r/confidentlyincorrect • u/Maleficent-AE21 • 1d ago
Understanding photosynthesis, trees, and conservation of mass.
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u/Dreadnoughtus_2014 1d ago
Where does the carbon dioxide come from then, pray tell?
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u/soboga 1d ago
The trees CONSUME it, duh.
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u/Dreadnoughtus_2014 1d ago
The most like blatantly idiotic thing I've seen given how it doesn't even answer the question. Well played.
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u/Child_of_the_Hamster 1d ago
From the AIR, duh. 🙄 Which is obviously totally unrelated to the atmosphere.
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u/BigZucchini6032 1d ago
From the pantree!
I’ll see myself out.
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u/NickyTheRobot 1d ago edited 1d ago
No, you dunce! That's a tree what pans grow on.
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u/AaronTuplin 1d ago
All this talk of pans is getting me excited for later. Can't wait to cook dinner!
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u/NickyTheRobot 1d ago
Wait a minute... You're not one of them pansexuals I've heard about are you?
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u/AaronTuplin 1d ago
What a consenting adult does in the privacy of his own home is no one's business. But I am gonna make love to the chicken breast that I cook on the pan.
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u/NickyTheRobot 1d ago
All true.
I just wanted to say that if you are you probably want to give it a good 30m to cool off (unless you're into that).
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u/SarpedonWasFramed 1d ago
I assume your joking but they get it from tree vending machines, Tree Dash etc. I was homeschooled by an illiterate schizophrenic and even I was taught that.
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u/NickyTheRobot 1d ago edited 1d ago
OK, I get your reply was a joke. But I think this is too cool a point not to share:
Trees in old enough woodlands will have a mycelial network linking them at their roots (and linking all other rooted plants in the area as well). Although from what I understand the plants get all their CO2 from the atmosphere, they will trade with other plants of both the same and different species for micronutrients using the mycelium as a broker. Some of the scientists studying these sorts of forest fungal networks, as well as the exchanges of nutrients and information it enables, have started to call it "the Wood Wide Web" for its resemblance to our internet communications (and for the pun).
Tl:dr; They don't get it from Tree Dash, they get it from treeBay.
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u/SarpedonWasFramed 1d ago
Yeah fungi are amazing. Everytime I hear about it I learn it does something else cool.
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u/UnhappyCaterpillar41 1d ago
From outside the environment, the same place they towed that ship to after the front fell off, DUH.
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u/TFANOverride08 1d ago
Took the words out of my mouth. Someone doesn’t understand the basics of air.
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u/cheeseybees 1d ago
I thought (maybe i'm wrong?) that they still respire... so taking in Oxygen, and breathe out CO2... and that photosynthesis is a different mechanism that extracts CO2 from the air and produces O2
Pretty sure I read somewhere that some trees can take around a decade to grow to the point where they become net extractors of CO2?
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u/NickyTheRobot 1d ago edited 1d ago
You are correct, but unless a photosynthesising plant is killed when it's ridiculously young it will end up consuming far more CO2 through photosynthesis than it produces through respiration over it's whole lifetime.
EDIT: And vice versa for O2; it will create more than it will consume.
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u/Maleficent-AE21 1d ago
Yes, all plants do that. However, over time, the net is more CO2 is taken out of the atmosphere, and more O2 is out into the atmosphere (while the tree is still alive). Trees are still carbon based life form, and as they grow, carbon is needed to construct their cells. The main place to get carbon is from the atmosphere, and no where else come close.
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u/Cynykl 21h ago
When I was young I assumed they extracted their mass mostly through their root system. Then one day it occurred to me that to do that they would be creating sinkholes for themselves.
I wonder if OOP thinks trees are taking it from the ground?
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u/Gunnilinux 8h ago
Veritasium did a video about that since it does seem so counter intuitive. But then if you remember a potted plant cn get quit large, it makes more sense.
