Could we solve global warming with GM trees?
An average tree will consume 280 kilos of CO2 a year. The CO2 isn’t stored, as some people think, it is turned into sugars which the tree uses to grow, When a tree is burned, it does not produce anywhere near as much CO2 as it has consumed while growing. GM is a con. GM crops are simply produced to increase the profits of big business. Every single invention that we have forced on us, that they claim will end world hunger, NEVER CHANGES ANYTHING!!! World hunger continues; GM crops & trees will be “exactly” the same. The consequences of changing natural things at the cellular level cannot even be contemplated. It only takes for one change to result in a crops devastation and that will be the end of, possibly, everything eventually. This planet is very finely balanced. When the time comes to end all life on this planet then the US military will do just that. They already have biological weapons strong enough to do exactly that. Sorry, I got distracted. Just replace world hunger with glob
Well the trees will have to store the carbon and even if we do manage to get them to convert more C02 to O2 and they somehow managed to store all the extra carbon. All the C02 they converted will be released when the tree burns or decompose. Edit: as kindly pointed out by another person the C02 is of course not simply “stored” in the tree but made into carbohydrates of different kinds.. However when these carbohydrates burn or is decomposed by different organism all that carbon IS turned back into C02 in the end.. Some might take longer then other but in the end all the carbon is turned back into C02. Oil and coal is trees and plants that didn’t decompose and was turned into oil and coal long ago. So its possible for some trees or plants to not release the C02 it converted but this is a slow process and the rate at which we release C02 from oil and coal is many times larger.
No they aren’t, the main cause of global warming is electricity production from the burning of fossil fuels (coal and natural gas mostly). Deforestation is a cause of global warming but the best way to fight that is to give people in the third world enough to eat so that they stop subsistence farming (which is very bad for the environment when done on a large scale). Genetically modifying trees for higher productivity would probably let us reduce the impact of timber plantations by allowing for more wood to come from a given area or even allowing for different lower impact tree farming methods to be used that couldn’t be used for conventional trees (GM crops have already shown their worth at allowing crops to be grown on less land, using less pesticides than conventional crops along with being pretty much required for no-till farming (which is about the best we’ve got from an environmental point of view)) but we really can’t solve global warming by planting trees, if you want to stop i
Trees are not the major factor in Climate Change. Its the rate of CO2 emission (and other greenhouse gases) from fossil fuels that were stored over the course of millions of years. Trees can fix carbon, but not at the rate at which we release CO2 in the atmosphere, and they can not do it indefinitely. When a forest reaches its climate stage, it will release as much CO2 as it stores. Genetically modifying trees to make them sequestrate more CO2 would not solve this, even if you could create trees that grow so fast that they keep up with our emissions. The trees would grow faster and the equilibrium would be achieved faster. You cannot store wood for ever. Eventually it would rot, and turn itself into CO2 again. The total amount of carbon in the bioshpere is tiny compared to the amounts of carbon in the form of fossil fuels, there is no way the biosphere could compensate for burning all fossil fuels.
The only effect that trees have on the amount of Co2 in the atmosphere is that what the alarmist believers see as an excess would have been naturally absorbed by the tropical rain forests the enviro nazi’s chopped down to grow sugar cane and palms for ethanol and bio diesel. So the proponents of AGW are the major contributor to the presence of high levels of Co2 as is the current global climate optimums warming the oceans is. When you look at the point of serious Co2 rise it matches up with the increased cultivation of sugar cane in Brazil and oil palms in south east Asia.
