junk science from the Fringe, understanding tons of carbon

When I was in the 7th grade my science teacher told of an experiment going on while he was at university.  They wanted to learn where the weight of a tree came from.  A large tank was built, dirt was weighed dumped in and a tree was planted.  The tree growing in it's container would one day be pulled up and weighed, and the soil weighed again. Well, it had been years, they had yet to complete it so far as he knew.  We all imagined (with his prompting I suspect) the dirt became wood and so it might weigh less, it made sense since we were often told wood rots and returns to dirt one day.  

Today we know the imagined results has little to do with what happens.  What really happens is trees absorb a scarce few ounces of trace minerals and nutrients from the soil and carry them into the wood.  If we re-weigh the dirt in that container, it will be almost the weight as before.  So where did the mass of the tree come from?  

Carbon is a constant on earth, it’s total volume does not change.  What changes is where the carbon is.  The danger to us, to the planets current life forms and our current form of agriculture lies in where that carbon is getting to, where we are putting it.  

Carbon is the primary ingredient in plants and animals.  Science found the weight of that tree was (about) 90% carbon, 10% water. The weight and volume of the dirt it grew in did not change. If a storm blows down a big tree behind your house, and you leave it lay, slowly over the years it molders away. The water and the carbon are released during the rot and insect activity, released into the atmosphere. The tons the tree weighs, those tons of carbon, simply float away in the air.  A few spoonfuls of minerals remain; bugs and microbes wallow in the humus and build a little soil there, but the weight of the tree, the carbon, slowly floated off.  Now if the first winter after your tree fell, you cut it up and burn it, those tons of carbon are released right then by the flame, immediately into the atmosphere.  If the storm that fell the tree had instead been a landslide and the tree had been covered deep under ground, these tons of carbon would not have made it into the atmosphere for a long time, perhaps centuries, it may have become oil or coal holding the carbon millions of years.

When we dig up coal, oil, or natural gas, which were the trees meadows and animals of earlier biospheres and burn it in our car or power plant, we are taking that CO2 (carbon) from one place on earth, deep underground, and throwing it immediately into the atmosphere, tons and tons of it in an instant, all day, every day.  Most of this ends up in the atmosphere, the thin layer of balanced thermal and light wave protection system only 1/1000^th as thick of the diameter of earth, disrupting that balance.   The volume of CO2 hasn't changed, only it’s location and concentration, creating a greenhouse of rising temperature and chemical reaction disaster at the earth’s surface such as increase acidity of the seas.

The fact is, dirt does not become trees that become dirt again, dirt to dirt and ashes to ashes is not a true description of the natural world.  CO2 is taken in from the atmosphere by cell respiration of plants and resides there in forms that are useful to all life forms as they evolved up to now.  Since the industrial revolution, almost 200 years now, we have been releasing ever-increasing volumes of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses, at the same time clearing the earth of our best carbon storing plants.  Saving and replanting the world’s forests and tall grass prairie's, low till farming, non fossil fuel energy sources, more effective lighting and engines are the only way to halt the migration of CO2 from safe to dangerous locations. 

It's not easy to make sense of numbers which proclaim the car put out some tons of carbon, or the solar panel saved (prevented) as much.  Hopefully this is a start.  Better plant a tree now, carbon will build you a shade tree, tons of shade.