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u/Bl00dWolf 1d ago
It's a bit more complicated that that. While plants do breathe out CO2 AND take in CO2 during photosynthesis. The amount in takes in is way larger than the amount it breather out. In fact, most of that CO2 ends up in the plant itself. It's why plants burn when they're set on fire. It's that same C that came from CO2 that's now being released back into the atmosphere again.
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u/cheeseybees 1d ago
Yeah, like... they build their bodies from the carbon they bring in... I think? :)
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u/Echo__227 1d ago
Most life generates the energy to life by oxidizing the carbon from organic molecules, including trees.
What's unique about photosynthesis is that they also create new organic molecules (reduced carbon) from CO2 (carbon fixation) from free sunlight.
Biomass relies on having lots of organic molecules available. Whereas animals need to eat organic molecules both for energy and new mass, plants generate their biomass entirely from the CO2 in the air (with the exception of parasitic plants and such). That means any amount of living plant biomass is a net reducer of atmospheric CO2: the sugars it burns to live simply return what was taken from the air, and the rest becomes part of the growth.
However, because plants die and decompose, we have to think about, "How much CO2 is in plant or other photosynthetic organism biomass at any one time?" That's where calculating total carbon sequestration is important because it conversely means "How much less carbon is in the air at any one time?" Forests are a great way to sequester carbon because trees are massive and long-lived. All coal in the world represents carbon sequestered in the Carboniferous period that was then buried for a long time. However, by far the greatest carbon sequestration is in oceanic algae and the processes that cause dead algae to be buried on the ocean floor (where all the oil in the world came from). This is what ecological scientists such as marine biologists dedicate a lot of effort to researching: how we can prevent disrupting the protective carbon sequestration of the natural world.
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u/eloel- 1d ago
Life on earth is made mostly by carbon (and water) in various forms. That carbon mostly comes from the CO2 used by photosynthesis, and is passed up the food chain to all life.
Vast majority of plants don't quite have a way of eating other things with carbon, so the carbon that they give off has to have come from their own photosynthesis.
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u/LoneSnark 1d ago
When they're super young, they have no leaves for photosynthesis, so they rely upon the energy stored in the seed/nut that spawned them, turning that into CO2 and energy.
But their seed/nut was created from CO2 by their parent. It isn't like they are created from oil/coal.1
u/Sealedwolf 1d ago
They do. Usually that's not a problem, but with algea in an eutrophic lake they can consume so much oxygen overnight that animals might asphyxiate.
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u/Hattkake 1d ago
They eat the CO2 through the dirt with their root mouths then? I don't get it.
<goes googling>
Hold the phone, trees absorb carbon dioxide through the underside of the leaf!? So during winter trees are just freeloading slackers!? I knew it! Trees are bastards!
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u/NickyTheRobot 1d ago
So during winter trees are just freeloading slackers!?
Not the coniferous ones.
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u/Hattkake 1d ago
True. Pines and firs are ok. They're a prickly bunch though.
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u/Magenta_Logistic 1d ago
Much like humans, trees can be divided into two groups: the lazy ones, and the pricks.
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u/zeroaegis 1d ago
How does one person believe both halves of this statement at the same time. How does that even work?
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u/Seldarin 1d ago
I mean, what he says is almost true for nitrogen, but I'm not willing to give him credit for knowing that since he most likely doesn't, and it certainly isn't something you'd learn in the 2nd grade.
Nitrogen is 78% of the atmosphere, and they absorb it through their roots because the stuff floating around in the air is too much of a pain in the ass to absorb. Nitrogen fixing bacteria pull it from the air and dump it in the soil, where the trees absorb it.
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u/Tripleberst 22h ago
Both statements are actually mostly true. They don't technically consume carbon dioxide, so "fully extracting carbon dioxide" is also not technically what they do. The part that people care about is that they consume the carbon in carbon dioxide and release oxygen from the CO2 bond.
It's a slightly semantic way to describe it but it's not really wrong.
