Crude Carbon Choices?

Jane Goodall:

Recently the International Panel on Climate Change issued a report predicting an alarming array of impacts of climate change around the globe, including drought, floods, lower crop yields, threatened food security, wildfire and ocean acidification. It seems that no living thing in this web of life we are a part of will be unaffected by climate change.

As a primatologist, I am particularly concerned by the prediction that 20 percent to 30 percent of species will face increased risk of extinction.

We know that a majority of the world's species live in rainforests, from many flagship species like elephants, tigers and chimpanzees to smaller species like insects and algae. Some play a role in curing human diseases, or may in the future.

These forests are threatened both by large-scale commercial exploitation and by rapidly increasing numbers of poor people who are destroying the forests to make charcoal or to open the land for subsistence agriculture. Some of the other effects of climate change predicted by the IPCC, such as drought and food insecurity, will only exacerbate the plight of these people.

A relatively new danger to these forests is the growing enthusiasm for biofuels. In Africa, Asia and Latin America, forest blocks that were previously reserved for conservation or sustainable forestry are being converted to sugar cane and palm oil plantations, whose output will be used as fuel for ethanol or biodiesel plants.

The irony of cutting down forests for biofuels is that forests store a significant fraction of the world's stocks of carbon. If these carbon-capturing trees are felled and burned — whether as firewood or to clear land — the oxidation of their carbon will release billions more tons of carbon dioxide.

The tropical rainforests of Africa, Latin America and South Asia are particularly important in this regard. Tropical deforestation contributes 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere annually, compared to approximately 6 billion tons from burning fossil fuels. Saving these forests would not only prevent the release of carbon currently stored in them, but it also would allow them to continue absorbing carbon in the future.

...

Did you know that there are more trees in North America now than there were when Europeans first came to this continent? Did you know that one reason why this is so is that the forest products companies manage their inventory and make sure they have a constant supply? If the environmental wackos would quit fighting them and let them spread their magic to the rain forests of the world they would create greater forests to consume excess CO2.

However, trees aren't the only plants that consume CO2. Cane and corn do too. That makes her argument on ethanol production suspect too.

Does anyone else have trouble wrapping their mind around the concept that a weightless gas that rises in the atmosphere is measured in tons which is a measure of 2000 pounds of weight? There must be a sophisticated answer to this question, but in all the writing on CO2 emmissions I have never seen it.