Forests and Rice

At an interesting talk right now. The point it's making is that naively, we view (re)forestation as a simple win for carbon dynamics: forests = sequestration and new forests are the best, because old-growth forests are basically in carbon balance, just storing carbon, while new forests are actively sequestering carbon that would otherwise stay in the atmosphere, lowering the net carbon content.

Of course, forest management can be a great tool for carbon management. But what complicates this is that not all forests and settings are created equal. If we engage in willy-nilly forestation that don't fit the ecological history and profile of the setting, we may fail to account for unintended consequences like catastrophic fires and the large carbon releases they create.

Edit: Now listening to a talk by a bioengineer whose team is currently testing a bioengineered rice plant with a gene that allows it to survive sitting in a submerged field for 17 days (ordinary rice dies after about three days of submersion.) Since most of Bangladesh is going to become increasingly prone to catastrophic flooding with global warming, this as a big deal. SUPER COOL.

Get-green-quick schemes

For every generation of environmental problems, there is a group of scientists willing to come up with whacky Rube Goldberg solutions:

Leon Sadler of Alabama University says we could do it [fix an ozone hole] by injecting 5,000 tonnes of ozone into the stratosphere a day for a century. You could, he says, hitch small ozone generators to ordinary commercial aircraft which could spray the ozone into the stratosphere on their normal flights, or you could fly special flights from world ozone production centres or even fire frozen 'bullets' of ozone into the air from special guns. 

--Fred Pearce, The Sunday Times (London), Mar. 5, 1989.

Frozen ozone bullets. From special guns.