I'd be interested if RumRunner (or any of the others we have around here that are knowledgable about the earth) has any ideas on deforestation and it's effects on the environment...
Belle, I have not seen he movie, but what I have seen is the Smithsonion exhibit 4 years ago and then a couple weeks ago. It is warming, the atmosphere is changing. The exhibit explains all of this.
The thing I found interesting was this one exhibit where you can see how something in Asia effects something on the other side of the planet. The Mt Penetubo particulates were all over the world, it was absolutely fascinating.
I'd be interested if RumRunner (or any of the others we have around here that are knowledgable about the earth) has any ideas on deforestation and it's effects on the environment...from Tom Strange
I don't have the same finese and updated knowledge as RumRunner, but I can lay things out in broad strokes. When he returns, he may fill in some details.
The Carbon Budget tracks carbon (and some of its compounds) as they cycle through various pathways of the planet much like your checkbook keeps track of your money.
With respect to deforestation, that may be a very large impact leaving a large void to fill if the deforestation area is large.
All vegetation takes C02 out of the atmosphere. So all vegetation has the potential ability to reduce at least some of the green house gasses. If a large forest is removed, all that potential green house gas remains in the atmosphere until that forest is fully regrown. If that forest is burned (such as in the Amazon area) all that carbon which is stored in the trees (that's what they are made of - - wood - is a carbon compound) is immediately released into the atmosphere adding to the CO2 quantity.
Even if another human never so much as lit a match, the CO2 in the atmosphere will still increase from natural causes such as lightning strikes (especially dry lightning) which can start forest fires, but also from the natural decomposition of dead and decaying organisms both plant and animal. Volcanos also add CO2 to the atmosphere.
(there is more, but I want to post this so it doesn't get lost in the ether....I'll add more later if you want.)
Once a sizeable piece of land has had it's surface vegetation removed, by cutting, or any other method, other changes may follow - depending on conditions.
Sunlight can reach the soils directly and change the nutrients present. Sometimes they may be leached, or removed by high intensity sunlight. Sometimes intense sun and heat may bake the soils into a clay-like material where seedlings cannot catch root to grow.
At the very least, the top layers of soil will dry out and the particles of soil will be picked up by wind and moved elsewhere. More layers become exposed, more drying out, more movement by wind (similar to the way our wheat-belts were damaged previous to the crash of '29 - abject poverty can be thrust onto farmers who were just getting by before.
Once deforestation has ocurred, heavy rains can do more damage. Whenliving trees stand in an area, they hold the soil in the midst of the extra water they themselves don't use. With the trees gone, the roots can't do this, and so the floods carry soil and nutrients downhill (whatever direction that is) displacing more soil and nutrients. Rivers get choked with this material and they themselves may flood. The addition of the solid particles may fill the riverbed itself making dredging necessary if the river is to be used again for navagation.
Deforestation also impacts any and all animals that lived there. Some species may die out, but most animals will endeavor to move somewhere else where they may compete with those species living there
Deforestation may also alter local weather or climate. Transpiratioin moves water from the soil through the plant and is evaporated out of the leaves of trees and other organisms. You can fill in the blanks if a sizeable forest is removed.
It's fascinating and, in a sick way, it's humorous to me because these are the things I groaned about HAVING to learn in school.
The loss of the Amazon is far reaching and seriously impacts the environment as a whole...and once the soil is exposed to continuous sunlight, it could render the land unsuitable for restoration should they try to do that anyway? Does that also include global warming being impacted in a big way? Is that what's happening in CA with all the forest fires and then killer mud slides following, or are the mud slides in different areas?
How does all this fit with the fact that winters are getting worse and lasting longer?
Excellent job Krys! Thanks for adding that to the carbon cycle references.
I have only one more thing to add (for now) which is the rarely mentioned contribution by coastal phytoplankton to the depletion of greenhouse gases and to their contribution to the carbon budget as well.... of course that is all well and good but too many of them and you have other nasty problems as well with red tides and hypoxia. Hypoxia is a loss of enough oxygen in the water for fish, etc to survive. This happens if there are large algal blooms (too much phytoplankton). When they die, like all carbon life forms, they oxydize, i.e. consume oxygen from the water. Phytoplankton live mostly in the top 3 meters of ocean - and - as if by coincidence that is where the majority of the oxygen is as a result of their respiration and consumption of CO2. So when they die - the process consumes the oxygen they have produced. If there is enough O2 loss it results in fish kill and can span large portions of the ocean based food chain - which then can affect portions of the land based food chain... most of us do eat fish after all.
from Belle....The loss of the Amazon is far reaching and seriously impacts the environment as a whole...and once the soil is exposed to continuous sunlight, it could render the land unsuitable for restoration should they try to do that anyway?
