[LINK] "Massive Tree Farms May Be a Really Bad Climate Idea"

[rfmcdonald]

National Geographic's Marianne Lavelle notes the complexities of dealing with atmospheric carbon dioxide.

To meet the Paris climate deal's goal of deep greenhouse gas cuts, nations appear to be relying on costly, possibly harmful large-scale projects to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, says a new paper with sobering calculations of the risks.

"The Paris agreement shows where we want to go — the brave new world of a balanced carbon budget — but not how to get there," says Phil Williamson, environmental scientist at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom and science coordinator for the U.K. government's Natural Environment Research Council.

Williamson warned in a commentary Wednesday in Nature that even seemingly beneficial approaches like tree planting could wreak havoc if they are implemented on the massive scale required to limit the increase in average global temperature to below 2° Celsius.

"There's a lot of optimism based on the assumption it will all be all right, because sometime in the future, we're going to be able to remove the carbon," Williamson said in a phone interview. "Well, that's actually going to be more trouble and more expensive than if you face up to the problem now." He said research is urgently needed on the consequences of these massive carbon removal projects, which he says are essentially geoengineering projects by another name.

Paris negotiators did not specifically discuss carbon removal, but Williamson argues their deal implicitly relies upon large-scale mitigation projects, because nations are not on track to cut fossil fuel burning enough to meet the pact's targets.