Counting Trees

THERE ARE APPROXIMATELY three point four trillion trees in the world, according to scientists, satellites, and computers. This is a recent estimate, and far exceeds anyone's previous guess. Most folks probably would've said something like, oh, half a billion. This huge number is surprising to most people, including the scientists who discovered it. So we have more trees, many more than we ever thought, which means we're out of the woods, so to speak, relieved of any threat of a tree shortage. Right? No more worries about rain forests or suburban expansion. We'll always have enough trees. Except for one thing. Recent research also strongly suggests that human beings, during their short time on earth, have cut down about half the original number of trees, and are losing about ten billion a year, even as we speak, net. So, perhaps we're not quite out of the woods yet, and may in fact be heading ever deeper into them, what there is left of them. You have to figure that if we replaced three and a half trillion trees, and got back up to seven tril, a lot of excess carbon now in the atmosphere would be eaten up, wouldn't you? Well, who knows...but we do know that carbon is tree food, and that for humanity to add a little extra carbon to the atmosphere probably makes things grow faster, as long as you don't add so much that we burn ourselves up climatically. So should we plant a trillion trees now? There is a tree planting organization which originally set its goal at planting a billion, but has now amended that to one trillion, in light of the new information. They might need a little help.