No! And I believe most agree on that now. A few decades ago, slash and burn was the practice. Forests were chopped and burned. This was done in order to make space to grow more crops. The practice gave at most 2 years of decent farming because the nutrients were lost from the soil. So, unless someone was willing to invest huge amounts of cash in fertilizer, that was a bad idea. Additionally, many traditionally edible foodstuffs cannot grow well in that climate!
Of course these remarks apply to all Tropical Rain-forests, no matter what continent they exist on.
I love RumRunner's statement "don't crap in your dishwasher". The whole earth as a planet and the various ecosystems have the ability to refresh themselves if left alone OR properly stewarded. Weren't God's instructions to Adam and Eve at least in part to steward the earth? We should walk more lightly on it than we presently seem to be.
Some things I'm confused about ... burning wood is supposed to be carbon neutral ... so taking a bunch of trees out just returns the carbon to wherever? And when they clear the trees, don't they grow soybeans or sugar cane or something? Why would they pay to clear it just to leave it in mud?
And yeah, those darn phytoplankton ... that must be a tough one to model.
Some things I'm confused about ... burning wood is supposed to be carbon neutral ... so taking a bunch of trees out just returns the carbon to wherever? And when they clear the trees, don't they grow soybeans or sugar cane or something? Why would they pay to clear it just to leave it in mud?
And yeah, those darn phytoplankton ... that must be a tough one to model.
Hey Rhino
Burning wood is actually mostly carbon neutral - although not entirely depending on how clean the fire burns. However carbon neutral is only part of the picture. It is not CO2 neutral. A long term CO2 consumer has just been destroyed.
On the phtyo topic...There are some good sites at Rutger's and LSU that show some very nice phyto and Chlor-A (a type of chlorophyll) work. Try the Coastal Ocean Observing Laboratory at Rutger's and the Earth Scan Laboratory at the Coastal Studies Institute at LSU.
To directly answer your comment - the bear of modelling phyto is that a lot of their harmful blooms are based on phosphate point source polution - man made and often hard to identify until the bloom occurs.
.....from Belle.....Does that also include global warming being impacted in a big way? Is that what's happening in CA with all the forest fires and then killer mud slides following, or are the mud slides in different areas?
I doubt that this deforestation contributes in a large way toward global warming....at least with respect to the whole planet!
The planet has oceans and land forms. Both play parts in the Carbon budget....I suspect that the land plays a smaller role because it is smaller than the oceanic parts, but I have no numbers to back that up...it is only a "guestimate" kind of thing.
With respect to CA - the wildfires come from dry lightning. Heavy rains do cause mudslides, but I've never seen a place in CA where a wild fire was followed by heavy rains, so I can't speculate or give you other information. However, it is probable that quite a bit of land clearing happened in order to build roads and those houses which fall over those cliffs. Someday, people may realize where it isn't really safe to build homes although they are exquisitely beautiful vistas...they will be temporary homes at best.
from Belle....How does all this fit with the fact that winters are getting worse and lasting longer
I don't think this is a correct statement, Belle! Here in NJ we've had one of the mildest winters this year in terms of temperature. It was a long spring, but that's not saying the same thing as a longer winter.
Storms are the result of uneven heating someplace. Warm or hot air rises, and cooler air rushes in to take it's place. The greater the heat, the greater the storm potential. This means more wind and more moisture. Warmer surface waters (down to about 3 meters) in southern Atlantic and Pacific regions certainly produced a string of very strong hurricanes. I can certainly see global warming having an effect there. But also winter storms will be more severe....more heat during the summer evaporates more water vapor, so more water vapor is in the atmosphere to precipitate down in the form of snow during winter months.
But please - keep in mind that while the general consensus is in that the planet is warming, there is real credible evidence that points to cooling factors too. People want scientists to give them answers...and eventually I'm sure science will deliver. But at this moment, the verdict is still out on that front. No real predictions can be made that have any meaningful value at this point.
I spent some time last week reading many blogs and papers dealing with earth's heating mechanism and found some strange "new" info. Whether it will prove out or not remains to be seen. Some cosmologists believe that the sun is in a temporary heating mode....if the sun puts out more heat....we get more heat put in here no matter what else is going on. Is that a factor? I dunno...let the cosmologists work on it a while.
