payne1000 wrote:
Instead of planting trees, trees are being cut at the rate of 1.6 billion acres a year:
"About one half of the forests that covered the Earth are gone. Each year, another 16 million hectares disappear. The World Resources Institute estimates that only about 22% of the world's (old growth) original forest cover remains "intact" - most of this is in three large areas: the Canadian and Alaskan boreal forest, the boreal forest of Russia, and the tropical forest of the northwestern Amazon Basin and the Guyana Shield (Guyana, Suriname, Venezuela, Columbia, etc.)
Today, forests cover more than one quarter of the world's total land area, excluding polar regions. Slightly more than 50% of the forests are found in the tropics and the rest are temperate and boreal (coniferous northern forest) zones.
Seven countries (Russia, Brazil, Canada, the United States, China, Indonesia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) account for more than 60% of the total.
For millennia, humankind has influenced the forests, although much of the impact has been relatively minor. Today, the impact is enormous. Deforestation is expanding and accelerating into the remaining areas of undisturbed forest, and the quality of the remaining forests is declining. Today we examine global patterns in deforestation, assess the human and ecological costs of forest loss, and discuss some of the steps that can help to rectify this alarming situation."
http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lectures/deforest/deforest.html
Instead of planting trees, trees are being cut at ... (
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Thank you for the support. It seems that instead of building on the solution, More vegetation, everybody is trying to cut back on the wrong end of the problem. Sure it makes sense to reduce the generation of bad gases, but it makes more sense to provide for the future by increasing the ability of what we have to do the job they were designed to do. All we have to do, is keep the green side up. Now if the doubters don't want to plant trees, let them dream up a process that does the same thing, that trees do. Convert Co2 into wood and release the O2. The way to solve the problem, is to increase this activity, not decrease the other. Instead of going backwards we need to make a giant leap forward Build a system that sucks the "bad" stuff out of the air and puts in the good stuff. If we could invent a mechanical tree, the problem would be over.