Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2019 October 9

= October 9 =

Climate Change
Bjørn Lomborg aside, I was speaking to a "Rabid Leftist" recently who said that the majority of our problems can be resolved if half of the world's population agreed to plant a single tree each over the next year which would result in +£3,000,000,000 trees. I have little to no knowledge on the subject, personally leaning towards the teaching of Mr Lomborg. However the theory has resonated with me and I would like to know if there is any substance to this argument and if so, why has this not been implemented? Thanks Anton 81.131.40.58 (talk) 13:36, 9 October 2019 (UTC)
 * The local Residents Association has not approved tree planting. They can not agree on which species of trees should be allowed. If Residents plant the wrong type of tree, they could face a fine.  (Seriously, this type of burocratic nonsense does happen). Blueboar (talk) 14:01, 9 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Which local residents association? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 14:04, 9 October 2019 (UTC)
 * fun fact: This remind me of an old article by a most honorable road building engineer, calculating, in the early 20th century, the value of planting trees along roads, and, according to him, mounting up to huge value. Turns out, these trees actually cost money, end up disposed of rather than sold, so no profit, but rather a loss, is made...
 * This type of calculation usually disregard the loss: that is, where a tree grows, some other vegetation do not
 * NASA indicates that the Earth is actually greening of its own, which help explaining why only roughly half the burned fossil fuel shows in the atmosphere inventory.
 * That said, the average human produce like ~4 ton CO2 a year if I remember well, which is more than the amount a fair size tree will absorb in a year, and far more than a recently planted small tree will. So, even if you do not include the CO2 not absorbed by the replaced vegetation, no, this doesn't add up.
 * Moreover, half the wold population live in cities were it will be hard for them to find a place to grow a tree. And half of the population also has far more important problem, like, just getting food for next day. Gem fr (talk) 14:20, 9 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Some of that half is poisoning the world's water by increasing the partial pressure of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which raises the parts of carbon per million parts of water at which CO2 molecules evaporating equals CO2 molecules dissolving (into carbonic acid) which makes seawater less alkaline and freshwater more acidic and will fuck up the ecosystem. It being half is not a good thing. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 18:59, 12 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Tree_farm link to USDA calculator: http://www.carbon.sref.info/estimating/calculator . The given example http://carbon.sref.info/an-example says you can expect ~1 metric tonne / hectare /year . hectare (~2.5 acres), not a single tree... Gem fr (talk) 14:42, 9 October 2019 (UTC)
 * If Each of Us Planted a Tree, Would It Slow Global Warming? says: "...if every one of us took a couple of hours this weekend to plant a tree, it would eventually reduce the carbon dioxide level by around 6 percent from the current level". Of course, that assumes that all the trees planted survive, and that there's somewhere to plant them in the first place. Cities can support quite dense tree cover, but not tundra, deserts, high mountains and so on. In the UK, valuable habitats such as lowland heath would be destroyed by tree planting. And we still have to grow food crops. So we'd have to pay someone to plant trees where they were actually needed. Carbon offset schemes do this already on a modest scale. Alansplodge (talk) 11:30, 10 October 2019 (UTC)

So each person on the planet would need to plant 1 square kilometre or 1 hectare of trees in order to resolve the current climate change problem according to the above answer, are you certain? Anton 81.131.40.58 (talk) 11:33, 10 October 2019 (UTC)


 * I think that's far off. So to begin, one of the issues with just planting trees is that if the tree dies at some point, and you allow it to rot, all the carbon it pulled out of the atmosphere is going right back into it. The idea of growing trees and then sealing them up somewhere is one proposed method of carbon sequestration. As for how many trees you would need, well, let's take a Fermi problem approach. It's estimated there are around one trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that weren't there a few centuries ago. A typical oak weighs around ten tonnes. Half of that is water, which is less than a factor of ten, so we ignore it. So if we grow another 100 billion oaks, that's all the extra carbon dioxide removed. Is it feasible for everyone to plant 15 trees and have them grow to a full size oak? Is there enough room on Earth. Probably not. Based on numbers here, all the forests on the planet probably contain about half a trillion tonnes of carbon. Now, that's the equivalent of about two trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide. So you're talking about increasing the mass of Earth's plantlife by about 50%. Good luck. Someguy1221 (talk) 13:05, 10 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Don't forget the risk of losing them all in one shot, in a "megafire". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 13:40, 10 October 2019 (UTC)


 * This study may be helpful. 98.247.144.23 (talk) 05:34, 13 October 2019 (UTC)

Vienna Philharmonic oboeist
Does anyone know the name of this oboeist in the Vienna Philharmonic? He was a great favourite of mine as a boy when my parents had a box in the Großer Musikvereinssaal during the late 1970s; before a performance I'd wave at him and he'd wink back at me. Ericoides (talk) 18:01, 9 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Aw! The Vienna Philharmonic's website has a long list of retired musicians, some with biographies and pictures. Is your oboist one of them? Another thought, look through Category:Austrian classical oboists, Category:Austrian oboists and Category:Players of the Vienna Philharmonic? 70.67.193.176 (talk) 20:53, 9 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I've had a look through the lists but can't find a name with a photo that matches. Ericoides (talk) 21:24, 9 October 2019 (UTC)
 * That's too bad. The only other idea I've got is the German-language version of the Players category: which has more people listed, though there will be the same problem with photos.70.67.193.176 (talk) 01:51, 10 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Pinging who might have an idea. --Viennese Waltz 06:53, 10 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Ericoides (talk) 07:51, 10 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Thank you for the ping, VW.
 * I notice some similarity with Walter Lehmayer. UTube has a video of a Haydn Sinfonia Concertante, conducted by Leonard Bernstein, where WL is shown.  WL has played in the State Opera around the corner from the Musikverein in the late 1960s (as principal oboist) and was appointed to the Philharmonics in 1973, so the time frame may fit.  --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 17:03, 10 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Walter Lehmayer it is. Many thanks, Herr ZooM! Ericoides (talk) 22:42, 10 October 2019 (UTC)