The climate change denial industry

[wintler2]

Fake Anonymous video - Anti-carbon tax message woven into occupywallst message.

"Anonymous-To-The-People-Of-Australia"
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrSyzdbrE1U&feature=share [/youtube]

[Iamwhomiam]

Sad, really, that you posted that lame article Ben D.

The namecalling has to stop
It’s absurd self-satire when mere sociologists and journalists casually call Nobel Physics Prize winners: Deniers? These “deniers” are guys who figured out things like tunneling electrons in superconductors. Just because they won a Nobel doesn’t make them right, but wouldn’t a true investigative reporter’s curiosity pique a little as skepticism rose and rose? Isn’t there a moment when it occurs to any open mind that it might be a good idea to actually phone up a NASA astronaut who walked on the moon and has spoken out as a skeptic and ask: Why?

No one with any sense at all has called the Nobel Laureate in Physics referred to here a climate change denier, agw or otherwise. He simply said he could not agree with the majority of climate scientists, members of the American Physical Society, because of one single word they chose to use: "incontrovertible." That the science on global warming is inarguable.

He is an admitted skeptic.

"Please see the statement from the American Physical Society where it is stated: The evidence is incontrovertible..."

Really foolish to go to veterinarian to seek help for a medical problem you might have, probably a bit more foolish to seek an understanding of climate science from a physicist who is a nerdy computer mathematician.

And searcher, as wintler has said, all words are labels. Speaking of "sneering, mocking or self-righteous indignation," do you not realize how very foolish your post is? You hear someone tag a label of "denier" on someone and immediately you label them with your own unique and offensive labels? What's up with that?

[Searcher08]

Sad, really, that you posted that lame article Ben D.

The namecalling has to stop
It’s absurd self-satire when mere sociologists and journalists casually call Nobel Physics Prize winners: Deniers? These “deniers” are guys who figured out things like tunneling electrons in superconductors. Just because they won a Nobel doesn’t make them right, but wouldn’t a true investigative reporter’s curiosity pique a little as skepticism rose and rose? Isn’t there a moment when it occurs to any open mind that it might be a good idea to actually phone up a NASA astronaut who walked on the moon and has spoken out as a skeptic and ask: Why?

No one with any sense at all has called the Nobel Laureate in Physics referred to here a climate change denier, agw or otherwise. He simply said he could not agree with the majority of climate scientists, members of the American Physical Society, because of one single word they chose to use: "incontrovertible." That the science on global warming is inarguable.

He is an admitted skeptic.

"Please see the statement from the American Physical Society where it is stated: The evidence is incontrovertible..."

Really foolish to go to veterinarian to seek help for a medical problem you might have, probably a bit more foolish to seek an understanding of climate science from a physicist who is a nerdy computer mathematician.

And searcher, as wintler has said, all words are labels. Speaking of "sneering, mocking or self-righteous indignation," do you not realize how very foolish your post is? You hear someone tag a label of "denier" on someone and immediately you label them with your own unique and offensive labels? What's up with that?

I neither sneered, nor mocked nor felt indignation - you can check the basis of that by having a look at the guardian.co.uk site. Have a look at the quality of the exchanges around the subject of global warming - and ask yourself whether labelling advances it or not.

Being able to respond is a matter of distinctions - being able to distinguish "snow that means you have to build an igloo NOW" from "snow you can sit on and drink beer as you ice fish" is about engaging with what is happening. It is not a label, which is a description, it's an executive concept - you see the type of snow then starts igloo building stat.

What I see is a bun fight between two sides.

There is a sub-set of the scientific establishment that 'knows best' for the rest of us. My concern about THAT is that there is already a well funded, highly organised, pseudoskeptic campaign to have ALL science shown on UK TV (and all POLICY related to that) be what THEY describe as "evidence based".

There is a subset of the anti-climate change people who are clearly in the pocket of Big Oil. There is also a section of business which is just trying it on, because - like cfc replacement, it will cost them.

There is a great saying
"Proof is often nothing more than a lack of imagination"

Just because a set of scientists think something, does that mean we HAVE to follow their instructions?

[JackRiddler]

.

Let's just put those two graphics in a single post for a direct comparison. Hm, does one look more constructed, less specific about names and direct relationships, more squishy and paranoid than the other?

Organized Climate Change Denial “Played a Crucial Role in Blocking Domestic Legislation,” Top Scholars Conclude

Map: The Climate Change Scare Machine — the perpetual self-feeding cycle of alarm

Spoilers ahead...











....










....

