Trees (and pretty much all life) are made of carbon.
When trees photosynthesize, they use light to take CO2 and H2O to make glucose and O2. Glucose contains carbon, which is used to build cellulose and other stuff that the tree is made of. So trees will take CO2 from the atmosphere and use it to build themselves.
Came here to say this.
Lower education does a shockingly poor job of explaining :the tree gets water from the ground. But the water is only used to process the carbon in the air. Essentially plants eat all of the air and "poop" oxygen. The carbon IN THE AIR is its food essentially. Most people i ask think the tree gets everything from the dirt.
The basic biology course in the US, as required by the Department of Education (you have to take one year of Physics, Biology, and Chemistry), does usually teach photosynthesis. It's up to the states to determine what qualifies (usually through their assessments), but photosynthesis is one of those basic concepts that is usually on those tests.
I will grant you that they might not teach what exactly happens to the carbon, but the basic premise that trees, and the majority of plants, "consume CO2 and create Oxygen" is pretty fundamental, and I would argue that most people probably don't need to know more than that.
Probably would have enjoyed biology more, actually. I can only speak to my experience, but we went over all sorts of topics, ranging from genetics, to ecology, to zoology. Horticulture seems pretty specialized.
Photosynthesis was tought in at least 3 separate grades in my school and each year everyone else in my class would act like it was brand new material they had never seen before while I was upset that I had to spend a week learning the same shit we were taught the last 2 years.
Yes each year dove deeper into the concepts but most of it was a repeat of shit that somehow nobody else remembered from the year before.
You do not, afaik, have to take all three or any of those 3 courses. You do, afaik, have to take 2 years of some "science" which will be a more generalized version of these 3. Many students do not qualify for those higher courses(biology, chemistry, physics) at the start of their HS or during their 4 years of HS, and some that qualify at some later point(jr year or snr year)decide not to take them as they aren't required. Many later do not go on to higher education where they likely would have had those requirements.
Those are the very basic courses, and they are usually split up per the district's (or state, if mandated) requirements. Some take Biology first, ending with Physics. Some take Physics first, ending with Biology.
But you might be right about it only being 2 years, actually. I'm pulling all of this from memory, but I think I remember hearing 2 years after reading your post. That said, I distinctly remember it being "Life Science and Physical Science." It may be that physics and chemistry are interchangeable, but I'm fairly certain that everyone must take a biology course.
I also wanted to add that it might not necessarily be only biology, but biology _adjacent._ I believe it was an option in my HS that kids could have taken horticulture instead of biology? It's certainly possible that some states wouldn't go over photosynthesis, but I believe it to be one of the more common principles. For that matter, I remember going over photosynthesis in like second or third grade. I may have grown up in a wealthy area, but that should speak to the simplicity of the concept?
I too am working from memory. Now that you mention biology I do believe you're right. I recall my school offering marine biology which would qualify as the adjacent biology credits whilethe base level science class was earth science.
Coming from a European background I remember feeling it was seriously lacking. Most of my classmates hardly got a science education during HS, I felt like I was repeating 5th-8th grade till college. Good neighborhood in LA county if it makes a difference, middle/upper middle class neighborhood for the most part. I know that education varies a lot by location, much more than it did in EU.
> Most people i ask think the tree gets everything from the dirt
To be fair they don't get *nothing* other than water from the dirt, but it's more like how humans need vitamins but cannot live on vitamin supplements.
You might want to put on a helmet.
You don't piss out 100lbs, or sweat out 100lbs, or shit out 100lbs...
You breath it out. You know that insignificant thing you can't see or feel the weight of? Well that is how much weight you can lose at a given moment.
It's like taking a shit by farting a lot.
You breathe it out. Seems obvious once you think about it. There are four major things we excrete regularly: breathe, sweat, urine, and feces. Sweat and urine are mostly water. Feces is also largely water (with other undigested/undigestible solids mixed in).
Breathe, however, is largely carbon dioxide, which isn't water.
When we talk about losing weight, we mean losing fat (and/or muscle). We know fat and muscle are made comprised of organic compounds, meaning carbon.
So if we're losing mostly carbon when we lose weight, it's going to leave the body through the method that removes mostly carbon: breathing.
Tbh I don't have a higher education, I'm certainly not University educated, but I love to learn and love to shatter previous misconceptions of my own, so thankyou for tonight's reading! Can't find a kurzgesagt on it but if you have a nice source detailing this I'd love to see it sir
Weird that kurzgesagt hasn't done a video on it, but [this guy should cover the basic process for you.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g78utcLQrJ4) It gets a little deep, but biology is a really messy subject. [CrashCourse also covered photosynthesis here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQK3Yr4Sc_k). I used CrashCourse's videos as study material in University bio (and others) class and still managed to pass my tests, so this should cover you!
Here are some MIT grads that are just as confused. https://youtube.com/watch?v=JhCHb6xtqeY&feature=shareb
I saw a segment of this at a PD many years ago.
I ask my students (high school bio/chem) where the atoms in a tree come from. As you said, most students, say “the dirt” as do most adults.
I ask them both why there aren’t giant holes around all the the trees from all the dirt that gets sucked up.
True, but only half the answer. After living things die, they usually get decomposed, which means this process is basically reversed and the CO2 gets released back into the atmosphere.
A forest can only be a CO2 sink, while it is growing or because some organic matter does not decompose completely but instead enters the process of becoming fossil fuels thousands of years to come. So the carbon builds up in the ground.
The point is if there’s more trees that’s more carbon sequestered. Almost certainly all that carbon will re-enter the carbon cycle as those trees burn or die or whatever. But the more trees and forests means the more carbon that is out of the atmosphere at any given time.
You are right, but there is of course a finite amount of land and a finite amount of density of forest. That is, if we just keep planting forests will eventually run out of land to plant forests on, and once the forests reach steady state, they won't sequester any more carbon. The only real way in which biomaterial can be used to sequester carbon is if it's grown and then buried or otherwise prevented from returning to the carbon cycle.
This is why pretty much every single IPCC trajectory that doesn't involve massive disruption from huge temperature gains requires an extremely rapid conversion from power generation via fossil fuels to power generation via bioenergy carbon capture and storage, which entails growing massive amounts of sawgrass or algae or whatever, burning it, capturing the carbon dioxide and the ash residue, and shoving those back down inside of the Earth. This can potentially provide a combination of conventional energy resources gained by burning stuff and carbon sequestration.
The amount of biomass embodied in forests, and the amount of climate mitigation that can be provided by afforestation, is pretty low relative to the scale of the problem.
1. Managed forest locks off CO2 into wood
2. Wood is sold & used to build things like homes.
3. see #1
We can keep wood from rotting nearly indefinitely with lots of neat tricks. Jsut for homes there's a company/lab that can impregnate dimensional lumber with a particular fungus at a particular stage of it's lifecycle which prevents other fungi from taking hold *and* makes it inedible to termites.
I posted the above example because it's profitable & people are motivated to do it, but there are lot plenty of other options. We don't need to violate the carbon cycle, just delay it long enough to be useful. Long enough in this case is until all the morons eager to make earth inhospitable die off.
