So, what did happen to all that warmth?

it probably depends on the type of tree, after all the slower the wood grows the slower it burns ? different woods have different desities so will be absorbing less carbon

Not one to trust a website called "Treehugger.com", but I don't think this particular dispute is worth a whole lot of digging anyway. It defies common sense.

From Treehugger:
100 forest sites around the world and found that temperate moist forests stored an average of 377 tons of carbon per hectare in above ground biomass; subtropical moist forests, 294 tC/ha; cool dry temperate forests, 176 tC/ha; and, tropical rainforests, 171 tC/ha.

**broken link removed**

So rainforests are actually on the low end of the carbon sequestration budget compared to moist temperate forests, but still a far cry from the "42 tons" or thereabouts touted by the corn lobbyist website and tcmtech.

And there is more to the equation. Brazilian forests are important for their sheer size, contributing to a huge percentage of overall global tree cover. They are beijng lost at the greatest rate, by slash and burn deforestation. They are destroyed by burning, which releases ALL THAT CO2 that has been stored over the life of the forest. The cornfield not only can't sink as efficiently, it loses ground based on the amount that was released to make way for it. Not to mention that in 3rd world countries it isn't uncommon to burn dead crops rendering all that CO2 sinking null.

I'm far from a treehugger but this is an argument that simply goes nowhere. We wouldn't even be having this AGW discussion of as much as 20% of the world's forests had never been cleared (i.e. if we'd had a crystal ball and knew the consequences)

Did you look at the fine print of annual tonnages? 17 tons per acre per year Vs 377 tons per acre stored over a 50 -100 year life cycle.

377 / 50 = 7.54 per year. (or less!)

I will still give you the benefit of the doubt and go with corns lowest annual rate of 10 tons per acre per year Vs your top forest capacity at less than 8 tons per acre per year.

Densely packed Forest may have upward of 500 tons of wood per acre but it may take 100 years to grow to that level. Corn even at a level of 10 tons per acre per year over the same time period will still produce around 1000 tons of harvested bio mass and much of that biomass is capable of being reclaimed and put to use each and every year.
Trees are basically near useless for the first 10 -20 years of their life at natural growth rates.

If you want to lock that carbon up that is stored in trees for the long term I suggest you start cutting more down and using them to make more lumber for housing and construction! Housing eats up huge quantities of wood and once a house is constructed the wood in it tends to stay there for far longer than the tree it came from ever would have lived naturally!

see this is the whole plan behind wood burning furnaces that are being put in all over the place, we cut the trees, burn the wood and the CO2 we release will be reabsorbed by the trees growing in the place of the ones we cut, pity there are too many people and too little forest area, like I said a good few pages back, there are too many people on the planet

tcmtech said:

Did you look at the fine print of annual tonnages? 17 tons per acre per year Vs 377 tons per acre stored over a 50 -100 year life cycle.

377 / 50 = 7.54 per year. (or less!)

I will still give you the benefit of the doubt and go with corns lowest annual rate of 10 tons per acre per year Vs your top forest capacity at less than 8 tons per acre per year.

Densely packed Forest may have upward of 500 tons of wood per acre but it may take 100 years to grow to that level. Corn even at a level of 10 tons per acre per year over the same time period will still produce around 1000 tons of harvested bio mass and much of that biomass is capable of being reclaimed and put to use each and every year.
Trees are basically near useless for the first 10 -20 years of their life at natural growth rates.

If you want to lock that carbon up that is stored in trees for the long term I suggest you start cutting more down and using them to make more lumber for housing and construction! Housing eats up huge quantities of wood and once a house is constructed the wood in it tends to stay there for far longer than the tree it came from ever would have lived naturally!

Click to expand...

Now wait a minute, where are you getting the 50-100 year life cycle? And what makes you conclude that the life cycle take-up is divisible in such a simplistic manner? Stored carbon doesn't refelect the dynamic process of annual carbon/oxygen exchange. And as I said, all of those corn field are harvested annually. I'm no agriculture expert, but I'm familiar with the process of burning crops to recycle the nutrients to the soil. This releases a whole lot of the carbon sinking that the corn is good for.

You have to realize, this is a budget, kind of like finances. Look at people who gamble. They can make you think they are filthy rich when all they tell you about is their winnings. But when you dig a little deeper you find out they owe bookies and credit cards a ton of money in net losses. Kind of works the same way here. We can make it look on paper like corn is a better CO2 sink, until you start disecting the energy and CO2 budget and realize that much of that CO2 is going to bio-fuels which are being burned and released...more efficiently than gasoline YES, but still WAY less efficiently in the budget cycle than the rain forest left alone would be.

Not an enviro-wacko. Just stating the obvious.

BTW, these little points of discussion really illustrate the economic and political forces that drive the whole CO2 AGW etc debate. Billions, probably trillions, of dollars in ivestement capital are at stake. You have the established petrochem industries competing with these bio-fuel interests. The elephant in the room is the ecologic trauma that the bio-fuel industry causes. But its happening in Brazil and Argentina etc etc so the typical Americo-European turns a blind eye and the South Americans and corporations rake in the profits.

Not that I'm against global capitalism or South Americans doing what they want with their land. I'm just saying the issues are not so simple and people really need to do some thinking about this stuff and stop the knee-jerk AGW tunnel vision.

tcmtech said:

Housing eats up huge quantities of wood and once a house is constructed the wood in it tends to stay there for far longer than the tree it came from ever would have lived naturally!

Click to expand...

Yes, all those 1000 year old houses sure are quaint aren't they?

The thing you are missing, is that the whole corn plant is being used to make fuel, not just the ears you buy at the market. But of course, does it really matter if the corn is burned in the field, or in a car? Would bio fuel release more CO2 than petroleum? Which kind of brings up another point, how are these science guys sorting out which CO2 molecules come from natural source, and which came from Canada, or China? Americans are the good guys, we never, ever do bad things.