There's no doubt, sorry. The second contains patent big-lie elements. Without research or solid evidence, every company on earth that happens to produce energy by a means other than burning hydrocarbons is put down as the financers of propaganda for anthropogenic climate change research. (This is actually true of the nuclear industry, by the way, as the one form of energy production that may be more suicidal on a massive scale than burning hydrocarbons; but otherwise it's a laundry list.) Most of the listings are based on (falsely) assumed benefit, rather than actual positions taken. I can also make a list of the big financial houses, and claim they must be financing this or that because I figure they would, but it doesn't make it so. Hm, does Wall Street make more money off its centuries-long close symbiotic relationship with the oil industry, or does it stand to maybe make more off speculating in carbon trading? And even granting their intent to derive dodgy profits from the latter, as they do with everything else in the world, it doesn't say a thing about the causes of climate change.

.

[JackRiddler]

The thing about the pro-hydrocarbon fuel faction (which, let's face it, is effectively what they are) that most annoys me, including among those on this board [EDIT: NOT EVERYONE HERE!], and that really betrays them as "talking points" sophists, is the obsessive focus on lone details and selected targets of ridicule to the exclusion of the big and obvious.

Half of the primary forests gone, 2/3 of the fisheries seem to be depleted, 1/4 of coral reefs dead, species extinction at 1000 times the background rate, Texas-size dead patch of plastic garbage growing in the Pacific, dead ocean patches around the world, 100 calories of oil consumed for each calorie of meat produced and even the IEA is tacitly admitting the depletion of oil reserves in this century, nine billion people as the best-case for population stabilizing assuming no die-off, 100,000 new and untested synthetic substances introduced to the environment in the last century, most megalopoli under suffocating smog caps, water tables dropping and deserts growing for the very well-understood reason that we're tapping the aquifers too much, one in ten major rivers so reduced by consumption they are no longer above the surface the whole year round, AND these huge glacial recessions and the polar ice cap melting to open up the Northwest Passage. And most of all this is thanks to the production of war, superfluous junk, inefficiencies and externalizations that aren't priced, and too much meat. And most of this was accomplished in the last 50 years as the world population tripled and Americans' per capita oil consumption went up by two-thirds. But apparently that was coincidental because, after all, the sun has its phases too and it's downright anti-humanist to imply we little plucky free divine humans could ever do too much harm to the weather, or the biosphere.

The climate sophists never address the overdetermined facts of ongoing global catastrophe that will cause a die-off of billions if we cannot collectively (gasp!) address questions of production and consumption on this planet and get control of the Western-style "way of life." I've repeated the above incomplete litany of undeniable catastrophes a few times, and they don't respond to it. They just keep their Aspergian focus on temperature. If due to the number of unknowns that go into global temperature the thermometers don't respond exactly as climate scientists have predicted, the sophists will pop their champagne corks and the better-funded professional talking heads among them will get time on every channel to crow about how "the Goracle" was wrong. Never mind that global catastrophe is still guaranteed without radical changes. Never mind that required change number one is still - exactly as the climate scientists would have it - an across-the-board reduction of energy use and replacement of hydrocarbons with renewables.* Never mind that the fish and rivers and aquifers and forests still will disappear if we don't change the rate of their consumption. If the world really were to blow up, still the sophists would point to a chart that shows the Arctic ice cap was slightly bigger this year than last, so everything is fine folks: don't do anything rash, keep "growing" your economies, raising your oil consumption and making lots and lots of babies. Which is the implicit message, even if they rarely let it peek through.

---

* Number two in my opinion would be the related money measures: cancellation of all Third World debt and the socialization of capital, meaning the big banks state-owned and the little ones owned by communities and cooperatives, with democratic mechanisms for choosing management and flexibly planning economies for sustainability.

The end of the debt would close the chapter on imperialism and give these countries the means to return as much as possible to food self-sufficiency as the first priority, with monocultures for markets only if the surplus is there and it's ecologically sustainable. As for farming in the West, no one says convert to full small-scale organic farming overnight and let a billion people starve (another common canard). Just start switching the subsidies that way, and while you still continue as needed to enrich the soil with oil to produce mountains of grain, you can at least stop feeding most of that grain to cows and gas tanks.

Or maybe "number two" is an immediate set of world and regional conferences called by the Only Superpower That Still Has A Chance To Do This to effect universal military disarmament in all regions and a shut-down of the international arms trade, in turn freeing two Pentagon budgets (the one in the US, and the one of all the other countries put together) for productive investment. Could this country actually use its position for good in the world, just once?

