31,000 scientists reject 'global warming' agenda

[w¡n9Nµ7 §£@¥€r 123]

Even if he didn't actually do it, we should. Nature has clear Marxist sympathies, IMO.

[Marilyn. 340]

sheesh, I give up.. have fun boys....

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

Even if he didn't actually do it, we should. Nature has clear Marxist sympathies, IMO.

Caligula declared a draw I believe. I guess he didn't have nuclear depth charges

That'll show'em - world class grenade fishing.

[HAL 9000 96]

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.

You are absolutely 100% correct in localization. Its actually a combination of phytoplankton and coral polyps. Anywho...

Too bad we are busy removing these populations of organisms by raising the atmospheric temperature above natural cycles. .

That is, on top of the chemical pollution we are dumping in the oceans that poisons these populations.

[HAL 9000 96]

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.

That is where you are misconceived on this one. Trees may not be the major remover of atmospheric CO2, but they are a critical component of the machinery.

As for what one nation does is irrelevant. Pollutants don't stop at imaginary political borders.

Human involvement is miniscule compared to what this planet has done to itself. Guilt trips, my god!

As I said there are quite a few examples of how human activity has negatively influenced the environment across quite large areas.

Desertification and the exacerbation of marine erosion being just two examples.

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.

I also understand that its only new trees that are the most effective at absorbing CO2.

I agree in logic- younger trees grow faster than older trees. Thusly they absorb greater quantities in order to increase their biomass at a rate in step with their genetic programming.

[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.

You are absolutely 100% correct in localization. Its actually a combination of phytoplankton and coral polyps. Anywho...

Too bad we are busy removing these populations of organisms by raising the atmospheric temperature above natural cycles. .

That is, on top of the chemical pollution we are dumping in the oceans that poisons these populations.

There's plenty of published articles on rising ocean acidity - but for all of our amateur discussions on this subject, that aspect is never touched.

[HAL 9000 96]

Human involvement is miniscule compared to what this planet has done to itself. Guilt trips, my god!

As I said there are quite a few examples of how human activity has negatively influenced the environment across quite large areas.

Desertification and the exacerbation of marine erosion being just two examples.

Could you please describe what an ancient forest fire might do as far as damage. We look at burnt forests as ugly and terrible what does the earth see it as.

Human perspectives dont work.

Quite simply - forest fires are short term and the damage is repaired relatively quickly, certainly when compared to erosional processes like desertification.

YES.

These are different timescales.

[HAL 9000 96]

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.

You are absolutely 100% correct in localization. Its actually a combination of phytoplankton and coral polyps. Anywho...

Too bad we are busy removing these populations of organisms by raising the atmospheric temperature above natural cycles. .

That is, on top of the chemical pollution we are dumping in the oceans that poisons these populations.

There's plenty of published articles on rising ocean acidity - but for all of our amateur discussions on this subject, that aspect is never touched.

Well its all chemistry to be honest... I have written down the equation here a few times:

CO2 (Gas) + H2O (Liquid) -> H2CO3 (liquified gas, carbonic acid)

edit: Water is not in this case

Edited June 3, 2008 by maviwaro

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

Right but there's obviously more to it than the chemistry - specifically the knock on effects of rising ocean acidity on marine ecosystems.

[HAL 9000 96]

Right but there's obviously more to it than the chemistry - specifically the knock on effects of rising ocean acidity on marine ecosystems.

Yep.

Here are a couple of the more simple consequences of rising oceanic temperatures (as a result of rising atmospheric temperatures due to increased CO2):

1. Acidification -> poison to marine life. Phytoplankton and corals included, as well as the higher parts of the human food chain supply.

2. Temperature -> removal of O2 from the biotic zones (where life exists) by physical means. Passing the thermal limits for phytoplankton and coral polyp survival. Causation of changes of migratory patterns of larger sea life. Increased algal growth in shallower waters (= decreasing O2 levels even more).

From there even these two aspects can weave an ever complicated picture within the oceanic environments as well as in feedback loops that affect terrestrial life.

[Peikko 1,575]

I am no scientist, but I forsee the oceans looking like huge algae filled ponds in the not so distant future. Sad, very sad - and on the way to this monoculture world we lose out on so much because the human race hadn't even documented many, many species that have now become extinct. It's terrible really. Bio diversity took millions of years to create and the human race has taken a couple of hundred years to put a huge dent in it - with a lot more to follow.

Edited June 3, 2008 by Purple_Hibiscus

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

I am no scientist, but I forsee the oceans looking like huge algae filled ponds in the not so distant future. Sad, very sad - and on the way to this monoculture world we lose out on so much because the human race hadn't even documented many, many species that have now become extinct. It's terrible really. Bio diversity took millions of years to create and the human race has taken a couple of hundred years to put a huge dent in it - with a lot more to follow.

That right there is a pretty good example of how humans have impacted the natural balance in a big way - the eradication of animal species speaks to the destruction of natural habitats.

[Peikko 1,575]

Edited for extreme cynicism. My bad!

Edited June 3, 2008 by Purple_Hibiscus