Legacy Emissions and Ancient Welsh Tropical Forest

Map showing the location of all mines in the South Wales Coalfield

The carbon emissive technological model of development that has now been emulated by every single country in the world was invented right here. Basically an ancient fossilised tropical forest has been mined and the carbon that those trees absorbed (about 60 billion tonnes) has been released to the atmosphere.......The planet's tropical forests currently reabsorb around 20% of the 32 billion tonnes of carbon that our species produces every year so it makes sense to compensate for our carbon effluent legacy by planting trees and protecting forest in places like Kenya.

According to research conducted by the National Museum of Wales, the tropical forest that covered the globe 300 million years ago (which ultimately became the coal reserves such as those mapped above) was absorbing around 100 Billion tonnes of CO2 each year. This figure is more than 3 times higher than that for total annual human emissions so by simple maths we can deduce that if we had just a third of that original forest left, our problem would disappear....

Map showing the location (in green) of tropical 'coal' forest 300 million years ago

Note that at that time, Wales would have been right on the Equator. Since we can't put that carbon back in the ground as Welsh coal, we think the next best thing is to fix it in current day tropical forests such as those in Bore...