Or maybe it's an immediate end to the war on drugs and thus of every form of corrupt industry and finance that relies on it.

None of this radical. Or even that hard. It's merely unthinkable.

[Elihu]

fyi: i'm a sincere critic of established climate science... i think the lack of good research on cloud-vegetation coupling

sometimes the science is bad

(ecology isn't a real science you see, it resists %$&@# quantification)

sometimes there is no science.

has created a big hole in theoretical and numeric climate models. But existing models still do an amazing job of matching

but sometimes the science applied to a non-science yields reliable results

what has and is happening.

see what i mean?

since we all seem to agree bad things are going on are those of us who want to address the "growthist suicide cult" instead of nationalizing the machinery bad fellow travelers?

[JackRiddler]

.

Let's see what the Soros-funded media has to say this month.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/01/scien ... nted=print

October 1, 2011

With Deaths of Forests, a Loss of Key Climate Protectors

By JUSTIN GILLIS

WISE RIVER, Mont. — The trees spanning many of the mountainsides of western Montana glow an earthy red, like a broadleaf forest at the beginning of autumn.

But these trees are not supposed to turn red. They are evergreens, falling victim to beetles that used to be controlled in part by bitterly cold winters. As the climate warms, scientists say, that control is no longer happening.

Across millions of acres, the pines of the northern and central Rockies are dying, just one among many types of forests that are showing signs of distress these days.

From the mountainous Southwest deep into Texas, wildfires raced across parched landscapes this summer, burning millions more acres. In Colorado, at least 15 percent of that state’s spectacular aspen forests have gone into decline because of a lack of water.

The devastation extends worldwide. The great euphorbia trees of southern Africa are succumbing to heat and water stress. So are the Atlas cedars of northern Algeria. Fires fed by hot, dry weather are killing enormous stretches of Siberian forest. Eucalyptus trees are succumbing on a large scale to a heat blast in Australia, and the Amazon recently suffered two “once a century” droughts just five years apart, killing many large trees.

Experts are scrambling to understand the situation, and to predict how serious it may become.

Scientists say the future habitability of the Earth might well depend on the answer. For, while a majority of the world’s people now live in cities, they depend more than ever on forests, in a way that few of them understand.

Scientists have figured out — with the precise numbers deduced only recently — that forests have been absorbing more than a quarter of the carbon dioxide that people are putting into the air by burning fossil fuels and other activities. It is an amount so large that trees are effectively absorbing the emissions from all the world’s cars and trucks.

Without that disposal service, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be rising faster. The gas traps heat from the sun, and human emissions are causing the planet to warm.

Yet the forests have only been able to restrain the increase, not halt it. And some scientists are increasingly worried that as the warming accelerates, trees themselves could become climate-change victims on a massive scale.

“At the same time that we’re recognizing the potential great value of trees and forests in helping us deal with the excess carbon we’re generating, we’re starting to lose forests,” said Thomas W. Swetnam, an expert on forest history at the University of Arizona.

While some of the forests that died recently are expected to grow back, scientists say others are not, because of climate change.

If forests were to die on a sufficient scale, they would not only stop absorbing carbon dioxide, they might also start to burn up or decay at such a rate that they would spew huge amounts of the gas back into the air — as is already happening in some regions. That, in turn, could speed the warming of the planet, unlocking yet more carbon stored in once-cold places like the Arctic.

Scientists are not sure how likely this feedback loop is, and they are not eager to find out the hard way.

“It would be a very different world than the world we’re in,” said Christopher B. Field, an ecologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science.

It is clear that the point of no return has not been reached yet — and it may never be. Despite the troubles of recent years, forests continue to take up a large amount of carbon, with some regions, including the Eastern United States, being especially important as global carbon absorbers.

“I think we have a situation where both the ‘forces of growth’ and the ‘forces of death’ are strengthening, and have been for some time,” said Oliver L. Phillips, a prominent tropical forest researcher with the University of Leeds in England. “The latter are more eye-catching, but the former have in fact been more important so far.”

Scientists acknowledge that their attempts to use computers to project the future of forests are still crude. Some of those forecasts warn that climate change could cause potentially widespread forest death in places like the Amazon, while others show forests remaining robust carbon sponges throughout the 21st century.

“We’re not completely blind, but we’re not in good shape,” said William R. L. Anderegg, a researcher at Stanford University.

Many scientists say that ensuring the health of the world’s forests requires slowing human emissions of greenhouse gases. Most nations committed to doing so in a global environmental treaty in 1992, yet two decades of negotiations have yielded scant progress.