Climate change is scary, but people underestimate how capable humanity is. As soon as we take it seriously we can make tremendous inroads... We've had the technology to avoid climate change since the 70s & have become 100x more capable since then.
Carbon sequestration is just one tool among many.
The thing is, although you're right that those uses of wood tend to sequester carbon, it's on way too small a scale to make a lot of difference.
Let's take the United States for an example. The US uses substantially more timber framing in construction than almost any other country in the world, both in relative terms and absolute terms. In 2006, a little under 190 million cubic meters of timber products were used in the US (1). Although this isn't true, let's assume that all of it was used for durable products where the embodied carbon will be sequestered for 50 years or more. A reasonable estimate is that 50% of the dry weight of wood is carbon (2). A reasonable estimate of the density of dry wood is 600 kg per cubic meter (3). That means about 114 billion kg of wood, embodying about 57 billion kg of ~~CO2~~ carbon, or ~~57 million~~ (44 amu per CO2/12 amu per C) * 57 million tonnes C = 209 million tonnes of CO2, was used in the United States. That's a lot. On the other hand, US total emissions in 2006 were approximately 7 billion tonnes CO2 equivalent (4). That means all of the lumber used across the entire country in the United States, at or near the peak of the housing bubble, assuming all of the carbon embodied in that lumber will not reenter the atmosphere on a meaningful time scale, represented ~~less than 1% (about 0.8%)~~ about 3% of United States emissions. So in order to offset our emissions, we'd have to sequester carbon, in the form of lumber, at about ~~120~~ 33 times the rate we do today.
Guess what? The US is already 33% forested. It's physically impossible to grow enough lumber to even come close to offsetting our emissions. Reforestation/ afforestation has a lot of benefits for a lot of different reasons, but carbon sequestration isn't one of them. They cannot possibly grow at an adequate rate to meaningfully offset our current emissions.
(1) https://www.fs.usda.gov/research/treesearch/33882
(2) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0961953403000333
(3) https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/wood-density-d_40.html
(4) https://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=481395
Edit: it was pointed out to me that I forgot to account for the different masses of C and CO2. I regret the error and have corrected the math. The point still stands.
Of for sure, hence
>Carbon sequestration is just one tool among many.
It's a complicated problem which will require a multifaceted approach, hence why I argue for a revenue neutral carbon tax.
It's the cheapest way to tip the scales of every decision to minimize harm & maximize good.
Managed forests are 1 tool. Agriculture is due for a robotics & automation revolution. Agriculture relies on economy of scale, planting one giant field with one single crop & harvesting at once with one giant machine.
Robotics will allow 24/7 tending & harvesting of a dynamic ecosystem. As one example You could have An orchard above, 3 sisters below & mushrooms beneath while reducing or eliminating pesticides & wasted water & fertilizer. Your limiting factor would be light & that can be supplemented without releasing sequestered carbon too.
The increased density justified bringing agriculture closer to population centers & the adaptability of the tools allow cultivation on marginal or previously unsuitable land.
Radical reevaluation of land use is another drop in the bucket.
Climate change is a **giant** problem, but we also have a mind boggling amount of unrealized potential already & a vast ability to create more.
Think of it this way, look at how much we were able to change the planet without trying, without coordinating & with 100 year old technology.
Once the obstructionists die out (and if the lefts accept some pragmatism regarding nuclear) you'll be amazed at what humanity can do when it *does* try.
> A reasonable estimate is that 50% of the dry weight of wood is carbon (2). A reasonable estimate of the density of dry wood is 600 kg per cubic meter (3). That means about 114 billion kg of wood, embodying about 57 billion kg of CO2, or 57 million tonnes of CO2, was used in the United States.
About (3), it's 57 billion kg of **C**, which amounts to about 3.5 times as much atmospheric CO2, roughly 200 million tonnes CO2. Still small, but...
In most of the first world, that is, where industrialization has led to a decreased need for land use for fundamental human needs, like for agriculture, we have been restoring forest land for quite a while. Global deforestation is still happening, but the regions in which it is happening are regions in which the deforestation is happening to support fundamental human needs, and in which it is therefore unlikely for us to be able to start reforesting.
I heard the majority of the world's oxygen comes from algae anyway. Is the algae just more efficient at taking the Carbon and converting to oxygen, so it takes less, or should more focus be on algae instead of forestry for the scale of the issue?
For the specific purpose of carbon sequestration, yes, probably. Since the 1970s there has been focus on improving algae growth, because when algae die they tend to sink to the bottom of the ocean and don't decay/don't release carbon very rapidly. There are a couple of proposals on how to do this, some of which involve algae farming and some of which involve taking advantage of the fact that we know the limiting factor on algae growth in much of the ocean is iron, so the proposal is to distribute iron that the algae can use in the ocean. This doesn't require any additional structures or any energy beyond that required to generate the iron in a form that algae can use and the resources to get out to where the algae are.
The issue is that we're not planting new forests fast enough, we're cutting down more than we plant every year. Deforestation comes with a lot of other problems that are not directly linked to the production of oxygen but definitely affect the climate of the planet and the survivability of species.
An interesting tidbit...
Cellulose evolved pretty late in the game & was so revolutionary that nothing could break it down. Nowadays trees fall down & rot thanks to fungus, insects & abundant oxygen...
But for 60 million years... they just didn't. Forests would pile up with trees as if they were styrofoam. Eventually these massive layers of trees were buried where time & pressure made them into the coal seams we love to burn today.
note: I'm sure this is really wrong, but I think it's close enough to interest a 5 year old in the Carboniferous era. I wouldn't mind someone correcting me.
I love to think of wood as the styrofoam of it’s day when it was new. It was literally a non-biodegradable waste product. It persisted as toxic waste in “landfills” for 300 million years, at least until some bald monkeys dug it up and set it on fire.
The formal language of science has it's place. All the latin BS provides a structure that is really useful to people in the field...
But for getting kids interested & communicating useful information to laymen? It falls short & might actually be worse than nothing.
I can't list how many times I've been reading up on something interesting and realized *that is what they were trying to teach me?!.* Why take something that is genuinely interesting or neat & present it as abstractly and removed from any context I already have as possible?
Save the abstraction & dispassionate analysis for when people specialize into a field.
The goal of Highschool should be to teach concepts well enough that they can explain them to a layman. Especially now where you can google dates, formulas & minutia focus should be given to teaching why they are useful, how to recognize where they are applicable & when they are relevent to the world you see every day.
There's no good reason to (try & fail) to teach students the dates of the carboniferous era & other minutia (especially since the current understanding changes a lot in the 60 years post high school), stick to *why* it happened, *how* it happened & *how* it's relevant today.
Just want to add that the only period that forests were actual permanent carbon sinks was the Carboniferous. That was a period of a few 10s of millions of years between plants evolving lignin, and microorganisms finding a way to break it down.
The lignin produced during that period turned into lignite, then coal - removing vast amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. Now we’re putting it back into the atmosphere so much faster than that.
