From: Ramez Naam (mez@apexnano.com)
Date: Sun Dec 01 2002 - 20:21:02 MST
From: spike66 [mailto:spike66@attbi.com]
> But Robert (J not N), you have flown over this country
> and looked down, you know how much empty wasted space
> there is. We *can grow* ten billion new trees, honest
> we can.
Uh-oh, I've discovered some data that makes this plan a bit doubtful.
As I posted earlier, your proposal is basically to double the mass of
forests on earth. However, I made a calculation error in that post.
Total US land area is roughly 900 million hectares, not *9 billion* as
I previously posted. Of that area, 300 million hectares are already
forest land. So in the US you're talking about taking the % of land
that is forests from 33% to 66%. That's not realistic.
The same problem exists worldwide. Worldwide there are about 13
billion hectares of land (not all of which is arable), of which 3.9
billion are already forests. There is no way that we could double the
amount of forest on the planet without severe reduction in human
population. Even then it would be a very ambitious project.
Sorry, I don't think just planting trees is going to do the trick.
mez
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