In the near term, experts say, more modest steps could be taken to protect forests. One promising plan calls for wealthy countries to pay those in the tropics to halt the destruction of their immense forests for agriculture and logging.

But now even that plan is at risk, for lack of money. Other strategies, like thinning overgrown forests in the American West to make them more resistant to fire and insect damage, are also going begging in straitened times. With growing economic problems and a Congress skeptical of both climate science and new spending, chances for additional funding appear remote.

So, even as potential solutions to forest problems languish, signs of trouble build.

In the 1990s, many of the white spruce trees of Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula were wiped out by beetles. For more than a decade, other beetle varieties have been destroying trees across millions of acres of western North America. Red-hued mountainsides have become a familiar sight in a half-dozen states, including Montana and Colorado, as well as British Columbia in Canada.

Researchers refer to events like these as forest die-offs, and they have begun to document what appears to be a rising pattern of them around the world. Only some have been directly linked to global warming by scientific studies; many have yet to be analyzed in detail. Yet it is clear that hotter weather, of the sort that science has long predicted as a consequence of human activity, is playing a large role.

Many scientists had hoped that serious forest damage would not set in before the middle of the 21st century, and that people would have time to get emissions of heat-trapping gases under control before then. Some of them have been shocked in recent years by what they are seeing.

“The amount of area burning now in Siberia is just startling — individual years with 30 million acres burned,” Dr. Swetnam said, describing an area the size of Pennsylvania. “The big fires that are occurring in the American Southwest are extraordinary in terms of their severity, on time scales of thousands of years. If we were to continue at this rate through the century, you’re looking at the loss of at least half the forest landscape of the Southwest.”

The Carbon Dioxide Mystery

In the 1950s, when a scientist named Charles David Keeling first obtained accurate measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a mystery presented itself. Only about half the carbon that people were releasing into the sky seemed to be staying there. It took scientists decades to figure out where the rest was going. The most comprehensive estimates on the role of forests were published only a few weeks ago by an international team of scientists.

As best researchers can tell, the oceans are taking up about a quarter of the carbon emissions arising from human activities. That is causing the sea to become more acidic and is expected to damage marine life over the long run, perhaps catastrophically. But the chemistry is at least somewhat predictable, and scientists are reasonably confident the oceans will continue absorbing carbon for many decades.

Trees are taking up a similar amount of carbon, but whether this will continue is much less certain, as the recent forest damage illustrates.

Carbon dioxide is an essential part of the cycle of life on Earth, but geologic history suggests that too much can cause the climate to warm sharply. With enough time, the chemical cycles operating on the planet have a tendency to bury excess carbon.

In the 19th century, humans discovered the usefulness of some forms of buried carbon — coal, oil and natural gas — as a source of energy, and have been perturbing the natural order ever since. About 10 billion tons of carbon are pouring into the atmosphere every year from the combustion of fossil fuels and the destruction of forests.

The concentration of the gas in the atmosphere has jumped 40 percent since the Industrial Revolution, and scientists fear it could double or even triple this century, with profound consequences.

While all types of plants absorb carbon dioxide, known as CO2, most of them return it to the atmosphere quickly because their vegetation decays, burns or is eaten. Every year, during the Northern Hemisphere growing season, plants and other organisms inhale some 120 billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere, then exhale nearly the same amount as they decay in the winter.

It is mainly trees that have the ability to lock carbon into long-term storage, and they do so by making wood or transferring carbon into the soil. The wood may stand for centuries inside a living tree, and it is slow to decay even when the tree dies.

But the carbon in wood is vulnerable to rapid release. If a forest burns down, for instance, much of the carbon stored in it will re-enter the atmosphere.

Destruction by fires and insects is a part of the natural history of forests, and in isolation, such events would be no cause for alarm. Indeed, despite the recent problems, the new estimate, published Aug. 19 in the journal Science, suggests that when emissions from the destruction of forests are subtracted from the carbon they absorb, they are, on balance, packing more than a billion tons of carbon into long-term storage every year.

One major reason is that forests, like other types of plants, appear to be responding to the rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by growing more vigorously. The gas is, after all, the main food supply for plants. Scientists have been surprised in recent years to learn that this factor is causing a growth spurt even in mature forests, a finding that overturned decades of ecological dogma.

Climate-change contrarians tend to focus on this “fertilization effect,” hailing it as a boon for forests and the food supply. “The ongoing rise of the air’s CO2 content is causing a great greening of the Earth,” one advocate of this position, Craig D. Idso, said at a contrarian meeting in Washington in July.