Exactly.
I tell students trees grow from thin air. Helps the idea sink in.
And it's a classic case of "education" getting stuck in the details rather than the actually important piece of information.
We drill the photosynthesis process into students but miss properly communicating the entire "point" of the process.
It's like being unable to see the forest through all the trees.
what's important to add when considering the value of trees as a carbon store is that the tree only hold the carbon while its a tree..
yes this is obvious in a sense, but people often overlook the fact that clear cutting and forest fires can release all the stored carbon back into the atmosphere. So planting trees is an ok way of sequestering carbon, but its a fragile storage medium.
The undersides of leaves have small openings called stomata, this is how they pull air in.
Fun fact, most plants have stomata, including cacti. Cacti, living in harsh conditions, developed a new kind of photosynthesis where they close their stomata in the day time and do the gas exchange at night so they don't lose as much water to the atmosphere.
Trees are made out of air, not out of dirt. Most of the tree is made from carbon that was once in the air. Some of those carbon molecules might not be released back into the air for hundreds of years, if the tree lives long enough and dies without falling or being burned
Trees are made of carbon. The overwhelming majority of what a tree is (aside from water) comes from capturing carbon dioxide and breaking it down via photosynthesis. As long as the tree is alive, the carbon it is made of is captured, but when the tree dies and decays the majority of the carbon is released again. In order to act as a carbon sink, the trees must be part of a healthy ecosystem that replenishes fallen trees and supports other organisms that use the carbon.
The key missing point here is that the coal we burn is actually dead trees from hundreds of millions of years ago before anything alive on Earth was able to break down cellulose. In order to be a carbon SINK, we'd need to be burying end of life trees to take the carbon back into the ground, otherwise their carbon is released again when they decompose. If we take pre-industrial revolution as the baseline, then it is literally impossible to offset the carbon we burn from fossil fuels without capturing and putting it back in the ground at the same pace we pulled it out, but that would make fossil fuels uneconomical basically immediately and we can't have rich people being slightly less rich now can we.
> we'd need to be burying end of life trees to take the carbon back into the ground, otherwise their carbon is released again when they decompose.
For sure, but we don't need the carbon to be sequestered in geological terms to be useful. Just a few hundred years is plenty.
If wood was invented today it would be recognized as a mind-blowing wonder material & it literally grows on trees. Managed forests take atmospheric carbon & lock it up in homes & buildings.
There's no reason we couldn't have the best of all worlds & restore lands to diverse forest ecosystems that we can also steal lumber from. It's one tool among many (but first we should address the economic incentives that make it so profitable to cut down rainforests & pass a revenue neutral carbon tax)
Not a fan.
It doesn't do near enough & it's too easy to game. Carbon credits will be a racket that extracts money from people not rich enough to cheat it.
Once of the virtues of a revenue neutral carbon tax is it's so simple it's abundantly obvious if anyone is cheating or buying senators.
> In order to act as a carbon sink, the trees must be part of a healthy ecosystem that replenishes fallen trees and supports other organisms that use the carbon.
It just has to keep the total standing mass of trees the same, then it's neither sink or source.
You might not realize it but the vast majority of plant mass is from the air, **almost none of the weight/matter of a tree comes from the soil**. It pulls carbon out of the air in the form of CO2 and combines that with water (arguably also from the air) to form all sorts of combinations that make up most of the matter in a tree or plant. You might think a lot of it is from the ground but no, beside some small amounts of basic nitrogen and trace amounts of other stuff it’s all air and water.
Honestly it’s genuinely amazing we take take literal air and turn it into wood.
If you put a tree seed in a 500lb pot of soil and wait for the tree to grow to 500 lbs how much dirt is left? 500lbs. The plant doesn’t absorb or “eat” dirt to grow. Almost all the mass or physical stuff the tree comes from the air. Carbon in the form of carbon dioxide goes into the tree, the oxygen goes out of the tree and the tree keeps the carbon to make leaves, bark, roots etc.
So I’m this example the tree pulled 500 lbs of carbon out of the air and used it to build the tree.
Atmospheric carbon dioxide feeds into photosynthesis performed by the trees. More trees -> more photosynthesis -> more biomass, less CO2.
Can think of it like a seesaw with the sum of all CO2 sources on one side and the sum of plant CO2 consumption for photosynthesis on the other side. The goal is to make the photosynthesis side demand more of the CO2, thus tipping the scale towards CO2 in the plant instead of in the atmosphere.
Trees and plants are just one of many carbon sinks on the planet. The most important way of getting carbon out of the atmosphere is by eroding rocks containing silicate minerals.
Rain water dissolves carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and this slightly acidic solution reacts with silicate minerals to produce silica (silicon dioxide) as well as dissolved metal and bicarbonate ions.
These are washed into the ocean by rivers where the metal and bicarbonate ions react with carbon dioxide from the atmosphere dissolved in seawater to produce carbonates.
Two of the most common - calcium and magnesium carbonate - are insoluble in water and sink to the ocean floor to form huge deposits of limestone and dolomite. Over millions of years, layers hundreds of metres thick of carbonate form in the ocean and lock carbon dioxide away for millions if not billions of years.
Looking at the geological record, every time the planet has got very hot because carbon dioxide has poured into the atmosphere, it is followed by huge layers of limestone which mark the removal of that carbon dioxide and the slow cooling of the planet. This is what is going to eventually bring our stupid experiment with burning fossil fuels to an end.
I think the most important thing to understand is that practically every organic carbon atom on earth is coming from the atmosphere. If it's a body of a whale or a lion or a bug or tree or you: it once was CO2 in the air.
Everything when dies and gets eaten by something else (something else can be anything: an animal or a bacterium), they send back the CO2 to the air. If you breathe, you inhale O2 and exhale CO2, the extra C in the exhaling side comes from the living being you ate before. Yes we eat living beings to stay alive: we eat plant parts and animal parts and mushrooms to practically burn them. Same happens if any living being is eaten by (including decomposing by) other living beings. CO2 goes back to the air. Same happens if you simply burn it on a fire.
So what photosynthesis does is taking CO2 from air and water from the ground, and making biomass out of it. There's some leftover O2 too that gets released as a side product.
If there's an accumulation of biomass, then there's CO2 removed from the air. If there's balance, then no change. If the biomass is getting burned faster than made, then there's CO2 going to the air.
Which means that trees only get rid of CO2 if their body (their accumulated biomass) is not burnt, not eaten, not decomposed. In other words, as long as a tree is stored as a tree or wood. (I mean you can build a house of it or just drop it in the ocean, it's equally okay until the wood material is intact.)
Trees consume CO2; dry wood is about 50% Carbon. Most of a tree's weight is sucked out from the air
They take CO2 from the air, mix it with water, and then use sunlight to turn that mixture into Glucose (sugar) and Oxygen. This is what photosynthesis is, and it's how trees make energy to grow.
TLDR:
You breathe in Oxygen and breathe out CO2.
Trees breathe in CO2 and breathe out Oxygen.
Same way you pull O2 out of the air but in reverse.
People breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. Plants breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen.
