Many people involved in the climate debate do not seem to understand how big the planet is, how slowly inexorable ocean currents and other geological phenomena are or, well, scale generally. For instance Scientific Alarmism, asks “Can We Bury Enough Wood to Slow Climate Change?” And while the answer is obviously “no of course not you fools” they say yes: “Wood vaulting, a simple, low-tech approach to storing carbon, has the potential to remove 12 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year – and some companies are already trying it”. Meanwhile out there in the real forest, nature has been burying a bunch of wood since before there was oil from buried plants. While estimates of the scale of the carbon cycle vary, suppose that it is reasonable to say humans produce 30 GT out of the 750 GT total. Is it then reasonable to say us throwing logs into a hole can dispose of 40% of all the emissions from factories, farms, land use and windbags? So if we get extra-busy with wood chips and toothpicks and tongue depressors and golf tees as well and bury enough to cover half of human emissions we’ll be at Net Zero? Anyone who thinks so does not realize how big the Earth is compared to, say, a tree.

Of course the Canadian government long claimed that by planting two billion of the things in a country that by itself is now estimated to contain over 300 billion it would fix the weather worldwide. Not that it could actually plant them. And while it could certainly talk, it apparently couldn’t really count, since adding 2 billion trees to 3 trillion of the things worldwide would not really make a discernible difference in their absorbing CO2, only to emit it again when they died unless someone or something came running up and buried them. But they couldn’t grasp that the planet is big and has a lot of trees. The scale problem again. (And speaking of scale, with most politicians we’re far from certain they could say off the cuff how many zeroes there are in a trillion even while adding one or more to their national debt.)

Scientific Communism urges us to panic calmly here:

“Humanity has only so much time to limit global warming and minimize the severity of future climate disasters. And with mostly tepid attempts to slash greenhouse gas emissions, researchers are scrambling for realistic ways to pull carbon out of the atmosphere.”

Confronted with “tepid attempts to slash” we cry “block that metaphor”. But realistic? Really?

You may have thought we were being sarcastic about wood chips. But the story actually does propose “collecting truckloads of logs, branches, wood chips and sawdust – and burying them”. And of course collecting a truckload of sawdust, loading it into the truck, driving it somewhere and having a guy in a backhoe dig a big pit and dumping it in won’t create emissions. Even if you collect so many that it changes the weather worldwide, which would take how many truck trips exactly?

Never you mind, because the payoff for getting to sawdust tipping points is evidently colossal:

“Wood burial, also called wood vaulting or biomass burial, could potentially store more than 12 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year and decrease global warming by more than a third of a degree Celsius (more than half a degree Fahrenheit), according to a recent study in Nature Geoscience. This difference sounds small, but preventing a few tenths of a degree of warming could keep polar ice caps from completely disintegrating, coral reefs from collapsing and other tipping points from triggering.”

Wow. A third of a degree. Actually it sounds small because it is small. Turn up (or down) your home thermostat by that massive amount and watch your relatives succumb to heatstroke, hypothermia or fury. Or indifference. But it could keep polar ice caps from “completely disintegrating” unless it doesn’t. And save the coral.

Obviously we have no way of knowing from proxies whether the temperature of the Earth surged massively by a third of a degree over a few decades repeatedly in the past without causing complete disintegration, or plunged by such an amount. But is nature so fragile that half a degree Fahrenheit could wipe out a widespread life form that clings to the hottest parts of the planet having evolved on a much warmer world? Or melt icecaps that have been there for millions of years?

Again we say that there’s no sense of scale here. Or sense of any sort. What happens when the wood rots?

Ah but it won’t. See they consulted “Ning Zeng, a University of Maryland climate scientist, who has been a leader in the field of biomass burial for two decades” and found that:

“If carbon dioxide is buried under just a few yards of dirt – where bacteria no longer have the oxygen they need to break down woody tissues – however, none or very little of it is released.”

Now once upon a time a publication then rightly called Scientific American would not have employed writers who called wood “carbon dioxide”. Or didn’t at least suspect that if carbon dioxide is buried under just a few yards of dirt it would leak right back out. Or asked whether, even if you bury wood thoroughly, is it clear that after you engaged in massive disturbance of soil there will be no biological activity. What about when you dig up the field next door?

Also, where are you going to put it all? How much space will it take to bury trees way better than nature does it? Many cities seem to be having trouble finding room for garbage landfills never mind forest after forest. Oh, and apparently it’s best to bury wood in clay soils. Massively disrupting certain ecosystems to save them, and running out and going say, plants are still rotting, blast that wretched nature.

Still, it’s all dead simple:

“There’s no reason to doubt the study’s math or methods, says Kevin Fingerman, a professor and carbon accounting expert at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt. But as the proposed technique gets implemented in the real world, practitioners would need to carefully and accurately calculate how much carbon their vaults have kept out of the atmosphere. This would involve assessing what the fate of the wood would have been without intervention – and that’s no trivial feat.”

Because something whose effects we don’t understand and can’t measure would be different from something else whose effects we don’t understand and can’t measure in ways we don’t understand and can’t measure. Carbon accounting expert says. Planet saved.

Or not, because then they tout a company in Colorado that buries forest-thinning debris to reduce fire risks, and:

“They claim that their first commercial project alone should prevent more than 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere, and they’ve got several more under development in the U.S. Mountain West and the Southeast.”

So quick: How many 100,000s in a giga? (Correct. Ten thousand. But it’s only a “could” anyway and doesn’t say “annually.”) Another startup, a phrase that gleams in the eye of climate alarmists but means “company not making money”, has “removed an estimated 5,000 tons of carbon in its first phase”. Woot.