Tree hugging nonsense, election special

The election falls even further into farce today. It truly is an election special.

Labour announce they are going to plant 2 billion trees, the Lib Dems 30 million and Tories 20 million.

What is the point of all this and why have none of them thought anything through, I see Guido already had a stab at this but has got a few bits wrong, so here we go:

A) You need 45 trees to store one ton of carbon dioxide, of course this is only store so you can't go cutting them down again.

B) The UK carbon output is is 367,000,000 tons per year according to the UK Government estimates (down 38% in 10 years, which is rather impressive, almost entirely down to swtiching coal for gas power stations).

C) So you would needs 16,515,000,000 trees to make the UK carbon neutral.

So two billion trees will balance off about 12.5% of our current carbon output, at the usual density for tree planting of 2000 trees per hectare, that gives us about 1 million hectares needed - about 5 times the size of greater London or half of Wales.

The Government, including all property and building, only owns about 6 times the size of London in property.In addition, tree don't grow all over the mountains of Wales or Scotland so vast areas of wilderness you can't turn to forest. 

So for Labour, they would have to buy huge amounts of private land and return it to forest. As well as the army that would be needed to do all this planting - tens of thousands of full time people for decades. .

If you actually wanted to make the UK carbon neutral, the simpler and more realistic plan would be to buy Ireland which is quite flat, at 8.5 million hectares, and turn it all into a forest. This would make the UK carbon neutral.

For crying out loud this is so stupid. Esepcially when thanks to climate change and more CO2 more trees are going to grow anyway. Also there are actually some quite good ideas like planting billions of trees across Africa to stop the spread of the Sahara - trees are needed unlike the UK where we need arable land to feed oursleves and live in.

Logical failures when discussing the weather

Watching the terrible Hurricane season in the Caribbean has not been a lot of fun. Lovely island cities and cultures face ruin and the support is both hard to send and it needs to be plentiful. I wrote a piece last week showing how heartless some are and I read this week too that apparently these countries are too rich for aid.


What exactly is the logic in that?


I earn money and become rich, I buy a house, I invest all my money in it, the house is destroyed and I have no insurance. My money was the house, ergo I am no longer rich.


The logic of saying you are too rich to help clearly can't apply when a country is destroyed. Has no one recalled the Marshall Plan or the Berlin airlift? Bureaucracies are stupid, another reason to have less involvement with grandiose international institutions.


Then, following on from yesterday's post, I have spoken to quite a few people keen to opine that the Hurricane season this year is worse due to climate change. That as maybe, however their evidence is that this is a once-in-a-hundred-year event. Which, by definition means that it happened around a hundred years ago, before climate change. Where is the logic in their arguments? It would only make sense if this was the worst weather event ever or if it was now more frequent that in the past - that would be logic (and, neither of those statements it true as yet).


Who else has good current examples?