2006 roundup #19: We plant the trees that make the whole world sink

Everybody is planting trees to sequester carbon now: Carbonfund.org would plant one for being linked to; Ecoist plants one every time you buy a bag from them; you can click a Swedish site to save old growth forest there, and so forth.  There's even the Tree-Athalon, where you run 5 kilometers and then plant a tree.  Most notable, there's Treeflight, where you pay £10 extra to have Treeflight offset the carbon from your air travel.  But near the end of the year came a serious and disturbing question: does planting trees really work to offset carbon?  A new study showed it has a good chance of actually making things worse, because it traps heat.  Unsurprisingly, the best solution, as usual, is to stop being bad in the first place.  [GT]

Original stories: Planting trees may do more harm than good | Ecoist: the bag so nice we blogged it twice | Tuesday ecoblog roundup: Tree-athalon, National Eisteddfod, more | Click to save Swedish old growth forest | Make it a Treeflight