Wetlands Loss and Climate Change

Before Trump took office, I put together some quick and dirty supporting information on Reddit and then used that information to come up with ballpark figures:

Peatlands cover just 3 percent of the planet’s surface but they store about 30 percent of all land-based carbon, or twice as much as all of the world’s forests combined. Forests cover about 30 percent of the land and land is about 1/3 of the planet surface, so roughly 10 percent of the planet is covered with forests.

In order to restore the lost wetlands we had in the 1700s, we would need to multiply their coverage by 6.66. Mutiply the 30 percent of all land-based carbon peat currently stores by that figure and you get 200 percent. This should begin to make a difference in global warming.

Please do note that not all wetlands are peatlands. So that figure may be a tad optimistic, but I think I am on solid ground to suggest restoring wetlands will eventually do more to reverse human caused climate change than the oft promoted planting of trees.

The last time I tried to look up citations related to this, the Internet was feeding me a lot of propaganda that sounded to me like the Trump administration actively put out misinformation on this topic. 

You are free to think I'm a nutter and conspiracy theorist. I trust the figures I came up with before he took office more than the information I was able to find more recently.