Tree Counter Is Astonished By How Many Trees There Are

"Here is a pop quiz: How many trees are on the planet?"

"Most people have no idea."

"A new study says the answer is more than 3 trillion trees — that's trillion with a T, and that number is about eight times more than a previous estimate."

"Thomas Crowther was inspired to do this tree census a couple of years ago, when he was working at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. He had a friend who was working with a group with an ambitious goal: trying to fight global warming by planting a billion trees. A billion trees sounded like a lot. But was it really?"

"'They didn't know if planting a billion trees was going to add 1 percent of the world's trees, add 50 percent of the world's trees,' recalls Crowther. 'They didn't even know if it was even possible to fit a billion trees on Earth.'"