Green Geoengineering is a False Faustian Bargain

                                        The Faustian Bargain of Green Geoengineering

Some scientists have held out hope that green geoengineering would be able to help reduce the effects of CO2 buildup in the Earth's atmosphere.  The basic idea was that increasing concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere would stimulate  the growth of trees and other plants, pumping down some of the CO2 in the atmosphere.  

The flaw in this idea is obvious----any storage of CO2 in the biosphere must inevitably be temporary---when trees and plants die all the CO2 returns stored in the plant will return to the atmosphere.  Over the last few decades numerous studies have confirmed that trees and plants in the Amazon Rain Forest areas were indeed undergoing accelerated growth due to higher CO2 and excitement was growing over the potential of green engineering to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.  Now new studies are showing that all the accelerated growth of trees has done is to create a larger-then-usual pool of carbon in the biosphere and solum that is now being released back to atmosphere as the trees and plants die.  Projections show that in short order so much of this excess CO2 will be released to the atmosphere at the Earth's biosphere is going to change from a carbon sink into a major carbon source.  

It turns out that "green geoengineering" has turned out to be a Faustian bargain, i.e. a foolish deal made for present without regard for future costs or consequences.    The claim that planting trees and other forms of green geoengineering would reduce atmospheric CO2 and mitigate global warming has had a very short shelf life.    Current estimates are that the biosphere will become a large net carbon source by the year 2100.

We can now declare that green geoengineering is essentially useless.  Any relief from higher atmospheric CO2 levels and global warming provided by green geoengineering will only be temporary--after only a few decades any excess CO2 stored in trees plants and soils will be returned to the atmosphere.   

But don't despair because green geoengineering has turned out to be a sham and a fraud.  There are still a variety of  other geoengineering proposals, including my own CO2 Antarctic Pumpdown Geoengineering proposal, that hold out promise of being ways to pump down and sequester CO2 over time periods that will actually help ameliorate global warming.