Global Warming and Planting of Trees

Off of the top of my head, a large/fully-grown tree will remove 22kg of CO2 a year. I assume the trees being planted will be small and wont absorb the same volume of CO2 that a mature tree would. But, in 30 or 40 years when global warming has noticeable effects..it might help to buffer those negative impacts.

You would be removing 222 million kg of CO2 a year with those trees. An average canadian produces 23 tonnes (roughly equal to 20.8k kg) of CO2 per year so in total you compensated for 10.5 thousand canadians...too bad there are 30 million of us .

Hope I don't confuse you with using canadian emmision data, I just thought it was interesting...Anything you do to help, is helping and getting 10 million trees planted would be a huge accomplishment! But, we do need more then just that, not too mention the fact, there are much bigger problems and more economical solutions to those problems that we should undertake before caring overly much about Global Warming.

(ie aids, hunger, literacy, etc)

Oh Oh! more fun stats. Average emissions per capita of the world is 4.1 tonnes. So,

3719 kg of CO2 per person * 7 billion = 26,033,000,000,000

222,000,000/26,033,000,000,000 = 0.000853 %

You, personally through your iniative, would have reduced Global Emissions by 0.000853 %!

That's 5,480 trees every day, 365 days a year (with one day off on leap year) for 5 years to get the job done.

A rough order of magnitude guess would be that you would probably exhale more CO2 in the act of planting them than you could hope to recover. Then, there are all those blisters.

You can actually account for the amount of carbon truly sequestered by trees. There are carbon to organic matter conversions used by plant scientists that are fairly accurate, or you do testing for TOC. At any rate, trees only sequester the carbon that remains in their tissues from anabolic processes, the remaining carbon is utilized and converted back to CO2 by the plants aerobic metabolic processes. So the mass of a tree and its component parts correlates directly with the carbon removed from the atmosphere. (It is actually slightly higher mass in carbon that removed from the atmosphere, since trees can also get a small portion of its carbon from soil-water solution as carbonate/bicarbonate ions.) So a Tree that grows by 100 lbs in a year (oven dry weight) has sequestered 100 lbs times C:OM conversion factor of carbon from the atmosphere. So you might consider how many year old a tree would have to be to grow the amount you desire (obviously most trees under 10 years do not grow that much per year).