31,000 scientists reject 'global warming' agenda

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

6- Poor urban planning makes for some very nasty urban environments.

LA is designed around the automobile - though they are starting to invest in a vaible public transport network. Anyone who has been to LA should be able to appreciate the impact that all those car exhausts have on the air quality and temperature levels in that city.

Its not implausible to me that this could have a cumulative effect across larger areas; or that there would be knock on effects in the atmosphere.

[Sister Fracas 5]

Their planet is a lot cleaner. I think I may move.

Buy up a tract of cheap land, build a whole bunch of condos on it. Oh yeah.

wheeeeeee!! I'll buy one...

[w¡n9Nµ7 §£@¥€r 123]

Their planet is a lot cleaner. I think I may move.

Buy up a tract of cheap land, build a whole bunch of condos on it. Oh yeah.

wheeeeeee!! I'll buy one...

It'll be in a clean planet so we don't have to recycle. We can litter all we want!

[Pinocchio Liberal 268]

lol.. you don't know if it has an effect on the planet??

You see, Marilyn, rural areas aren't part of the our planet. They have their own.

You see, Marilyn, rural areas aren't part of the our planet. They have their own.

oh yeah, I forgot about that

Their planet is a lot cleaner. I think I may move.

Buy up a tract of cheap land, build a whole bunch of condos on it. Oh yeah.

Cmon sheesh. Years and years ago when the forests would burn unhindered for all of the summer untill the rains came, was that bad for the environment? Can you imagine the massive amounts of smoke and debris? Volcanoes erupting spewing massive amounts of chemicals into the atmosphere. These things have been going on way before we even exsisted. Yet somehow the planet recovers. It would take us little humans ions to even start to detroy or effect this planet. Mother earth has thrown more at herself than we ever will. We are nothing but a brief visitor here. But some like to think we have the power to change sometings that arent even understood. This mistake is going to ruin the economies of many nations.

[w¡n9Nµ7 §£@¥€r 123]

eons, not ions.

[Marilyn. 340]

umm but did they have cars and factories back then and people chopping down the rainforest etc....

[Sister Fracas 5]

Cmon sheesh. Years and years ago when the forests would burn unhindered for all of the summer untill the rains came, was that bad for the environment? Can you imagine the massive amounts of smoke and debris? Volcanoes erupting spewing massive amounts of chemicals into the atmosphere. These things have been going on way before we even exsisted. Yet somehow the planet recovers. It would take us little humans ions to even start to detroy or effect this planet. Mother earth has thrown more at herself than we ever will. We are nothing but a brief visitor here. But some like to think we have the power to change sometings that arent even understood. This mistake is going to ruin the economies of many nations.

Right, we are a brief visitor here as the planet WILL recover. It's not going anywhere anytime soon, but in the meantime, it may just chuck us all off as it becomes more and more inhabitable.

Save the Planet..... NO

Save the environment that we all have to share..... YES

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

Its not hard to understand - prior to human civilization there was a natural balance that allowed the planet some respite to recover from major disasters.

Human involvement disrupts that balance. Can't take CO2 out of the air if you're ripping up all the trees. Can't maintain stable coastlines if you're building Groynes to trap ocean sediment and preserve pleasure beaches.

[Marilyn. 340]

exactly... :thumbs:

[GaryC 7]

Its not hard to understand - prior to human civilization there was a natural balance that allowed the planet some respite to recover from major disasters.

Human involvement disrupts that balance. Can't take CO2 out of the air if you're ripping up all the trees. Can't maintain stable coastlines if you're building Groynes to trap ocean sediment and preserve pleasure beaches.

Common misconception. The main CO2 remover isn't trees, its ocean plankton. Also, we have more trees in the USA now than we did at the turn of the century.

[Marilyn. 340]

yeah because only the trees in the US count..

From about the mid-1800s, the planet has experienced an unprecedented rate of change of destruction of forests worldwide. Forests in Europe are adversely affected by acid rain and very large areas of Siberia have been harvested since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the last two decades, Afghanistan has lost over 70% of its forests throughout the country.[4] However, it is in the world's great tropical rainforests where the destruction is most pronounced at the current time and where wholesale felling is having an adverse effect on biodiversity and contributing to the ongoing Holocene mass extinction.

