Planting Trees Does Help

What role does planting trees have on global warming you may ask?

Planting tree’s helps reduce global warming by giving us clean air. If this is done correctly it will help reduce carbon dioxide, living trees breathe in carbon dioxide also known as C02. But when they die, they ROT, and when they rot, all the carbon they stored over the years will be oxidized and released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Some part of it will be transferred to the soil. But in places like the Amazon Rain Forest, the soil is too thin to hold much carbon, so very little goes into the soil and what little does is rapidly released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. On the other hand, if, instead of allowing trees to die and rot, we were to HARVEST the trees, turn them into lumber, and treat them to prevent rot, the carbon therein would be sequestered (prevented from oxidizing into the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere) almost indefinite.

But it is not only planting trees we need to plant trees in the right location. Because trees are generally dark in color and have a large surface area they absorb a lot of heat from the Sun and so it's important to plant them in a place where in the earth would absorb a lot of heat anyway. The ideal place for this is in the Equatorial regions. If you plant a tree in the more northerly or southerly latitudes it can actually contribute to global warming by absorbing more heat than would have been the case if it weren't there. To put it into some sort of perspective, the amount of heat absorbed and given off by a single average sized tree in a year is about the same amount of energy that an average house uses in 3 days.

So the ideal trees to plant are trees bearing fruits or nuts or that produce rubber, oils, resins etc and which are planted in the Equatorial regions. Over their lifetimes these trees will cause a net reduction in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.