Will trees or mushrooms save the world?

Let's work with Mother Nature not against her.

This is what happens to trees when they take in "excess" CO2. That's a silly statement to fan the fires of global warming alarmism. There is no "excess." However much or little there is in the atmosphere, there's a failsafe system in place to restore us to balance. Like mushrooms (fungi), mammals breathe out carbon that trees breathe in. Then they breathe out oxygen.

It's a wonderful system, self-sustaining, self-correcting, self-balancing. More carbon is GOOD for trees and chlorophyll plants, most of which are in the ocean in the form of plankton and seaweeds.

Oak trees, for instance, accumulate more wood when there is more carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere, a recent study shows.

Oak tree branches under sun in summer in Aegean Turkey (Emreturanphoto/Moment/Getty)

.

Oak trees accumulate more wood when there is more carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere. That’s the key finding from our new study, carried out in a long-established forest in Staffordshire, England, that we have turned into a huge field experiment by injecting with extra CO₂.

After we increased CO₂ levels to what will be the planetary level in the 2050s, trees took more of it from the atmosphere and their wood production increased by 10 percent.

More CO2, please. We love it.

In some ways, this result is reassuring. We know that more CO₂ in the atmosphere can often help plants grow bigger and faster since photosynthesis captures the carbon [but we're trying to find a way to negatively spin that so people continue to alarmism] from which plants are largely made.

However, until now, the only comparable study on an older, mature forest (an Australian eucalyptus forest) found no link between extra CO₂ and tree growth.

Our work shows the link really does exist — at least in some common broadleaf forests. However, woodier trees do not offer a silver bullet to solve climate change.

While carbon is certainly better off in trees than in the atmosphere, where it causes global warming, it’s not a long-term solution. [Of course not, because we need a manmade solution that can be monetized to profit private industry; we can't afford to leave this in the hands of Mother Nature.]

Over decades or centuries, wood rots away, and carbon dioxide is released back into the atmosphere [and the whole cycle repeats at that time as it has for billions of years].

So, as a store of carbon, trees are not remotely equivalent to it being locked away in coal seams and oil reservoirs deep underground [or on other planets, or in locked vaults and storage units, where the keepers can charge rent governments will have to pay. We need to stop corporate polluting and start planting more regionally-appropriate trees]. More

• Another green world. Let's move to space instead, Elon! Saturn's moon Mimas may be way more inhabitable than we first thought (inverse.com)
• Keep buying; Jeff Bezos needs the money: 65 weird things under $30 on Amazon that are clever as h*ll
• Rob MacKenzie, Richard Norby and The Conversation via Inverse (inverse.com), 8.18, 24; mycologist Paul Stamets, "How Psilocybin Mushrooms Can Help Save the World" at SXSW 2023; CC Liu, Crystal Q., Seth Auberon (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly