“Are we the idiots?” – Bill Gates on Planting Trees

hey everyone welcome back to our science news today we're diving into a Hot Topic Bill Gates recently got fire on social media for claiming that planting trees can't save us from climate change is he right let's have a look starting with just exactly what he said I don't plant trees a lot there's a lot of people who are very enamored with trees we've got trees on this stage some people would even say that if you just planted enough trees it could take care of the climate issue all together and that's complete nonsense okay I mean are we the science people or are we the idiots which one do we want to be the X Twitter Fallout wasn't nice you are the idiot Bill Bill deserves to be in prison why does anyone listen to this evil man and one guy used the opportunity to Proclaim that Gates is wrong and to promote his tree planting company I'll admit that I'm one of those people who are very en armored by trees they're really good listeners and if they get too boring you can chop them down and heat with them that said it makes sense to think that trees can help us fight against climate change trees absorb carbon dioxide use photosynthesis to split it up store the carbon and release the oxygen the carbon goes into trunks branches leaves and roots and over the course of time some of it gets deposited into the soil so let's just plant trees them and solve all our problems indeed in 2019 a paper appeared in Science magazine saying that we could basically fix climate change if we just plant trees everywhere there's space the authors estimat that this it require about a trillion trees covering an area approximately the size of China that so the estimate would remove about 700 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere removing that much carbon dioxide would keep us within the Paris goals if we reached Net Zero by 2050 this is why some people have enthusiastically said that planting trees has a mindblowing potential and that Forest restoration is overwhelmingly more powerful than all of the other climate change Solutions proposed the paper even gave rise to the one trillion trees campaign whose goal is what the name says to plant one trillion trees to save the world basically it's a nice story unfortunately it turned out that the estimate in the 2019 paper was wildly overoptimistic it was criticized almost as fast as it appeared for overestimating how much land would be available for planting trees and how much carbon the trees would eventually remove the corrected estimate is about a fifth of that in the original paper one also has to keep in mind that trees don't grow on the snap of a finger it takes decades for them to grow not all of them survive and who will do all that planting anyway science eventually published a correction to this study and the lead author Thomas kther said somewhat exasperated that he never said we should plant a trillion trees I get the feeling that he and his co-authors didn't quite anticipate how much attention the paper would attract and I wasn't even doing science news then now you might say that well well even if the estimate was a factor 5 too high that would still be something like 20% of what we need to remove and yes that would be pretty good but that it require that we plant trees in basically every corner where there aren't already growing trees and the trees actually grow there but good soil and tree friendly climates aren't easy to find and if you find them people would rather use them to grow food there's also the issue as another study has found that if you plant trees on formerly Barren land then that significantly changes the reflectivity or the alido of the surface as a consequence Earth retains more heat According to some estimates that could effectively counteract the carbon dioxide removal by 30% indeed another study found that if limiting temperature increases our goal we'd be better off Plastering land with solar panels than planting trees okay you might say maybe trees won't fix climate change but trees are good for other things right like parks are good for your mental health trees are known to keep cities cooler improve air quality and planting things ought to be good for biodiversity too well it's partly right monocultures generally aren't good for biodiversity so you have to be careful with what you plant but sure trees are good company however if you listen to the gates quote in context it's entirely clear that he wasn't dissing trees in general he wasn't even talking about climate change in general he was specifically talking about the potential of planting trees for offsetting carbon dioxide emissions it was a reply after the interviewer asked Gates about his involvement with the carbon removal company climb Works listen yourself but are you offsetting your own personal emissions with that and what can you give us a sense of the scale of that uh it's you know like 10 million a year okay peanuts uh and and just it's a variety of things The clim Works is part of it you know buying uh electric heat pumps for low-income housing where they get the benefits of lower monthly bills and I'll I take the carbon credits for those things you know there's uh you know solar panels there's a a huge variety of things I don't use some of the uh less proven uh approaches such as uh I don't plant trees and that makes a lot of sense not just because of the butchered estimate for the potential of carbon dioxide removal by planting trees but also because a lot of carbon offset projects that relied on reforestation turned out to have prettified their numbers at least at the moment you can't trust carbon offsetting with tree planting and it makes a lot of sense that Gates Spends His peanuts on more reliable approaches so is Gates Right sign says yes and keep on dusting those solar panels did you know that several studies have found that people who speak different languages have different brain connections maybe I'm imagining it but I certainly feel like 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Channel: Sabine Hossenfelder

Views: 751,611

Keywords: science without the gobbledygoook, hossenfelder, science news sabine, science news, science humor, Bill Gates, climate change, climate science, planting trees, carbon dioxide emissions, fossil fuels, carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide removal, science

Id: kGRjwT7mkx8

Length: 7min 50sec (470 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 06 2024