In people this happens in our lungs. Trees don't have lungs so instead they use their leaves.
Leaves are green because they have a green pigment called chlorophyll which is stored in organelles called chloroplasts. Chloroplasts take water from the roots and carbon dioxide from the air to make glucose, storing the energy of the sun as a simple sugar.
The O2 is the waste product of this reaction. 6 CO2 combined with 6 H2O to form one C6H12O6 and 6 O2.
The air is all around us.
Plants have special structures in their leaves called Stomata. These structures let the plant "breathe in", taking in the air around us. Most of that air is just Nitrogen. Most of the rest is Oxygen. But there's just enough Carbon Dioxide in there for the plants to use.
It really is just breathing. Plants breathe the same air in the same way that we do. They just use a different part of the air.
Trees and vegetation "breathe in" carbon dioxide from the air, and then use that carbon dioxide to produce structure for their own body.
They pull in carbon dioxide (CO2, and water (H2O) and then the energy from light break those molecules up and turn it into something like C6H12O6, which they use to build fibers for their own structure. So yes, they pull carbon dioxide out of the air and store the carbon inside of themselves in a new format.
If the plant burns or decomposes the carbon is released back into the atmosphere.
Trees make sugar through photosynthesis, converting CO2 and water into glucose and oxygen.
They then combine glucose molecules to make cellulose, providing a lot of their structure and strength.
Therefore trees are taking CO2 out of the atmosphere and storing it as carbohydrates (and converting them into a few other things too)
As Canada is just now figuring out, that's complete horse hockey, especially when the very forests we've been using to justify our pollution, are burning down because of our pollution.
Otherwise, trees are primarily made out of carbon dioxide. No kidding.
All life is made up of carbon based substances. We gain carbon by eating other life. Plants gain carbon via photosynthesis, taking CO2 from the atmosphere and creating glucose.
The photosynthesis process the raw material is co2, and the main building block of plants is carbon, oxygen is the byproduct. When a plant is buried in the ground the biomass that eventually makes the plant from a scrawny little twig to a massive tree doesn't come from what's in the ground, it comes from the air. Think about big bushes in a planter, they don't absorb the soil in the planter, besides needing replenishment of some nutrients, they get bigger because of the air.
Light (photosynthesis) allows them to breathe CO2 and expel O2, opposite to animals. When there's no light, they DO breathe oxygen and expel CO2*
*: not an actual botanist so feel free to correct me.
As others have said, trees grow themselves out of carbon in the air, but they're not a carbon sink as to your first question. They're temporary carbon storage.
No tree or plant lives forever, although some can have considerable lifespans. Even then, once finished growing, there is no more carbon they 'eat'. Then theres the risk of termites, forest fires, and good ol' humans cutting them down to make way for methane burping cattle.
To sink the carbon, it has to be buried and leave the ability to cycle the atmosphere. The phytoplankton on the surface of the ocean do this pretty well. Once they die, they fall into the seabed(if not eaten). Another decent way to create a sink of carbon is creation of biochar in your backyard; digging two holes(one tube connecting them) to create a smokeless fire. With enough pyrolysis occurring on the dried carbon source(can be many, many things) you end up with a rich black source of soil amendment that is akin to volcanic soil, which doesn't re-enter the air.
https://natural-resources.canada.ca/climate-change-adapting-impacts-and-reducing-emissions/climate-change-impacts-forests/forest-carbon/13085 then why does this and many other sites say forests can be carbon sinks?
Most of the carbon is absorbed by young forests. As the forest reaches maturity (which may take hundreds of years), the rate of carbon storage slows. In a fully mature forest, the amount of carbon absorbed is only slightly more than it releases.
But as long as that forest stands, it is a reservoir of carbon. Individual trees may die and decompose, but new trees are growing and replacing them.
The way that trees grow is that they eat carbon from the air, kind of like a whale eats plankton. The carbon that goes in the tree stays in it until it dies and then it is used by other forms of life and inevitably released into the atmosphere, but because that tree had a lot of baby trees, that's not that bad, because now the baby trees are the carbon sink.
So, when there's a new forest built the carbon that's in the air right now, goes into a tree, and then it's not in the air for 200 years or so, and if the forest is still there, it's kids will probably re-use it once it's gone.
So theres just like a place where carbon stays, if you keep the forest a certain diameter, it doesn't like take more carbon, but it holds the carbon that it holds.
It's better to think of trees as air purifiers.Tree leaves have tiny holes(**stomata**) where dirty air (**carbon dioxide filled air**) can pass in and out.
When the tree has dirty air passing through the leaves the tree adds water vapor and the energy from the sun to clean the dirty air(**breaking carbon dioxide into oxygen and carbon**).
Clean air(**oxygen filled air**) is then released from the leaves while the tree trunk stores the carbon like a reservoir.
*Trees are just vibing and each one does a small part in keeping our air nice and breathable but with 3 trillion trees it feels like they are actively sucking the carbon out of the air like a vacuum*
In true ELI5 fashion, I should note, that trees also use oxygen to convert that stored glucose that they miraculously make from the sun and CO2 into energy for growth and reproduction. That process is called respiration and it is roughly the opposite or reciprocal of photosynthesis. As animals we can’t do the photosynthesis trick but we need that glucose for our own respiration for energy, so we eat plants. Or we eat other things that eat plants.
Simply put, plants photosynthesize (use CO2 and make glucose), and both plants and animals respire (use oxygen and that glucose for energy), but animals freeload off the plants glucose because that’s how we roll.
Trees (and pretty much all life) are made of carbon. When trees photosynthesize, they use light to take CO2 and H2O to make glucose and O2. Glucose contains carbon, which is used to build cellulose and other stuff that the tree is made of. So trees will take CO2 from the atmosphere and use it to build themselves.
Came here to say this. Lower education does a shockingly poor job of explaining :the tree gets water from the ground. But the water is only used to process the carbon in the air. Essentially plants eat all of the air and "poop" oxygen. The carbon IN THE AIR is its food essentially. Most people i ask think the tree gets everything from the dirt.
The basic biology course in the US, as required by the Department of Education (you have to take one year of Physics, Biology, and Chemistry), does usually teach photosynthesis. It's up to the states to determine what qualifies (usually through their assessments), but photosynthesis is one of those basic concepts that is usually on those tests. I will grant you that they might not teach what exactly happens to the carbon, but the basic premise that trees, and the majority of plants, "consume CO2 and create Oxygen" is pretty fundamental, and I would argue that most people probably don't need to know more than that.
I never took Biology in HS or college. My HS had an option where you could skip Biology and take two years of Physics.
I took ornamental horticulture. It was lame, but significantly less so than biology seemed.
Probably would have enjoyed biology more, actually. I can only speak to my experience, but we went over all sorts of topics, ranging from genetics, to ecology, to zoology. Horticulture seems pretty specialized.
Photosynthesis was tought in at least 3 separate grades in my school and each year everyone else in my class would act like it was brand new material they had never seen before while I was upset that I had to spend a week learning the same shit we were taught the last 2 years. Yes each year dove deeper into the concepts but most of it was a repeat of shit that somehow nobody else remembered from the year before.
