Many people give themselves permission to discuss things that are mere smatterers about.

Plants live in synergy with an underground ecology, loosely described as the microherd. Up to 40%, or more, of the sunlight of photosynthesis is transferred to the underground, never to see the light of day again for millions of years.

Plants typically use feeder roothairs so thin you may not even see them. Up to 7 miles of root hairs was once counted on a single rye plant decades ago, yet this knowledge still has made it to the public attention.

These roothairs are rapidly expended and shed, whereupon a myriad of microbe species (over 5,000 species per teaspoon of soil, over 10 billion individual living beings in a gram), consume and transform it into living tissues.

The CO2 contents in active living soil may be 50 times greater than in the air.

CO2 is rapidly absorbed in water and much of it sinks into the subterranean aquifiers. Drops of this carbonic water make limestones and in caves they make stagtites and stalagmites.

Mature forests have deeper rooted and more robust root networks which sink more carbon below than they store above. Trees are a thin veneer over a carbon husk. The active sequestration may be 300 to 1000 years of carbon storage, and much of the detritus will also end up buried and sunk.

The "common knowledge" has been widely manipulated to foster tree farming by the Dept of AGRICULTURE in charge of National Forest tree farms. The revolving door of industry-managers of the Ag-Dept means the constant stream of industry bias disinformation that young trees store more carbon than mature forests.

Mature forests are at equilbrium in regards to their CO2 expenditures: that is they do not give off any nor do they take in any. The young forests accrue carbon at fairly fast rates. Thus, while technically both sinks (and here I am moving to an analogy), the analogy would be that mature forests are full sinks, while there is still room for water (carbon) in the young forests.

Cutting down old-growth or mature forests is like taking the sink container away and spilling the liquid (CO2) away. Soils may contain plenty of carbon but the majority do not store it for thousands of years, more like days. The exception is boreal forests and bogs, where there is continuous peat accumulation. The problem here is as the temperatures heat up, these soils heat up too, speeding up the decomposition process and actually making these sinks sources.

So young forests accrue more carbon than mature ones, despite the fact that mature ones may store more. So, in other words, forests may be used as a carbon sink if managed properly. Wood is good.