It's common for climate scolds and environmental activists to talk about the Amazon rain forest, along with tropical rain forests, as the "lungs of the earth," that take in CO2 and give us oxygen. That's true enough, although ocean phytoplankton may be the greatest such O2-producing resource. There are other forests, of course, some even larger than the tropical jungles. Here in the Great Land, we live on the southern edge of the magnificent, planet-spanning taiga, a vast circumpolar pine forest that stretches from Scandinavia to Hudson Bay. The taiga, which covers 17 percent of the Earth's surface, is one of the largest biomes on the planet, and has been since before the last ice age.
The taiga, in addition to making up a biome that is home to many plant and animal species, is also a vast carbon reservoir. The vast stands of pine and spruce sequester carbon every day, through photosynthesis, removing the C from CO2 and giving us O2 in return. That's a massive oversimplification of the process, but you get the point.
Trees have always been very effective carbon sinks. The climate scolds deride the use of coal, but coal is a brilliant example of how trees store carbon. Most of our global coal supply has its origins in the Carboniferous, more or less 360 to 300 million years ago. In that time, the Earth was much warmer, with great forests covering almost all the landmasses. Those trees weren't any trees we see today, but they were effective carbon sinks nonetheless, and when millions of tons of these trees died and were eventually buried, they deteriorated and were compressed into nearly pure carbon, which we call coal.
Now, carbon panic-mongers and climate scolds are shouting about the need for humans to do what our great forests do naturally.
The climate scare, and the efforts it has spawned to ‘decarbonise’, are so monumentally silly, so utterly contrary to reason, that it’s hard to pick a winner, so packed is the field. It’s tempting to pick the truly insane, like the idea recently floated, apparently in all seriousness, to dim the sun by seeding the atmosphere. It is to be hoped, however, that this idea will remain where it belongs, in the deranged imagination of the lunatics who thought it up.
To find a winner in this grotesque beauty contest, we have to look for an idea that is not only a fathomlessly silly attempt to fix a problem that doesn’t exist, but also stands a fighting chance of being adopted, and thus being the occasion for the squandering of even more billions of taxpayers’ money. Enter Carbon Capture and Storage, or CCS, as it’s catchily known to the cult adherents who cherish it. CCS is the name given to a range of ‘technologies’ which sequester CO2, either from the residue of industrial processes or, God help us, from the atmosphere at large, and then transport it to a place of entombment, there to let it languish for all eternity, with only its own disgrace for company.
So, spending millions, maybe billions of dollars to accomplish what our great forests already do. It won't work. As usual, the climate scolds don't understand all the implications of their proposals.
The principle sounds simple, but the devil, as so often, lies in the detail. Getting entropy to step aside for your convenience is no simple matter. Even if you believe the claptrap about CO2, capturing it, compressing it into a transportable form then carrying it to its tomb without, in the process, doing more damage to the environment than you fancy the CO2 would have done if you simply left it alone, turns out to be a tough call, and to date no CCS systems have proceeded beyond the experimental stage.
And that's fine. We already have a self-correcting system in place. Trees.
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As for that self-correction, climate scolds will sometimes quote someone named Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish scientist who lived from 1859 to 1927. Mr. Arrhenius was one of the first scientists to note that human-produced CO2 could have a warming effect on the earth's climate, but he also noted, as many have since - including this writer - that the slight warming would lead not only to greater plant growth in general, but to greatly increased crop yields.
We're seeing it happen now. The Earth has been warming, slowly and with some reversals and variations, since the last ice age. We had a Little Ice Age, and we had times when the Romans were growing wine grapes in Britain, but the trend has been for warming. What the climate scolds don't like to admit is the greening that comes with it.
Natural systems - all of them - tend to strike balances, to self-correct to a degree. These balances are never permanent. There are too many influences, many of which we know about and can predict, many more we cannot. Life on this world has always been engaged in a drunkard's walk through ever-changing conditions. But some things remain constant, and photosynthesis is one of those things. As long as plants continue to take in CO2 and produce O2, as long as plants continue to incorporate that carbon into that growth, they will continue to serve as a great carbon bank, and as a countering influence to any increase in atmospheric CO2 from any source. This is not subject to debate. It's happening.
The greening of our planet is something to be glad for. I am, every time I look out my window, to see our tiny little piece of that vast, green taiga.