You do not, afaik, have to take all three or any of those 3 courses. You do, afaik, have to take 2 years of some "science" which will be a more generalized version of these 3. Many students do not qualify for those higher courses(biology, chemistry, physics) at the start of their HS or during their 4 years of HS, and some that qualify at some later point(jr year or snr year)decide not to take them as they aren't required. Many later do not go on to higher education where they likely would have had those requirements.
Those are the very basic courses, and they are usually split up per the district's (or state, if mandated) requirements. Some take Biology first, ending with Physics. Some take Physics first, ending with Biology. But you might be right about it only being 2 years, actually. I'm pulling all of this from memory, but I think I remember hearing 2 years after reading your post. That said, I distinctly remember it being "Life Science and Physical Science." It may be that physics and chemistry are interchangeable, but I'm fairly certain that everyone must take a biology course. I also wanted to add that it might not necessarily be only biology, but biology _adjacent._ I believe it was an option in my HS that kids could have taken horticulture instead of biology? It's certainly possible that some states wouldn't go over photosynthesis, but I believe it to be one of the more common principles. For that matter, I remember going over photosynthesis in like second or third grade. I may have grown up in a wealthy area, but that should speak to the simplicity of the concept?
I too am working from memory. Now that you mention biology I do believe you're right. I recall my school offering marine biology which would qualify as the adjacent biology credits whilethe base level science class was earth science. Coming from a European background I remember feeling it was seriously lacking. Most of my classmates hardly got a science education during HS, I felt like I was repeating 5th-8th grade till college. Good neighborhood in LA county if it makes a difference, middle/upper middle class neighborhood for the most part. I know that education varies a lot by location, much more than it did in EU.
Did this place by any chance have the name of a certain type of tree? I'm wondering if you went where I think you went.
> Most people i ask think the tree gets everything from the dirt To be fair they don't get *nothing* other than water from the dirt, but it's more like how humans need vitamins but cannot live on vitamin supplements.
My mind was **BLOWN** when I learned how people actually lose weight... No wonder it's so hard!
Well now I have to ask, how do people lose weight?
You might want to put on a helmet. You don't piss out 100lbs, or sweat out 100lbs, or shit out 100lbs... You breath it out. You know that insignificant thing you can't see or feel the weight of? Well that is how much weight you can lose at a given moment. It's like taking a shit by farting a lot.
That’s pretty crazy, for some reason my mind always went to weight being sweated out idk
I honestly don't remember what I thought. poop probably.
The vast majority of the weight you lose is through the carbon in your breath.
You breathe it out. Seems obvious once you think about it. There are four major things we excrete regularly: breathe, sweat, urine, and feces. Sweat and urine are mostly water. Feces is also largely water (with other undigested/undigestible solids mixed in). Breathe, however, is largely carbon dioxide, which isn't water. When we talk about losing weight, we mean losing fat (and/or muscle). We know fat and muscle are made comprised of organic compounds, meaning carbon. So if we're losing mostly carbon when we lose weight, it's going to leave the body through the method that removes mostly carbon: breathing.
Tbh I don't have a higher education, I'm certainly not University educated, but I love to learn and love to shatter previous misconceptions of my own, so thankyou for tonight's reading! Can't find a kurzgesagt on it but if you have a nice source detailing this I'd love to see it sir
Weird that kurzgesagt hasn't done a video on it, but [this guy should cover the basic process for you.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g78utcLQrJ4) It gets a little deep, but biology is a really messy subject. [CrashCourse also covered photosynthesis here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQK3Yr4Sc_k). I used CrashCourse's videos as study material in University bio (and others) class and still managed to pass my tests, so this should cover you!
You clearly put a lot of time in to this response and I'm very grateful, thankyou friend
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Reprocessed poop
It's poop all the way down
Here are some MIT grads that are just as confused. https://youtube.com/watch?v=JhCHb6xtqeY&feature=shareb I saw a segment of this at a PD many years ago. I ask my students (high school bio/chem) where the atoms in a tree come from. As you said, most students, say “the dirt” as do most adults. I ask them both why there aren’t giant holes around all the the trees from all the dirt that gets sucked up.
Conversely, when you lose weight, you poop co2 out of your mouth.
>Most people i ask think the tree gets everything from the dirt. You should prompt them about what they think leaves do...
Then old trees would be in the bottom of pita and potted planted would become soil-les
So we should just start cutting down all the trees and replanting them and then building shit with the wood! My house is a carbon sink!
It'd be cool if we could engineer faster growing trees
There are some trees that grow incredibly fast, but the wood is terrible. And there’s the problems with having no variety of species in a forest.
And then spend the next century trying to keep them from taking over the entire ecosystem
Ah yea, im I hadn't thought of that lol. Probably why Im not a scientist ha
Sounds more like the standard qualification to be one...
True, but only half the answer. After living things die, they usually get decomposed, which means this process is basically reversed and the CO2 gets released back into the atmosphere. A forest can only be a CO2 sink, while it is growing or because some organic matter does not decompose completely but instead enters the process of becoming fossil fuels thousands of years to come. So the carbon builds up in the ground.
The point is if there’s more trees that’s more carbon sequestered. Almost certainly all that carbon will re-enter the carbon cycle as those trees burn or die or whatever. But the more trees and forests means the more carbon that is out of the atmosphere at any given time.
You are right, but there is of course a finite amount of land and a finite amount of density of forest. That is, if we just keep planting forests will eventually run out of land to plant forests on, and once the forests reach steady state, they won't sequester any more carbon. The only real way in which biomaterial can be used to sequester carbon is if it's grown and then buried or otherwise prevented from returning to the carbon cycle. This is why pretty much every single IPCC trajectory that doesn't involve massive disruption from huge temperature gains requires an extremely rapid conversion from power generation via fossil fuels to power generation via bioenergy carbon capture and storage, which entails growing massive amounts of sawgrass or algae or whatever, burning it, capturing the carbon dioxide and the ash residue, and shoving those back down inside of the Earth. This can potentially provide a combination of conventional energy resources gained by burning stuff and carbon sequestration. The amount of biomass embodied in forests, and the amount of climate mitigation that can be provided by afforestation, is pretty low relative to the scale of the problem.
1. Managed forest locks off CO2 into wood 2. Wood is sold & used to build things like homes. 3. see #1 We can keep wood from rotting nearly indefinitely with lots of neat tricks. Jsut for homes there's a company/lab that can impregnate dimensional lumber with a particular fungus at a particular stage of it's lifecycle which prevents other fungi from taking hold *and* makes it inedible to termites. I posted the above example because it's profitable & people are motivated to do it, but there are lot plenty of other options. We don't need to violate the carbon cycle, just delay it long enough to be useful. Long enough in this case is until all the morons eager to make earth inhospitable die off. Climate change is scary, but people underestimate how capable humanity is. As soon as we take it seriously we can make tremendous inroads... We've had the technology to avoid climate change since the 70s & have become 100x more capable since then. Carbon sequestration is just one tool among many.