Dr. Idso and others assert that this effect is likely to continue for the foreseeable future, ameliorating any negative impacts on plant growth from rising temperatures. More mainstream scientists, while stating that CO2 fertilization is real, are much less certain about the long-term effects, saying that the heat and water stress associated with climate change seem to be making forests vulnerable to insect attack, fires and many other problems.

“Forests take a century to grow to maturity,” said Werner A. Kurz, a Canadian scientist who is a leading expert on forest carbon. “It takes only a single extreme climate event, a single attack by insects, to interrupt that hundred-year uptake of carbon.”

It is possible the recent die-backs will prove transitory — a coincidence, perhaps, that they all occurred at roughly the same time. The more troubling possibility, experts said, is that the die-offs might prove to be the leading edge of a more sweeping change.

“If this were happening in just a few places, it would be easier to deny and write off,” said David A. Cleaves, senior adviser for the United States Forest Service. “But it’s not. It’s happening all over the place. You’ve got to say, gee, what is the common element?”

Tracking an Ebb and Flow

So far, humanity has been lucky. While some forests are starting to release more carbon than they take up, that effect continues to be outweighed by forests that pack carbon away. Whether those healthy forests will predominate over coming decades, or will become sick themselves, is simply unclear.

The other day, deep in a healthy New England thicket of oaks, maples and hemlocks, two young men scrambled around on their hands and knees measuring twigs and sticks that had fallen from the trees.

“What was the diameter on that?” asked Jakob Lindaas, a Harvard student holding a pencil and clipboard.

Leland K. Werden, a researcher at the university, called out a metric measurement, and they moved to the next twig. It was one of thousands they would eventually have to measure as part of an effort to tell how fast the wood, knocked off the trees in an ice storm in 2008, was decaying.

The debris they were cataloging would not have struck a hiker as anything to notice, much less measure, but the Harvard Forest, 3,000 acres near Petersham, Mass., is one of the world’s most intensively studied patches of woods. The work the men were doing will become a small contribution toward solving one of the biggest accounting problems of modern science.

In every forest, carbon is constantly being absorbed as trees and other organisms grow, then released as they die or go dormant. These carbon fluxes, as they are called, vary through the day. They vary with seasons, with climate and weather extremes, with the health of the forests and with many other factors. Across the world, scientists are struggling to track and understand this ebb and flow.

A 100-foot tower stands in the middle of the Harvard Forest, studded with instruments. Put up in 1989, it was the first permanent tower of its kind in the world, built to help track the carbon fluxes. Now hundreds of them dot the planet.

Meticulous measurements over the decades have established that the Harvest Forest is gaining weight, roughly two tons per acre per year, on average. It is characteristic of a type of forest that is playing a big role in limiting the damage from human carbon emissions: a recovering forest.

Not so long ago, the land was not a forest at all. Close to where the men were working stood an old stone fence, a telltale sign of the land’s history.

“When the European colonists came to America, they saw trees, and they wanted fields and pastures,” explained J. William Munger, a Harvard research fellow who was supervising the measurements. So the colonists chopped down the original forest and built farmhouses, barns, paddocks and sturdy stone fences.

By the mid-19th century, the Erie Canal and the railroads had opened the interior of the country, and farmers plowing the thin, stony soils of New England could not compete with produce from the rich fields of the Midwest. So the old fields were abandoned, and trees have returned.

Today, the re-growing forests of the Eastern United States are among the most important carbon sponges in the world. In the Harvard Forest, the rate of carbon storage accelerated about a decade ago. As in much of the world, the temperature is warming there — by an average of 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit in the last 40 years — and that has led to longer growing seasons, benefiting this particular forest more than hurting it, at least so far.

“We’re actually seeing that the leaves are falling off the trees later in the fall,” Mr. Werden said.

Scientists say that something similar may be happening in other forests, particularly in cold northern regions that are warming rapidly. In some places, the higher temperatures could aid tree growth or cause forests to expand into zones previously occupied by grasslands or tundra, storing more carbon.

Forests are re-growing on abandoned agricultural land across vast reaches of Europe and Russia. China, trying to slow the advance of a desert, has planted nearly 100 million acres of trees, and those forests, too, are absorbing carbon.

But, as a strategy for managing carbon emissions, these recovering forests have one big limitation: the planet simply does not have room for many more of them. To expand them significantly would require taking more farmland out of production, an unlikely prospect in a world where food demand and prices are rising.