About half of the mature tropical forests, between 750 to 800 million hectares of the original 1.5 to 1.6 billion hectares that once covered the planet have fallen. The forest loss is already acute in Southeast Asia, the second of the world's great biodiversity hot spots. Much of what remains is in the Amazon basin, where the Amazon Rainforest covered more than 600 million hectares. The forests are being destroyed at a pace tracking the rapid pace of human population growth. Unless significant measures are taken on a world-wide basis to preserve them, by 2030 there will only be ten percent remaining with another ten percent in a degraded condition. 80 percent will have been lost and with them the irreversible loss of hundreds of thousands of species.

Many tropical countries, including Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Bangladesh, China, Sri Lanka, Laos, Nigeria, Liberia, Guinea, Ghana and the Cote d'lvoire have lost large areas of their rainforest. 90% of the forests of the Philippine archipelago have been cut.[7] In 1960 Central America still had 4/5 of its original forest; now it is left with only 2/5 of it. Madagascar has lost 95% of its rainforests. Atlantic coast of Brazil has lost 90-95% of its Mata Atlântica rainforest. Half of the Brazilian state of Rondonia's 24.3 million hectares have been destroyed or severely degraded in recent years. As of 2007, less than 1% of Haiti's forests remain, causing many to call Haiti a Caribbean desert. Between 1990 and 2005, Nigeria lost a staggering 79% of its old-growth forests.[ Several countries, notably the Philippines, Thailand and India have declared their deforestation a national emergency.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation

[GaryC 7]

yeah because only the trees in the US count..

From about the mid-1800s, the planet has experienced an unprecedented rate of change of destruction of forests worldwide. Forests in Europe are adversely affected by acid rain and very large areas of Siberia have been harvested since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the last two decades, Afghanistan has lost over 70% of its forests throughout the country.[4] However, it is in the world's great tropical rainforests where the destruction is most pronounced at the current time and where wholesale felling is having an adverse effect on biodiversity and contributing to the ongoing Holocene mass extinction.

About half of the mature tropical forests, between 750 to 800 million hectares of the original 1.5 to 1.6 billion hectares that once covered the planet have fallen. The forest loss is already acute in Southeast Asia, the second of the world's great biodiversity hot spots. Much of what remains is in the Amazon basin, where the Amazon Rainforest covered more than 600 million hectares. The forests are being destroyed at a pace tracking the rapid pace of human population growth. Unless significant measures are taken on a world-wide basis to preserve them, by 2030 there will only be ten percent remaining with another ten percent in a degraded condition. 80 percent will have been lost and with them the irreversible loss of hundreds of thousands of species.

Many tropical countries, including Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Bangladesh, China, Sri Lanka, Laos, Nigeria, Liberia, Guinea, Ghana and the Cote d'lvoire have lost large areas of their rainforest. 90% of the forests of the Philippine archipelago have been cut.[7] In 1960 Central America still had 4/5 of its original forest; now it is left with only 2/5 of it. Madagascar has lost 95% of its rainforests. Atlantic coast of Brazil has lost 90-95% of its Mata Atlântica rainforest. Half of the Brazilian state of Rondonia's 24.3 million hectares have been destroyed or severely degraded in recent years. As of 2007, less than 1% of Haiti's forests remain, causing many to call Haiti a Caribbean desert. Between 1990 and 2005, Nigeria lost a staggering 79% of its old-growth forests.[ Several countries, notably the Philippines, Thailand and India have declared their deforestation a national emergency.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation

We can only affect what we do in our own country. That is why I specified the US. But to the point, trees are not the main agent of CO2 removal, it's ocean plankton.

[Marilyn. 340]

About one half of the forests that covered the Earth are gone. Each year, another 16 million hectares disappear. The World Resources Institute estimates that only about 22% of the world's (old growth) original forest cover remains "intact" - most of this is in three large areas: the Canadian and Alaskan boreal forest, the boreal forest of Russia, and the tropical forest of the northwestern Amazon Basin and the Guyana Shield (Guyana, Suriname, Venezuela, Columbia, etc.)

Today, forests cover more than one quarter of the world's total land area, excluding polar regions. Slightly more than 50% of the forests are found in the tropics and the rest are temperate and boreal (coniferous northern forest) zones.

Seven countries (Russia, Brazil, Canada, the United States, China, Indonesia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) account for more than 60% of the total.