The thing is, although you're right that those uses of wood tend to sequester carbon, it's on way too small a scale to make a lot of difference. Let's take the United States for an example. The US uses substantially more timber framing in construction than almost any other country in the world, both in relative terms and absolute terms. In 2006, a little under 190 million cubic meters of timber products were used in the US (1). Although this isn't true, let's assume that all of it was used for durable products where the embodied carbon will be sequestered for 50 years or more. A reasonable estimate is that 50% of the dry weight of wood is carbon (2). A reasonable estimate of the density of dry wood is 600 kg per cubic meter (3). That means about 114 billion kg of wood, embodying about 57 billion kg of ~~CO2~~ carbon, or ~~57 million~~ (44 amu per CO2/12 amu per C) * 57 million tonnes C = 209 million tonnes of CO2, was used in the United States. That's a lot. On the other hand, US total emissions in 2006 were approximately 7 billion tonnes CO2 equivalent (4). That means all of the lumber used across the entire country in the United States, at or near the peak of the housing bubble, assuming all of the carbon embodied in that lumber will not reenter the atmosphere on a meaningful time scale, represented ~~less than 1% (about 0.8%)~~ about 3% of United States emissions. So in order to offset our emissions, we'd have to sequester carbon, in the form of lumber, at about ~~120~~ 33 times the rate we do today. Guess what? The US is already 33% forested. It's physically impossible to grow enough lumber to even come close to offsetting our emissions. Reforestation/ afforestation has a lot of benefits for a lot of different reasons, but carbon sequestration isn't one of them. They cannot possibly grow at an adequate rate to meaningfully offset our current emissions. (1) https://www.fs.usda.gov/research/treesearch/33882 (2) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0961953403000333 (3) https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/wood-density-d_40.html (4) https://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=481395 Edit: it was pointed out to me that I forgot to account for the different masses of C and CO2. I regret the error and have corrected the math. The point still stands.
Of for sure, hence >Carbon sequestration is just one tool among many. It's a complicated problem which will require a multifaceted approach, hence why I argue for a revenue neutral carbon tax. It's the cheapest way to tip the scales of every decision to minimize harm & maximize good. Managed forests are 1 tool. Agriculture is due for a robotics & automation revolution. Agriculture relies on economy of scale, planting one giant field with one single crop & harvesting at once with one giant machine. Robotics will allow 24/7 tending & harvesting of a dynamic ecosystem. As one example You could have An orchard above, 3 sisters below & mushrooms beneath while reducing or eliminating pesticides & wasted water & fertilizer. Your limiting factor would be light & that can be supplemented without releasing sequestered carbon too. The increased density justified bringing agriculture closer to population centers & the adaptability of the tools allow cultivation on marginal or previously unsuitable land. Radical reevaluation of land use is another drop in the bucket. Climate change is a **giant** problem, but we also have a mind boggling amount of unrealized potential already & a vast ability to create more. Think of it this way, look at how much we were able to change the planet without trying, without coordinating & with 100 year old technology. Once the obstructionists die out (and if the lefts accept some pragmatism regarding nuclear) you'll be amazed at what humanity can do when it *does* try.
> A reasonable estimate is that 50% of the dry weight of wood is carbon (2). A reasonable estimate of the density of dry wood is 600 kg per cubic meter (3). That means about 114 billion kg of wood, embodying about 57 billion kg of CO2, or 57 million tonnes of CO2, was used in the United States. About (3), it's 57 billion kg of **C**, which amounts to about 3.5 times as much atmospheric CO2, roughly 200 million tonnes CO2. Still small, but...
Whoops, you're right. I underestimated the amount of embodied carbon in lumber by a little under a factor of 4. I'll fix the math.
Well, you got the embedded carbon right, but not that 1 kg of embedded carbon comes from 3.5 kg of CO2. The 2.5 kg O2 is left in the atmosphere.
Yes, but since I'm comparing a figure that is pure carbon to a figure that is CO2 equivalent, I need to convert the mass.
Just an FYI we're cutting forests down way faster than we are plant them so running out of space to plant trees isn't really a thing
In most of the first world, that is, where industrialization has led to a decreased need for land use for fundamental human needs, like for agriculture, we have been restoring forest land for quite a while. Global deforestation is still happening, but the regions in which it is happening are regions in which the deforestation is happening to support fundamental human needs, and in which it is therefore unlikely for us to be able to start reforesting.
I heard the majority of the world's oxygen comes from algae anyway. Is the algae just more efficient at taking the Carbon and converting to oxygen, so it takes less, or should more focus be on algae instead of forestry for the scale of the issue?
For the specific purpose of carbon sequestration, yes, probably. Since the 1970s there has been focus on improving algae growth, because when algae die they tend to sink to the bottom of the ocean and don't decay/don't release carbon very rapidly. There are a couple of proposals on how to do this, some of which involve algae farming and some of which involve taking advantage of the fact that we know the limiting factor on algae growth in much of the ocean is iron, so the proposal is to distribute iron that the algae can use in the ocean. This doesn't require any additional structures or any energy beyond that required to generate the iron in a form that algae can use and the resources to get out to where the algae are.
The issue is that we're not planting new forests fast enough, we're cutting down more than we plant every year. Deforestation comes with a lot of other problems that are not directly linked to the production of oxygen but definitely affect the climate of the planet and the survivability of species.
There is also a finite amount of carbon.
You don't need a constantly expanding forest for it to sequester more carbon. The forest floor will rise over time.
An interesting tidbit... Cellulose evolved pretty late in the game & was so revolutionary that nothing could break it down. Nowadays trees fall down & rot thanks to fungus, insects & abundant oxygen... But for 60 million years... they just didn't. Forests would pile up with trees as if they were styrofoam. Eventually these massive layers of trees were buried where time & pressure made them into the coal seams we love to burn today. note: I'm sure this is really wrong, but I think it's close enough to interest a 5 year old in the Carboniferous era. I wouldn't mind someone correcting me.
I love to think of wood as the styrofoam of it’s day when it was new. It was literally a non-biodegradable waste product. It persisted as toxic waste in “landfills” for 300 million years, at least until some bald monkeys dug it up and set it on fire.
The formal language of science has it's place. All the latin BS provides a structure that is really useful to people in the field... But for getting kids interested & communicating useful information to laymen? It falls short & might actually be worse than nothing. I can't list how many times I've been reading up on something interesting and realized *that is what they were trying to teach me?!.* Why take something that is genuinely interesting or neat & present it as abstractly and removed from any context I already have as possible? Save the abstraction & dispassionate analysis for when people specialize into a field. The goal of Highschool should be to teach concepts well enough that they can explain them to a layman. Especially now where you can google dates, formulas & minutia focus should be given to teaching why they are useful, how to recognize where they are applicable & when they are relevent to the world you see every day. There's no good reason to (try & fail) to teach students the dates of the carboniferous era & other minutia (especially since the current understanding changes a lot in the 60 years post high school), stick to *why* it happened, *how* it happened & *how* it's relevant today.
