by Matthew Tyler Funk

Created on: November 26, 2007

In my opinion, evergreen trees would be the best trees to plant if the object was to combat global warming because the evergreens convert carbon dioxide to oxygen all year round, whereas many other trees eliminate carbon dioxide from the atmosphere only during the warm seasons.

Whether planting trees is an effective stand-alone method of reducing global warming or not may be up for debate, but there is a lot of evidence to suggest that planting trees might help. Trees and other plants have been shown by NASA (among others) to reduce contaminants in the air, and the cultivation of indoor plants was found to be the most reliable and efficient method of purifying air on a space station. In that regard, planting trees here on Earth should at least help us fight poor air quality - and if the contaminats removed happen to include greenhouse gasses, like carbon dioxide (which plants of all kinds convert into oxygen) then that's always a plus and should help us to some small extent with our global warming problem.

Of course, as long as entire forests are being continuously levelled by clearcutters, planting trees will always be an uphill battle and therefore cannot be counted upon to help us make progress against the rapid acceleration of global warming without the implementation of other, much more effective efforts. If on the whole the human race managed to plant more trees than we destroyed for a stretch of several years, then it is likely that it reduce the rate of global warming. Since carbon dioxide is to trees what oxygen is to humans, trees make great filters of carbon dioxide. It just so happens that carbon dioxide is the most troublesome and most abundant greenhouse gas on the planet, followed fairly closely by methane.

So assuming the planting of trees would help to some small extent, the best trees to plant to help combat global warming in my opinion are evergreens. Evergreens convert carbon dioxide into oxygen and purify the air of other harmful contaminants all year round, while trees that lose their leaves in autumn are only effective air purifiers for half of the year. Spruce trees, cedars, pines, firs, hemlocks and many other varieties are great choices.

Planting trees though, should not be our first line of defense against global warming. We are losing far more trees everyday to logging than we could ever hope to plant, and the loggers cut down trees while they are nice and big - while we plant trees that are nice and small. Global warming is fast asserting itself as a more and more immediate problem and planting trees is an investment now in something that will take a long time to reap the full benefits from. We need more immediate solutions to such an immediate problem.

And I don't mean to discourage anyone from planting trees to fight global warming - we need more trees to replace the ones that are being cut down on a daily basis. I'm just trying to illustrate that planting trees alone could never be enough to even make up the damage that the planet is enduring, let alone reverse it - unless of course we stopped the clearcutters and the loggers, which likely won't happen. It may be plausible though, to force the plant their own trees for later logging. They already do this to some extent, but the loggers are not limited to the trees they have created and continue to destroy our few remaining old-growth forests for profit.

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