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It's not Just Joel Salatin anymore
Tropical rainforest is often on leached soil where most of the nutrients are actually in the trees. Saying that this environment doesn't accumulated soil and therefore no forest will do so does not necessarily follow. Particularly where temperate forests were cleared for crop land you can certainly increase the amount of carbon stored by converting them to pasture or back to forest. But your point about reaching a maximum and then not storing any more is correct. Citation, please. Note that we were talking about changes to land use not sequestering carbon in less decomposable forms. I was told the amount that can be stored has limits in a course by Dr Judi Earl who put me on to Dr Christine Jones. The latter is the local guru on agricultural carbon sequestration. The reason given is that as decomposable carbon builds up the microbes that break it down also build up until the rate they are breaking down reaches the rate of build-up, in other words an equilibrium is reached. The position of the equilibrium depends on the land use and methods but you will still get one sooner or later. This is ignoring the carbon stored above ground in forests etc but you can see that it also has a maximum value depending on what is grown. Here is one quote: "The capacity of soil to store decomposable organic carbon by physical protection within micro-aggregates or other organomineral complexes seems to be finite. Once these complexes are saturated any added decomposable organic carbon cannot be protected from decomposition. Even if this capacity has been severely depleted it can be resaturated rapidly (e.g. within 30 years by growing pasture)." Which is from he http://www.amazingcarbon.com/PDF/Lei...N_ARMIDALE.pdf This site http://www.amazingcarbon.com has a huge amount of material on this topic. I haven't read it all. If you also google on: carbon sequestration "christine jones" site:.au you will get much more. She is of the view that paying farmers to do sequestration is a solution to climate change. I think we must try many solutions because until you try you don't know for sure what the effect will be and also there are political, economic and social limits on the extent that any given solution can be adopted thus we are likely to need a multi-pronged approach to succeed. Also I would not want to push only sequestration solutions because the fossil fuel industry will try to seize on any method of dealing with climate change (eg "clean coal") as long as it allows them to keep on burning and that is very undesirable for many reasons apart from the increase in atmospheric CO2. David |
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