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I ran across this link and found it interresting. Remember that the results from one scientific study don't mean much untl they are duplicated but these results are noteworthy.
Trees

Depressing.

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Very interesting article Mike.

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I hope the 'less O2 output and less CO2 intake' does not result in an excuse to harvest these incredible trees. Brazil is a somewhat poor country and always looking for more products and the demand for this wood is tremendous.

The article didn't say which trees grew quickly and which grew slowly. The slow growth seems to be caused by soil and light conditions. A tree farm might be vialble because you can address those issues. I know with spruce that fast growing trees don't make very good tops. That may not be the case for rosewood.

Just because a tree is 700 years old doesn't mean that it has to take that long to grow to a reasonable size. Redwoods can grow to harvestable size in about 50 years even though they live for a thousand. I used to live in a redwood forest and there was a redwood in my yard that was 6 feet in diameter and over 200 feet tall. The area had been clearcut in the early 1900s. I have no idea what kind of tops it would have made, however.

Part of the problem too is that from what I've heard, radiocarbon dating can be extremely inaccurate. Sometimes it's spot on though. Don't quote me. Just repeating something I've heard.

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[QUOTE=Don Williams] Part of the problem too is that from what I've heard, radiocarbon dating can be extremely inaccurate. Sometimes it's spot on though. Don't quote me. Just repeating something I've heard.[/QUOTE]

If done well, it's very, very accurate. The confounders are well known, as a rule.

The only people I've see claim it isn't accurate is certified loonies (aka Young Earth Creationists) who know nothing about the science they're talking about 99.9% of the time.

They didn't go into their methods in the article but it took me several minutes to figure out how they could use radiocarbon dating on a tree that was recently cut down.

Living things take in carbon from the environment and incorporate it into their structure. The free carbon in the environment has a certain percentage of carbon 14. Once the organism dies, it stops taking in carbon 14. Carbon 14 decays at a known well-established rate. By measuring the percentage of carbon 12 to carbon 14, you can calculate the time since the organism died.

How then can this technique be used to date a tree that use recently cut down? My gess is that most of the wood in a tree is dead. Once you dry the wood and have only the celluose structure left you have carbon atoms that have the carbon 14/ carbon 12 ratio that reflects the age of that particular section of wood. You should be able to take samples from different areas of the tree and determine it's growth rate with the samples from the middle of the tree being the oldes. I don't know if that's what they actually did but it's how I would approach the problem.