• IMALlama@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    3 hours ago

    I got curious and will attempt some math and duckduckgoing.

    A forest can remove between 4.5 and 40.7 tons of Carbon Dioxide per year per hectare during the first 20 years of tree growth. Sauce

    Humanity is currently generating around 40 billion tons of CO2 per year. Sauce

    So now some simple math: it would take between 1 billion and 10 billion hectares of forests, depending on their maturity, to keep up. 100 hectare = 1 km2 sauce, so this means 10 to 100 million km2 of forests.

    Earth’s total surface area is 510 million km2. sauce.

    Of that, here’s a quick breakdown:

    Sauce

    So 10ish percent of the 510 million km2 of land on earth, or around 5.1 million km2 is a good candidate for tree planting. That’s not enough if we want to sequester all the carbon produced by humanity. Without getting to net zero global warming will continue. The best we can do is slow it down. More disconcertingly, our appetite for energy is only increasing. The good news is that we’re really starting to see large scale wind and farm operations ramping up, but there are still a lot of power plants scheduled to come online in the next two decades.

    • NauticalNoodle@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      2 hours ago

      yeah, sure, but have any of the other carbon sequestration technologies proven more efficient while being equally scalable?