“We’re basically running out of land,” Dr. Kurz said.

Even in forests that are relatively healthy now, like those of New England, climate risks are coming into focus. For instance, invasive insects that used to be killed off by cold winters are expected to spread north more readily as the temperature warms, attacking trees.

The Harvard Forest has already been invaded by an insect called the woolly adelgid that kills hemlock trees, and managers there fear a large die-off in coming years.

Wildfires and Bugs

Stripping the bark of a tree with a hatchet, Diana L. Six, a University of Montana insect scientist, pointed out the telltale signs of infestation by pine beetles: channels drilled by the creatures as they chewed their way through the juicy part of the tree.

The tree she was pointing out was already dead. Its needles, which should have been deep green, displayed the sickly red that has become so commonplace in the mountainous West. Because the beetles had cut off the tree’s nutrients, the chlorophyll that made the needles green was breaking down, leaving only reddish compounds.

Pine beetles are a natural part of the life cycle in Western forests, but this outbreak, under way for more than a decade in some areas, is by far the most extensive ever recorded. Scientists say winter temperatures used to fall to 40 degrees below zero in the mountains every few years, killing off many beetles. “It just doesn’t happen anymore,” said a leading climate scientist from the University of Montana, Steven W. Running, who was surveying the scene with Dr. Six one recent day.

As the climate has warmed, various beetle species have marauded across the landscape, from Arizona to Alaska. The situation is worst in British Columbia, which has lost millions of trees across an area the size of Wisconsin.

The species Dr. Six was pointing out, the mountain pine beetle, has pushed farther north into Canada than ever recorded. The beetles have jumped the Rocky Mountains into Alberta, and fears are rising that they could spread across the continent as temperatures rise in coming decades. Standing on a mountain plateau south of Missoula, Dr. Six and Dr. Running pointed to the devastation the beetles had wrought in the forest around them, consisting of a high-elevation species called whitebark pine.

“We were going to try to do like an eight-year study up here. But within three years, all this has happened,” Dr. Six said sadly.

“It’s game over,” Dr. Running said.

Later, flying in a small plane over the Montana wilderness, Dr. Running said beetles were not the only problem confronting the forests of the West.

Warmer temperatures are causing mountain snowpack, on which so much of the life in the region depends, to melt earlier in most years, he said. That is causing more severe water deficits in the summer, just as the higher temperatures cause trees to need extra water to survive. The whole landscape dries out, creating the conditions for intense fires. Even if the landscape does not burn, the trees become so stressed they are easy prey for beetles.

From the plane, Dr. Running pointed out huge scars where fires had destroyed stands of trees in recent years. “Nothing can stop the wildfires when they get to this magnitude,” he said. Some of the fire scars stood adjacent to stands of lodgepole pine destroyed by beetles.

At the moment, the most severe problems in the nation’s forests are being seen in the Southwestern United States, in states like Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. The region has been so dry that huge, explosive fires consumed millions of acres of vegetation and thousands of homes and other buildings this summer.

This year’s drought came against the background of an overall warming and drying of the Southwestern climate, which scientists say helps to explain the severe effects. But the role of climate change in causing the drought itself is unclear — the more immediate cause is an intermittent weather pattern called La Niña, and research is still under way on whether that cycle is being altered or intensified by global warming, as some researchers suspect. Because of the continuing climatic change, experts say some areas that are burning this year may never return as forest — they are more likely to grow back as heat-tolerant grass or shrub lands, storing far less carbon than the forests they replace.

“A lot of ecologists like me are starting to think all these agents, like insects and fires, are just the proximate cause, and the real culprit is water stress caused by climate change,” said Robert L. Crabtree, head of a center studying the Yellowstone region. “It doesn’t really matter what kills the trees — they’re on their way out. The big question is, Are they going to regrow? If they don’t, we could very well catastrophically lose our forests.”

Stalled Efforts

Scientists are coming to a sobering realization: There may be no such thing left on Earth as a natural forest.

However wild some of them may look, experts say, forests from the deepest Amazon to the remotest reaches of Siberia are now responding to human influences, including the rising level of carbon dioxide in the air, increasing heat and changing rainfall patterns. That raises the issue of what people can do to protect forests.

Some steps have already been taken in recent years, with millions of acres of public and private forest land being designated as conservation reserves, for instance. But other ideas are essentially stymied for lack of money.

Widespread areas of pine forest in the Western United States are a prime example. A scientific consensus has emerged that people mismanaged those particular forests over the past century, in part by suppressing the mild ground fires that used to clear out underbrush and limit tree density.

