This kind of texts reminds me how utterly close minded people often are. They try to reduce all global environmental problems into single variable, but are totally blind for the forest as a whole.
Indeed, humans have destroyed over 3 gigahectares of forest and some silly scientists are worrying for carbondioxide! For those who are not mathematically orientated (like all climate scientist), 3 gigahectares of forest could store in living carbon storage about 1-2 teratons of carbon. We can compare this amount of carbon to remaining fossil coal reserves that are approximately 630 gigatons. I just cannot understand climate people, because forests could absorb something like order of magnitude more carbon than what are global fossil carbon reserves, if we just let forests grow free without industrial exploitation. Actually this calculation is misleading, because after water, carbondioxide is the primary forest growth inhibitor, because forests would take as much carbondioxide from atmosphere as there is available. Therefore there is no practical limit how many kilotons of carbon per hectare forests could store if there is unlimited supply of carbondioxide available. One conspiracy theory could be that this is neglected, because the only reason why carbondioxide levels are rising is that forests has been destroyed ca. 14 megahectares annually. This translates roughly to 1-4 gigatons of carbon, what is the amount of carbon that athmospheric carbon levels are rising annually. We are destroying forests faster than they grow! But if deforestration had been stalled in '80s there would not be several dozen kiloclimatescientists! Therefore the primary for climate scietists is to encourage deforestration and indeed this is exactly what has happened, because of biofuels and refusal to set economic value for natural carbon sinks and miscalculating the amount of how much old growth forests can store carbon and how long time span they remain as carbon sinks. —Jouni