For millennia, humankind has influenced the forests, although much of the impact has been relatively minor. Today, the impact is enormous. Deforestation is expanding and accelerating into the remaining areas of undisturbed forest, and the quality of the remaining forests is declining. Today we examine global patterns in deforestation, assess the human and ecological costs of forest loss, and discuss some of the steps that can help to rectify this alarming situation.

http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalch...t/deforest.html

Until quite recently, most of the deforestation occurred in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. By the beginning of this century, these regions had been mostly converted from the original cover. Now, deforestation in these regions has stabilized and regrowth is occurring (though second growth forests have quite different character, see below). In the last few decades, the vast majority of deforestation has occurred in the tropics - and the pace still accelerates. The removal of tropical forests in Latin America is proceeding at a pace of about 2% per year. In Africa, the pace is about 0.8% per year and in Asia it is 2% per year.

The USA has already experienced its wave of deforestation, with the exception of small areas in the west and Alaska. Our old growth forests were mostly harvested by 1920, particularly in the East. Pacific Northwest forests and UP Michigan forests were heavily cut after 1920 until quite recently, and harvest of old growth continues today in Southeast Alaska. Interestingly, deforestation rates at their peak in the Midwest were ~2% annually, about the rates now seen in Amazonia. At that rate, how much of existing forest will remain in 70 years? Just one-fourth. However, much forest re-growth has occurred in the eastern USA during the 20th Century, although these second-growth forests differ in structure and composition from their predecessors.

[GaryC 7]

About one half of the forests that covered the Earth are gone. Each year, another 16 million hectares disappear. The World Resources Institute estimates that only about 22% of the world's (old growth) original forest cover remains "intact" - most of this is in three large areas: the Canadian and Alaskan boreal forest, the boreal forest of Russia, and the tropical forest of the northwestern Amazon Basin and the Guyana Shield (Guyana, Suriname, Venezuela, Columbia, etc.)

Today, forests cover more than one quarter of the world's total land area, excluding polar regions. Slightly more than 50% of the forests are found in the tropics and the rest are temperate and boreal (coniferous northern forest) zones.

Seven countries (Russia, Brazil, Canada, the United States, China, Indonesia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) account for more than 60% of the total.

For millennia, humankind has influenced the forests, although much of the impact has been relatively minor. Today, the impact is enormous. Deforestation is expanding and accelerating into the remaining areas of undisturbed forest, and the quality of the remaining forests is declining. Today we examine global patterns in deforestation, assess the human and ecological costs of forest loss, and discuss some of the steps that can help to rectify this alarming situation.

http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalch...t/deforest.html

Until quite recently, most of the deforestation occurred in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. By the beginning of this century, these regions had been mostly converted from the original cover. Now, deforestation in these regions has stabilized and regrowth is occurring (though second growth forests have quite different character, see below). In the last few decades, the vast majority of deforestation has occurred in the tropics - and the pace still accelerates. The removal of tropical forests in Latin America is proceeding at a pace of about 2% per year. In Africa, the pace is about 0.8% per year and in Asia it is 2% per year.

The USA has already experienced its wave of deforestation, with the exception of small areas in the west and Alaska. Our old growth forests were mostly harvested by 1920, particularly in the East. Pacific Northwest forests and UP Michigan forests were heavily cut after 1920 until quite recently, and harvest of old growth continues today in Southeast Alaska. Interestingly, deforestation rates at their peak in the Midwest were ~2% annually, about the rates now seen in Amazonia. At that rate, how much of existing forest will remain in 70 years? Just one-fourth. However, much forest re-growth has occurred in the eastern USA during the 20th Century, although these second-growth forests differ in structure and composition from their predecessors.

Thats talking about old growth forest. That has been replanted. The total number of trees in the US is more than it was at the turn of the 20th century.

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

Its not hard to understand - prior to human civilization there was a natural balance that allowed the planet some respite to recover from major disasters.

Human involvement disrupts that balance. Can't take CO2 out of the air if you're ripping up all the trees. Can't maintain stable coastlines if you're building Groynes to trap ocean sediment and preserve pleasure beaches.

Common misconception. The main CO2 remover isn't trees, its ocean plankton. Also, we have more trees in the USA now than we did at the turn of the century.

As far as trees go - I don't think there being more trees in the US today than 100 years ago really means a whole lot, given the huge commercial logging operations in the amazon, for example. Natural forces don't generally respect national boundaries.

As to the oceans - there's been a fair few articles on warming seas and how this affects marine ecosystems.