As a consequence, these overgrown forests have become tinderboxes that can be destroyed by high-intensity fires sweeping through the crowns. The government stance is that many forests throughout the West need to be thinned, and some environmental groups have come to agree.

But the small trees and brush that would be removed have a low commercial value, especially in a weak economy. With little money available to subsidize the thinning, the Forest Service is reduced to treating only small sections of forest that pose the biggest threat to life and property.

On an even larger scale, experts cite a lack of money as endangering a program to slow or halt the destruction of tropical forests at human hands.

Deforestation, usually to make way for agriculture, has been under way for decades, with Brazil and Indonesia being hotspots. The burning of tropical forests not only ends their ability to absorb carbon, it also produces an immediate flow of carbon back to the atmosphere, making it one of the leading sources of greenhouse gas emissions.

Rich countries agreed in principle in recent years to pay poorer countries large amounts of money if they would protect their forests.

The wealthy countries have pledged nearly $5 billion, enough to get the program started, but far more money was eventually supposed to become available. The idea was that the rich countries would create ways to charge their companies for emissions of carbon dioxide, and some of this money would flow abroad for forest preservation.

Climate legislation stalled in the United States amid opposition from lawmakers worried about the economic effects, and some European countries have also balked at sending money abroad. That means it is not clear the forest program will ever get rolling in a substantial way.

“Like any other scheme to improve the human condition, it’s quite precarious because it is so grand in its ambitions,” said William Boyd, a University of Colorado law professor working to salvage the plan.

The best hope for the program now is that California, which is intent on battling global warming, will allow industries to comply with its rules partly by financing efforts to slow tropical deforestation. The idea is that other states or countries would eventually follow suit.

Yet, scientists emphasize that in the end, programs meant to conserve forests — or to render them more fire-resistant, as in the Western United States, or to plant new ones, as in China — are only partial measures. To ensure that forests are preserved for future generations, they say, society needs to limit the fossil-fuel burning that is altering the climate of the world.

I don't like how in this article the extermination of forests, itself a fatal and global and pressing concern, is granted greater importance in the context of global warming. It's enough of an epochal catastrophe in itself. Nevertheless, and NYT or not, this is a lot more important than the wars they keep selling to us.

.

[Iamwhomiam]

searcher wrote:

I thought the idea THIS week was that we are going to have a Global Ice Age???

Whenever I hear "Denier!" attached to any contentious belief, it associates in my mind with an group of people who are characterised by:

classic neo-liberal
who buy "Government" pronouncements on things such as 9/11 and the War on Terror
whose idea of a rebuttal is actually just sneering, mocking or self-righteous indignation
who see themselves as proponents of so-called skepticism and 'critical' thinking
who are actually as elitist as fuck (epitomised by people like the Windbag of Bullytown - David Aaronovitch in the UK)

I have no horse in this race - each of us have to focus on where we will spend our resources of time and attention for most "bang for the buck" for the good of all beings... and climate change is not mine.

Iamwhomiam wrote:

And searcher, as wintler has said, all words are labels. Speaking of "sneering, mocking or self-righteous indignation," do you not realize how very foolish your post is? You hear someone tag a label of "denier" on someone and immediately you label them with your own unique and offensive labels? What's up with that?

searcher wrote:

I neither sneered, nor mocked nor felt indignation - you can check the basis of that by having a look at the guardian.co.uk site. Have a look at the quality of the exchanges around the subject of global warming - and ask yourself whether labelling advances it or not.

Quite obviously one of us is not understanding what you've written.

Seems to me you've said that whenever your hear the word "denier" you immediately tag the person uttering it a "classic neo-liberal," one who would buy the "Government" pronouncements on things such as 9/11 or the War on Terror, and one whose idea of a rebuttal is actually just sneering, mocking or self-righteous indignation who see themselves as proponents of so-called skepticism and 'critical' thinking who are actually as elitist as fuck.

I apologize for my poor comprehension of your words.

To equate the survival of our species to "a bun fight between two sides," one side being many thousands in number to another of perhaps several dozens is trivializing a most serious issue. I'd go with the larger consensus if I was ignorant of the issue, but I'm not and still there I remain having read many thousands of pages of scientific findings over many years of study.

If a small minority (a sub-set) of scientists believe something most others disagree with, should we disregard entirely their opinion? I would think not. All the more reason to carefully examine their findings, as has been done and rejected by the larger group.