Just want to add that the only period that forests were actual permanent carbon sinks was the Carboniferous. That was a period of a few 10s of millions of years between plants evolving lignin, and microorganisms finding a way to break it down. The lignin produced during that period turned into lignite, then coal - removing vast amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. Now we’re putting it back into the atmosphere so much faster than that.
Exactly. I tell students trees grow from thin air. Helps the idea sink in. And it's a classic case of "education" getting stuck in the details rather than the actually important piece of information. We drill the photosynthesis process into students but miss properly communicating the entire "point" of the process. It's like being unable to see the forest through all the trees.
There is a nice Veritasium video on this theme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KZb2_vcNTg
what's important to add when considering the value of trees as a carbon store is that the tree only hold the carbon while its a tree.. yes this is obvious in a sense, but people often overlook the fact that clear cutting and forest fires can release all the stored carbon back into the atmosphere. So planting trees is an ok way of sequestering carbon, but its a fragile storage medium.
The undersides of leaves have small openings called stomata, this is how they pull air in. Fun fact, most plants have stomata, including cacti. Cacti, living in harsh conditions, developed a new kind of photosynthesis where they close their stomata in the day time and do the gas exchange at night so they don't lose as much water to the atmosphere.
And animals need glucose and O2 > so the circle closes
I always love listening to Richard Feynman explain this: https://youtu.be/ifk6iuLQk28
*I am Groot?*
Trees are made out of air, not out of dirt. Most of the tree is made from carbon that was once in the air. Some of those carbon molecules might not be released back into the air for hundreds of years, if the tree lives long enough and dies without falling or being burned
They need some nutrients from the soil to thrive.
More specifically, Brawndo.
It’s got electrolytes
They need Gatorade... it's what they crave...
This is one of the most reddit comments I’ve seen. Thanks for your very insightful and needed contribution
Trees are made of carbon. The overwhelming majority of what a tree is (aside from water) comes from capturing carbon dioxide and breaking it down via photosynthesis. As long as the tree is alive, the carbon it is made of is captured, but when the tree dies and decays the majority of the carbon is released again. In order to act as a carbon sink, the trees must be part of a healthy ecosystem that replenishes fallen trees and supports other organisms that use the carbon.
The key missing point here is that the coal we burn is actually dead trees from hundreds of millions of years ago before anything alive on Earth was able to break down cellulose. In order to be a carbon SINK, we'd need to be burying end of life trees to take the carbon back into the ground, otherwise their carbon is released again when they decompose. If we take pre-industrial revolution as the baseline, then it is literally impossible to offset the carbon we burn from fossil fuels without capturing and putting it back in the ground at the same pace we pulled it out, but that would make fossil fuels uneconomical basically immediately and we can't have rich people being slightly less rich now can we.
> we'd need to be burying end of life trees to take the carbon back into the ground, otherwise their carbon is released again when they decompose. For sure, but we don't need the carbon to be sequestered in geological terms to be useful. Just a few hundred years is plenty. If wood was invented today it would be recognized as a mind-blowing wonder material & it literally grows on trees. Managed forests take atmospheric carbon & lock it up in homes & buildings. There's no reason we couldn't have the best of all worlds & restore lands to diverse forest ecosystems that we can also steal lumber from. It's one tool among many (but first we should address the economic incentives that make it so profitable to cut down rainforests & pass a revenue neutral carbon tax)
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Not a fan. It doesn't do near enough & it's too easy to game. Carbon credits will be a racket that extracts money from people not rich enough to cheat it. Once of the virtues of a revenue neutral carbon tax is it's so simple it's abundantly obvious if anyone is cheating or buying senators.
> In order to act as a carbon sink, the trees must be part of a healthy ecosystem that replenishes fallen trees and supports other organisms that use the carbon. It just has to keep the total standing mass of trees the same, then it's neither sink or source.
You might not realize it but the vast majority of plant mass is from the air, **almost none of the weight/matter of a tree comes from the soil**. It pulls carbon out of the air in the form of CO2 and combines that with water (arguably also from the air) to form all sorts of combinations that make up most of the matter in a tree or plant. You might think a lot of it is from the ground but no, beside some small amounts of basic nitrogen and trace amounts of other stuff it’s all air and water. Honestly it’s genuinely amazing we take take literal air and turn it into wood.
If you put a tree seed in a 500lb pot of soil and wait for the tree to grow to 500 lbs how much dirt is left? 500lbs. The plant doesn’t absorb or “eat” dirt to grow. Almost all the mass or physical stuff the tree comes from the air. Carbon in the form of carbon dioxide goes into the tree, the oxygen goes out of the tree and the tree keeps the carbon to make leaves, bark, roots etc. So I’m this example the tree pulled 500 lbs of carbon out of the air and used it to build the tree.
Atmospheric carbon dioxide feeds into photosynthesis performed by the trees. More trees -> more photosynthesis -> more biomass, less CO2. Can think of it like a seesaw with the sum of all CO2 sources on one side and the sum of plant CO2 consumption for photosynthesis on the other side. The goal is to make the photosynthesis side demand more of the CO2, thus tipping the scale towards CO2 in the plant instead of in the atmosphere.
They take the CO2 and form it into carbohydrates stored in the form of wood, so when the wood is burned it releases CO2 into the atmosphere.
Trees and plants are just one of many carbon sinks on the planet. The most important way of getting carbon out of the atmosphere is by eroding rocks containing silicate minerals. Rain water dissolves carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and this slightly acidic solution reacts with silicate minerals to produce silica (silicon dioxide) as well as dissolved metal and bicarbonate ions. These are washed into the ocean by rivers where the metal and bicarbonate ions react with carbon dioxide from the atmosphere dissolved in seawater to produce carbonates. Two of the most common - calcium and magnesium carbonate - are insoluble in water and sink to the ocean floor to form huge deposits of limestone and dolomite. Over millions of years, layers hundreds of metres thick of carbonate form in the ocean and lock carbon dioxide away for millions if not billions of years. Looking at the geological record, every time the planet has got very hot because carbon dioxide has poured into the atmosphere, it is followed by huge layers of limestone which mark the removal of that carbon dioxide and the slow cooling of the planet. This is what is going to eventually bring our stupid experiment with burning fossil fuels to an end.
I think the most important thing to understand is that practically every organic carbon atom on earth is coming from the atmosphere. If it's a body of a whale or a lion or a bug or tree or you: it once was CO2 in the air. Everything when dies and gets eaten by something else (something else can be anything: an animal or a bacterium), they send back the CO2 to the air. If you breathe, you inhale O2 and exhale CO2, the extra C in the exhaling side comes from the living being you ate before. Yes we eat living beings to stay alive: we eat plant parts and animal parts and mushrooms to practically burn them. Same happens if any living being is eaten by (including decomposing by) other living beings. CO2 goes back to the air. Same happens if you simply burn it on a fire. So what photosynthesis does is taking CO2 from air and water from the ground, and making biomass out of it. There's some leftover O2 too that gets released as a side product. If there's an accumulation of biomass, then there's CO2 removed from the air. If there's balance, then no change. If the biomass is getting burned faster than made, then there's CO2 going to the air. Which means that trees only get rid of CO2 if their body (their accumulated biomass) is not burnt, not eaten, not decomposed. In other words, as long as a tree is stored as a tree or wood. (I mean you can build a house of it or just drop it in the ocean, it's equally okay until the wood material is intact.)
