Trees

Why almost all coal was made at the same time
I ran across the story of coal a while back and I meant to do something with it, but it didn't happen. Now we've got this big tree planting project and everybody and their brother are making videos about trees and this one pops up and it's got some science. So here we have the story of coal and I didn't have to do any work other than embed this video.

Given that there a zillion trees in the world already, I don't think another 20 million is going to make a big impact, but hey, it's not going to hurt. I mean, trees are good. Let them grow for a while and you can cut them down and use the wood for all kinds of useful things, like building houses or making fires to heat your house or cook your chicken dinner. I have a fir tree in my back yard that is 40 or 50 feet tall. It was maybe 8 feet tall when we planted it ten years ago. They grow fast. Problem is when we cut them down faster than they grow. But now I wonder, how many trees are lost to natural fires compared to the number cut down by people? We hear about these fires in California and the Pacific Northwest that consume zillions of acres of forest. And then we hear about how the Amazon rain forest is losing a zillion acres to people clearing land for crops. Talk about an army of ants. Which one wreaks more destruction?

Trees are made of hydrogen and carbon (hydrocarbons), but being as carbon outweighs hydrogen by a factor of 12 to one, you can say that trees are mostly carbon.