Sorry I can't view the video, but I feel safe to conclude that it is an actor playing a doctor or he maybe in fact a physician promoting a certain cigarette brand.
So what's your point? That scientific opinion can be bought? Wow! Go back another 50 years and you'll find a majority of scientists claiming it wasn't possible for humans fly or to walk on the Moon. I suppose they were all paid-off, too, but by whom?

I am far from being an elitist. I am well informed. And I will say again as I have before: If climate change is a natural process beyond our control, shouldn't we act all the more with urgency to reduce the climate warming gases we contribute to our atmosphere?

Jack, thanks for re-posting your comment. I missed it earlier. I would add, though, that nuclear power too, has serious negative impacts upon our climate. The mining and extraction of uranium, its processing to refine it and its transport to a reactor and the building of the reactor, all have negative impacts upon our climate. Don't believe for a minute that nuclear power is "Clean Energy."

Lastly, Carbon Trading is indeed a scam. It allows industry to pollute even more than they are now permitted.

Individuals and those with organizational affiliations should endorse the Energy Justice Platform.

[Simulist]

Yes, this is exactly about "the survival of our species." As such, this is not a trivial matter, nor is it in any way "irrelevant."

What's more, I can imagine no topic that is of greater consequence.

[wintler2]

Yes, this is exactly about "the survival of our species." As such, this is not a trivial matter, nor is it in any way "irrelevant."
What's more, I can imagine no topic that is of greater consequence.

Its a personal/'religious' thing, but i can: the survial of Life/as many species as possible on this planet. I think that makes me a biotian, but not the brand of scooter.

[Searcher08]

@Wintler2 - )
The first time I ever saw Bill Mollinson talk about Permaculture (an ancient prog still on Google Video) he was travelling around an Aussie city and railing like St John the Baptist against the manicured lawns and cement backyards - "Ecologically dead, nothing! urban monoculture!" etc
You then saw HIS back (obv permaculture) garden and it looked like a jungle. Which it was. It was brilliant. Best illustration I've ever seen of the cost of reducing variety in a system.

@IamwhoIam
I feel in my heart that any future that will have emerged from humankind NOT stepping up to the plate of taking care of the natural world (no matter what technical marvels might be present in that future) will have lost something sacred. I don't think humans could kill Gaia (IMHO her intelligence in the form of feedback loops into the environment would ultimately prevent that), but we humans could have a damn good go at killing ourselves.

(tbh this is a conversation I wish we were having in a cafe / pub / round a campfire. )

I have deep concerns about the hijacking of the sustainability agenda by the 1%, because from the ground level, what I see are two very distinct patterns emerging: -one involving an increase in personal awareness and responsibility; the other a franly nightmarish global fascist control grid.
Do you engage people, enable them to see the importance of this for themselves and act for themselves OR do you enforce it, to the point of a man with a clipboard noting your details and sending you to jail for putting cardboard in a paper recycling box?

I want to distinguish scientists 'being bought' (corruption) from scientists 'being part of a system designed to reduce thinking to investigations along pre-approved tramlines' (herd instinct).
Both exist. And I am sure that Big Oil and Wall Street play both sides of the sustainability equation whenever they see it in their interest to do so. My posting the video was about how medics prefer Camel cigs; as recently as the 1970s I remember talking with astronomers (school trip) about extra-solar planets and having them *hoot* with amusement at the very idea.

What about exploring and discussing what happens if the scientists are wrong? What about preparing for a Global Mini-Ice age? Have you ever seen what a few inches of snow can do to the UK? Total chaos! The politicians and businesses involved used science as a fig leaf. The scientists saw themselves as clean as the snowflakes they hadn't predicted - everyone turned into Condoleeza mode "No one could possibly have imagined...."

What happens around population?
Could you imagine the 1% getting fully behind a population reduction strategy? It would be like the Kamikaze pilots in WW2, where the first ones were the creme de la creme who volunteered, doing an honourable thing for the greater good - later on, it was very ordinary pilots who were told it they HAD to do it - and many of them were forcibly tied in.

I think it is appropriate to be very cautious about endorsing scientists as if they are 'the Unalloyed Truth' - given the milleau of bankster militarised global control we are existing in, any stance which furthers that agenda will be used relentlessly. Given the historical links between eg the Bush family and the eugenics movement - this things are worth bearing in mind, while working to create Biotica - a world teeming with diverse life that we are a part of, and learn from and respect and love.

[Simulist]

I thought some here might appreciate James Hanson's latest TED talk.

This is the YouTube version...



... but it is also available at the TED website and at Jim's website.

His PowerPoint charts will be made available soon at his site address.