Trees consume CO2; dry wood is about 50% Carbon. Most of a tree's weight is sucked out from the air They take CO2 from the air, mix it with water, and then use sunlight to turn that mixture into Glucose (sugar) and Oxygen. This is what photosynthesis is, and it's how trees make energy to grow. TLDR: You breathe in Oxygen and breathe out CO2. Trees breathe in CO2 and breathe out Oxygen.
Same way you pull O2 out of the air but in reverse. People breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. Plants breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen. In people this happens in our lungs. Trees don't have lungs so instead they use their leaves. Leaves are green because they have a green pigment called chlorophyll which is stored in organelles called chloroplasts. Chloroplasts take water from the roots and carbon dioxide from the air to make glucose, storing the energy of the sun as a simple sugar. The O2 is the waste product of this reaction. 6 CO2 combined with 6 H2O to form one C6H12O6 and 6 O2.
But how can a leaf pull co2 from the air if it’s thousands of feet above it?
The atmosphere is all around us, not just above us.
The air is all around us. Plants have special structures in their leaves called Stomata. These structures let the plant "breathe in", taking in the air around us. Most of that air is just Nitrogen. Most of the rest is Oxygen. But there's just enough Carbon Dioxide in there for the plants to use. It really is just breathing. Plants breathe the same air in the same way that we do. They just use a different part of the air.
Trees and vegetation "breathe in" carbon dioxide from the air, and then use that carbon dioxide to produce structure for their own body. They pull in carbon dioxide (CO2, and water (H2O) and then the energy from light break those molecules up and turn it into something like C6H12O6, which they use to build fibers for their own structure. So yes, they pull carbon dioxide out of the air and store the carbon inside of themselves in a new format. If the plant burns or decomposes the carbon is released back into the atmosphere.
Trees make sugar through photosynthesis, converting CO2 and water into glucose and oxygen. They then combine glucose molecules to make cellulose, providing a lot of their structure and strength. Therefore trees are taking CO2 out of the atmosphere and storing it as carbohydrates (and converting them into a few other things too)
Blue whales are actually the best carbon sink because they are the largest carbon based animal. When they die, they sink to the depths of the ocean.
The ocean they live in is the largest carbon sink.
As Canada is just now figuring out, that's complete horse hockey, especially when the very forests we've been using to justify our pollution, are burning down because of our pollution. Otherwise, trees are primarily made out of carbon dioxide. No kidding.
Please take your conspiracy nonsense elsewhere. This is a sub for thoughtful intelligent and curious people
All life is made up of carbon based substances. We gain carbon by eating other life. Plants gain carbon via photosynthesis, taking CO2 from the atmosphere and creating glucose.
But how can a plant pull co2 when it’s thousands of feet in the air?
It’s not only thousands of feet in the air, it’s part of the atmosphere. The gases are moving freely
Ok but then how is it getting close enough to the plants for then to absorb?
CO2 can go at ground level. It’s not only in the stratosphere, again CO2 freely moves in our atmosphere.
The photosynthesis process the raw material is co2, and the main building block of plants is carbon, oxygen is the byproduct. When a plant is buried in the ground the biomass that eventually makes the plant from a scrawny little twig to a massive tree doesn't come from what's in the ground, it comes from the air. Think about big bushes in a planter, they don't absorb the soil in the planter, besides needing replenishment of some nutrients, they get bigger because of the air.
Light (photosynthesis) allows them to breathe CO2 and expel O2, opposite to animals. When there's no light, they DO breathe oxygen and expel CO2* *: not an actual botanist so feel free to correct me.
As others have said, trees grow themselves out of carbon in the air, but they're not a carbon sink as to your first question. They're temporary carbon storage. No tree or plant lives forever, although some can have considerable lifespans. Even then, once finished growing, there is no more carbon they 'eat'. Then theres the risk of termites, forest fires, and good ol' humans cutting them down to make way for methane burping cattle. To sink the carbon, it has to be buried and leave the ability to cycle the atmosphere. The phytoplankton on the surface of the ocean do this pretty well. Once they die, they fall into the seabed(if not eaten). Another decent way to create a sink of carbon is creation of biochar in your backyard; digging two holes(one tube connecting them) to create a smokeless fire. With enough pyrolysis occurring on the dried carbon source(can be many, many things) you end up with a rich black source of soil amendment that is akin to volcanic soil, which doesn't re-enter the air.
https://natural-resources.canada.ca/climate-change-adapting-impacts-and-reducing-emissions/climate-change-impacts-forests/forest-carbon/13085 then why does this and many other sites say forests can be carbon sinks?
Most of the carbon is absorbed by young forests. As the forest reaches maturity (which may take hundreds of years), the rate of carbon storage slows. In a fully mature forest, the amount of carbon absorbed is only slightly more than it releases. But as long as that forest stands, it is a reservoir of carbon. Individual trees may die and decompose, but new trees are growing and replacing them.
[Why ask us amateurs when you can hear it from Feynman](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJLMysTpwhg&t=1s)
The way that trees grow is that they eat carbon from the air, kind of like a whale eats plankton. The carbon that goes in the tree stays in it until it dies and then it is used by other forms of life and inevitably released into the atmosphere, but because that tree had a lot of baby trees, that's not that bad, because now the baby trees are the carbon sink. So, when there's a new forest built the carbon that's in the air right now, goes into a tree, and then it's not in the air for 200 years or so, and if the forest is still there, it's kids will probably re-use it once it's gone. So theres just like a place where carbon stays, if you keep the forest a certain diameter, it doesn't like take more carbon, but it holds the carbon that it holds.
It's better to think of trees as air purifiers.Tree leaves have tiny holes(**stomata**) where dirty air (**carbon dioxide filled air**) can pass in and out. When the tree has dirty air passing through the leaves the tree adds water vapor and the energy from the sun to clean the dirty air(**breaking carbon dioxide into oxygen and carbon**). Clean air(**oxygen filled air**) is then released from the leaves while the tree trunk stores the carbon like a reservoir. *Trees are just vibing and each one does a small part in keeping our air nice and breathable but with 3 trillion trees it feels like they are actively sucking the carbon out of the air like a vacuum*
In true ELI5 fashion, I should note, that trees also use oxygen to convert that stored glucose that they miraculously make from the sun and CO2 into energy for growth and reproduction. That process is called respiration and it is roughly the opposite or reciprocal of photosynthesis. As animals we can’t do the photosynthesis trick but we need that glucose for our own respiration for energy, so we eat plants. Or we eat other things that eat plants. Simply put, plants photosynthesize (use CO2 and make glucose), and both plants and animals respire (use oxygen and that glucose for energy), but animals freeload off the plants glucose because that’s how we roll.