We could cut atmospheric carbon by 25% by planting a forest the size of the United States
Most of the Mediterranean coastline has been forested once. Many nations such as Iceland have been deeply forested. Deforestation happened since before the ancient Greeks when massive wooden fleets roamed the seas. Fun-fact – all those ships that killed much of the Mediterranean forests were on renewable wind and muscle power. The Sahara has once been a lush forest. When the old Egyptians were around, it was still a lot more hospitable than it is today. So, either Climate Change is responsible for this but then we had Climate Change thousands of years ago and I ask myself where the Hockey sticks come from or we can’t do anything about Climate Change in which case its better we adapt instead of freaking out or, not everything that we find to be a problem nowadays has its roots in Climate Change. Oh besides, more CO2 in the air leads to a much greener planet as studies show so one might want to see the current increase in CO2 as a remedial effort for the damage our ancestors have done to forests.
It would be no surprise to anyone to say that if we hadn’t deforested so much of the Earth, we wouldn’t be in so much trouble with climate change now. Exchanging all those trees for hamburgers and industrialization was one of our potentially fatal mistakes. A new study, however, looks at the idea of reforestation from an unusually strategic, data-driven point of view.
