this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2024
614 points (93.4% liked)

Nature Enthusiasts

799 readers
13 users here now

For all media, news and discussion focusing on nature!

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

1-No advertising or spam.

2-No harrassment of any kind.

3-No illegal or NSFW or gore content.

founded 1 year ago
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Luckily for us it's not just trees though of course. there's like 400 something trees per person though and many other plants and organisms that also help as carbon sinks. Grasses and other plants cover the ground and sink tons of CO2. It's pretty cool to look up how much CO2 capture per different organisms like an acre of grass etc.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Yeah, nature is great. If all it had to handle were billions of people breathing we'd have no issues.

The problem is that modern machines are extremely efficient at dumping CO2 into the atmosphere, but as great as trees are, they're not all that efficient at removing it. So, if we want to keep CO2 at survivable levels, we either need fewer CO2-emitting machines (ideal) or a machine that takes CO2 out of the atmosphere (so far, impossible at scale). Simply relying on trees isn't going to cut it.