The latest plan to get better weather in a hundred years, is to cut down trees and dump them in the ocean.

The great northern boreal forest has expanded by 12% since 1984. Which means it has locked up all this extra carbon in it. Instead of waiting for it to catch fire and burn, the thinking is that we could cut it down now, and throw the logs in a river that leads to the Arctic ocean where they will sink (eventually, maybe) and take carbon to the sea floor.

New Scientist thought this was a good idea. Future anthropologists may file modern eco-science with arsenic cures, and radium toothpaste.

In order to save the environment, we need to cut down 180,000 square kilometers of forest and toss it into the river (every year).

How many trees do we have to kill to stop a cyclone in 2100AD?

Scientists new plan to save the world by chopping down boreal forest and tossing it in the Arctic Ocean…

These researchers and journalists are the kind of people who’ll check everything — except the core underlying assumptions that their fantasy is based on:

Humanity will need to find ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to compensate for industries that are hard to electrify – or even to begin reducing atmospheric CO2 levels. Direct air capture machines are expensive, however, and planting trees can backfire if they die or burn.
Several companies are burying wood, and US firm Running Tide sank 25,000 tonnes of wood chips off Iceland, although it was accused of endangering the environment and later shut down.

How many solar powered chain-saws are there in the world? Is that zero?

They have six Arctic rivers in mind, and say that if we can only cut down 30,000 square kilometers of forest on each river, that will bury about 1 billion tons of carbon, which is about 3% of our anthropogenic total emissions (ie. not much).
Previous research shows that waterlogged wood had lasted 8000 years in low oxygen Alpine lakes. How long will it last as a shipping hazard?
The only thing this study shows is how effective government funding is.
This article originally appeared at JoNova