Our parents always tell us how they would be outside all day playing or hanging out with their friends during the summer how they don’t understand how the youth of today don’t want to do the same thing. I feel like they don’t get that their 80°F afternoons have been replaced with 100°F ones. Due to climate change, we have seen drastic changes to our average temperatures and a big culprit of this is carbon. What carbon does is it essentially traps the heat within the atmosphere, thus raising our global temperatures. We have, however, found a way to reduce the carbon in the atmosphere through a process called carbon sequestration. What this process does is it converts the carbon in the air from a gaseous state into a liquid or solid one. To do this, we don’t need big machines or high tech to convert carbon. All we need are trees. Trees convert carbon into glucose during photosynthesis so that can grow. Researchers in the U.S. and China have taken this process and observed the changes carbon emissions. From 2000 to 2005, the U.S. has sequestered about 236 tera-grams through trees, which is approximately 19% of our carbon emissions, while China sequestered 96 tera-grams, which is about 8.5% of their carbon emissions (Zhao, 2011). Carbon sequestration effectively kills two birds with one stone. Not only does it encourage reforestation and forest preservation, but it also lowers the amount of carbon in our atmosphere that traps heat. Hopefully with carbon sequestration, future generation can play outside in the summer with no complaints
Reference:
Shao G., L. Dai, J.S. Dukes, R.B. Jackson, L. Tang, J. Zhao. 2011. Increasing Forest Carbon Sequestration through Cooperation and Shared Strategies between China and the United States. Environ. Sci. Technol. DOI: 10.1021/es200147k
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