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u/gin_kgo 1d ago
Is the carbon dioxide in the room with us? 🙄
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u/CaptainKortan 1d ago
Trees consume carbon dioxide from the carbon dioxide store, of course.
Unless they have a bit more money than others, then they have it delivered.
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u/cikanman 1d ago
the first two statements are correct.
people ARE getting dumb and trees DO consume carbon dioxide.
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u/Kylearean 1d ago
And they also produce carbon dioxide, just less than it consumes over time.
The CO2 consumed comes from the atmosphere.
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u/Vibingcarefully 1d ago
I'm not seeing a problem--water comes from the faucet.
food comes from the supermarket.
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u/tenuj 1d ago
Maybe a little known fact, but the oxygen produced by photosynthesis doesn't come from carbon dioxide. It comes from the water that's also needed in photosynthesis. All the oxygen from the carbon dioxide goes into the carbohydrates AFAIK.
I know it doesn't really matter which atoms are which (unless the air or water was highly radioactive), but I still had to share this useless fact with everybody.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-dependent_reactions
So photosynthesis turns water into oxygen by taking away the hydrogen. Yeah...
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u/Psychological_Tap187 1d ago
Omg. That whole thread was an bsolute study in moron. I read through it and lost brain cells. Dude could just not comprehend trees consum and trees extract carbon dioxide is the same thing.
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u/Maleficent-AE21 1d ago
It's amazing you found it the original thread. I tried to read through it and I just can't after a while.
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u/Psychological_Tap187 1d ago
I was slumming over on fb before I came here and saw it. Then this post was one of the first reddit posts on my feed
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u/Barl3000 1d ago
"This thing doesnt work like that, except it works exactly like that. Other people are stupid"
🤔
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u/SaturnusDawn 1d ago
Freeloader trees are stealing our carbon dioxide!!! 😠😠😠 Where are the woke sjw's now huh /s
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u/AelixD 1d ago
TBF, when I was going through grade school, the focus was the oxygen cycle, and nobody really mentioned what was happening to the carbon. I was out of high school for 25 years before I really connected where the carbon went.
I grew up thinking plants get their mass from the soil (because we always talk about the nutrients). Then I read a short paragraph stating that plants get more mass from the air than the ground, and it suddenly clicked.
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u/besee2000 1d ago
Doesn’t know the definition of extract? Extra CT? Trees don’t perform CT’s why would they do extra ones?
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u/WittyAndOriginal 1d ago
I just want to add that trees are not a good long term solution. As they decay they release ALL of the CO2 back into the atmosphere.
It's analogous to putting a bucket under a leaking pipe. Sure, it's a bandaid, but the water doesn't actually go anywhere permanently.
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u/lofgren777 17h ago
Trees live for dozens to hundreds of years and then take a loooooong time to decay. Like, hundreds to thousands of years. I don't know what your definition of "long term" is, but suffice to say if you're planning on a longer term than it takes a tree to grow up, die, and decompose, then you are planning on a longer term than anybody else cares about.
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u/MasterExploder9900 1d ago
Wait till he finds out our atmosphere is made up of Nitrogen, oxygen, argon and CO2
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u/ancient_mariner63 1d ago
Most of the oxygen, something like 50-70%, in our atmosphere is produced by the algae and plankton in the oceans.
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u/PMG2021a 1d ago
Maybe he was thinking of nitrogen, which I had read is usually obtained through the roots after being "fixed" by bacteria.
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u/Gruntzilla059 5h ago
Trees do consume carbon dioxide and replace with oxygen, but technically no carbon is extracted on average from the environment. When a tree dies or is cut down, eventually the carbon is reintroduced into the atmosphere from rot or burning. If there was no fungus or you sequestered the trees deep underground after they grew you could capture the carbon before it was released again.
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u/lofgren777 17h ago
They put the oxygen back, so they actually only extract the carbon from the atmosphere.
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