HarveyH42 said:

Which kind of brings up another point, how are these science guys sorting out which CO2 molecules come from natural source

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Well, we know with pretty good accuracy how much fuel we burn. I'm sure the oil companies aren't sneeking in any free fuel for us, so it shouldn't be too hard to calculate how much CO2 is produced from all that fossil fuel consumption.

kchriste, sure you can find about 10 trillion different number on the net. Virtually none of which agree because they use various asumptions and extrapolations from narrow data sets. I don't think fossil fuel is even a major constitute of the carbon dioxide we produce.

I am surprised that no one popped up with the obvious part of Bio fuels and crop/natural organic growth CO2 numbers.

They are carbon neutral.
What goes in equals what goes out. They have ZERO net effect on the total global volume of CO2!

Petroleum, ground based natural gas, and coal based CO2 are net gain ones.

Sceadwian said:

kchriste, sure you can find about 10 trillion different number on the net

Click to expand...

It is basic chemistry. We know the chemical constitution of a gallon of gas. We know how much O2 is consumed when the gasoline is burned and we know how much CO2 it will produce.

Virtually none of which agree because they use various asumptions and extrapolations from narrow data sets.

Click to expand...

Of course not all fuel is exactly the same. No two car engines, even of the same make, model and year, will perform exactly the same. On average though, you can estimate accurately enough the amount of CO2 produced by the total fuel consumed. Even if the estimates are out by 30%, the amount is still a lot.

I don't think fossil fuel is even a major constitute of the carbon dioxide we produce.

Click to expand...

You can believe what you want. It won't change the outcome.

tcmtech said:

I am surprised that no one popped up with the obvious part of Bio fuels and crop/natural organic growth CO2 numbers.
They are carbon neutral.

Click to expand...

No they are not.
Does the farmer till the soil by hand? No he uses mechanized machinery which runs on diesel and emits CO2.
Is the fertilizer, which comes from Potash, mined by hand? Processed by hand? Carried by packhorse to the farm?
It is probably worse than just burning oil directly. Just a feel good idea to make us think something is being done.

By the way here is a whole bucket load of coffin nails and a fully automatic nailer to go with them!

Unfortunately they belong to the global warming/climate change skeptics and educated nonbelievers.

**broken link removed**

The great 'global warming' hoax

RealClimate: Senator Inhofe on Climate Change

The Global Warming Hoax

Global warming conspiracy theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Global Warming Scam Exposed

THE GLOBAL WARMING HOAX


I even tossed in the wikipedia one just for the simpler folk!

If you want to argue its still real I expect no less than every reference found in every link and sub link here to be fully and scientifically explained.
No If Ands or buts. No exaggerations or bla bla bla.
Plus explain why so many super rich people got even richer just by playing along with it!

kchriste said:

No they are not.
Does the farmer till the soil by hand? No he uses mechanized machinery which runs on diesel and emits CO2.
Is the fertilizer, which comes from Potash, mined by hand? Processed by hand? Carried by packhorse to the farm?
It is probably worse than just burning oil directly. Just a feel good idea to make us think something is being done.

Click to expand...

Upon this we can both agree. Right-wing "religious" wacko and pinko-commie-god hating liberal alike

No they are not.
Does the farmer till the soil by hand? No he uses mechanized machinery which runs on diesel and emits CO2.
Is the fertilizer, which comes from Potash, mined by hand? Processed by hand? Carried by packhorse to the farm?
It is probably worse than just burning oil directly. Just a feel good idea to make us think something is being done.

Click to expand...

So are you saying that all plant life now needs human farmers to make it grow? For my whole life I understood that nature does its thing with or without us.
Who planted the trees that where here before any of us?
Who planted the grass that was here before any of us?
Who planted everything that was here before us?

Please explain how it works in your reality?

I would like to know how all of the worlds farming practices are one big scam just used by the oil industry to make money.

tcmtech said:

**broken link removed**

Click to expand...

Even if GW is mostly natural, which it most likely is not, then we should not be doing anything to worsen it's effects. When you are hurtling towards the cliff at 100MPH, you don't say "gee just hit the gas peddle what's another 10MPH?".

Plus explain why so many super rich people got even richer just by playing along with it!

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Many more super rich are getting rich with "business as usual."

tcmtech..."crops" i.e. biofuels are GROWN. By FARMERS, which use MACHINES to plant and harvest them. They aren't carbon natural. Rows of cornfields or sugarcane don't just pop out of nowhere...and furthermore they don't harvest themselves and ship themselves to refineries to be processed.

They are not carbon neutral. And where they really lose their neutrality is the refining process. I work in an oil refinery myself, but the concept is much the same and the process is comparable. The usable material has to be separated from the waste. This stock has to be treated...liquified, purified, seperated, heated, cooled, reactions, fermentation, pressurization, blending, recycling etc. All of this requires energy input, i.e burning a combination of bio, fossil, and natural gas fuels to operate the compressors, furnaces, pumps, reactors, and distillation towers in the plants.

Carbon neutrality denotes NOT needing such energy input.

ke5frf said:

Upon this we can both agree. Right-wing "religious" wacko and pinko-commie-god hating liberal alike

Click to expand...

LOL!
I prefer to be called socialist as opposed to commie because communism is an extreme political form of socialism.
I don't hate god. I just deny he exists. I can't hate something that doesn't exist in my mind so make me a:
pinko-socialist-god-denying-liberal!

hehe, socialism, a great idea that never works Stupid human nature.

Sceadwian said:

hehe, socialism, a great idea that never works Stupid human nature.

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Many European countries would be called socialist by American standards. They seem to be doing pretty well.