Some geologists think the earth's core is getting hotter....are they off their rockers? or will this pan out to be accurate?
The more science and technology answer questions on our behalf, the more questions we raise...and so it goes. I'm not hedging....I'm just pointing out how very complex this stuff gets once you get into it.
Some cosmologists believe that the sun is in a temporary heating mode....if the sun puts out more heat....we get more heat put in here no matter what else is going on. Is that a factor? I dunno...let the cosmologists work on it a while.
I don't understand what people who do makeup have to do with global warming... do they use more pancake base?
(sorry couldn't resist)
I know that we've had a milder winter the last couple of years and we're also in the middle of a drought that's lasted about the same length, we're down almost two feet of annual rainfall in that same time span... are the two related? is it just coincidence? is it just a cycle?
Thanks for all of the info on the deforestation... it's not a good thing, right? It's my feeling that we should be able to manufacture most of the construction items that these 'old growth' or 'rain forests' are supplying... but you're saying that they're clearing the land for crops? ...and I always remember the movie "Medicine Man" with Sean Connery where they were (kind of) delivering the message that as we lose the rainforests we lose sources of possible new medicines... or was that just 'hollywood'...
What I've also taken out of the discussion so far is that there are a lot of factors at work here...
*Deforestation* -- is happening -- as we speak -- in the BWCA.
(Boundary Waters Canoe Area) north of Grand Marais Minney-soda.
(From the local paper -- Duluth News Tribune --)
Forest Service: More experienced firefighters needed for Cavity Lake wildfire
BY JANNA GOERDT
NEWS TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
ON THE GUNFLINT TRAIL - The Cavity Lake fire burning in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness blowdown grew into a more complex situation on Tuesday, triggering the U.S. Forest Service to call for a nationally managed Type 1 fire team -- the most experienced kind of firefighting group available.
The Forest Service estimated the fire could grow to more than 30,000 acres and cost $3 million to fight. The fire also might not be fully controlled, meaning there is slim chance of it flaring up and expanding until the end of August.
The Type 1 team will include people from several agencies with more experience in attacking complicated fires, said Forest Service Information Officer Mike Martin.
Seagull Lake has been closed to all boat traffic, and a number of portages and BWCAW entry points also are closed.
The thing that has all worried -- is that the fire is approaching a *blow down* area.
The blow-down (of 1999) left literally millions of trees flattened by straight-line winds.
The local greenies up here cried *FOUL!!* when local lumber companies
wanted to go in, and harvest the downed timber.
BWCA is a protected wilderness, and NO MACHINES are allowed in there.
So, with many millions of board feet of lumber available ---
(conservative estimate of the U.S. Forest Service is --- 4,000,000 TREES lost in 1999),
AND NOT ONE BOARD FOOT OF THAT WAS HARVESTED, BECAUSE OF RESTRICTIONS!
Now -- 7 years later -- all that wood is still there, dry, rotted, and tinder for the fire.
And the fire is headed it's way, and it's gonna be a b!tch to contain.
(I fought forest fires in So. Cal back in 1977 -- so I know a little where-of I speak
So -- Deforestation?????? We had winds blow down 4 million trees here 7 years ago.
More are being destoyed by fire -- now. Today. By nature. Again.
So -- it happens all the time --- NATURALLY. And the forest, the world, whatever,
is better for it. New growth happens after fires go out.
New life is re-juvinated (sp?), and things return to normal.
Ask any forest ranger -- they will tell you the same.
Meebe if there is such a thing as global warming -- it's due to nature -- and not us??
I hear ya Dave... the deforestation I've been talking about, and interested in, is not the "natural" type... I was thinking about the clear cutting of the Amazon Rain Forest, etc (like Krys referenced)...
TomStrange wrote...I know that we've had a milder winter the last couple of years and we're also in the middle of a drought that's lasted about the same length, we're down almost two feet of annual rainfall in that same time span... are the two related? is it just coincidence? is it just a cycle?
There is probably no correlation between these 2 items. Water for snow or rain to break the drought would come from perhaps thousands of miles away. IMHO this is coincidence.
Let me clear something up about deforestation. Today, very little if any clear cutting via slash and burn to make room for crops is done anymore since finding out it doesn't work to greatly increase croop production.
Thanks for all of the info on the deforestation... it's not a good thing, right? It's my feeling that we should be able to manufacture most of the construction items that these 'old growth' or 'rain forests' are supplying... but you're saying that they're clearing the land for crops? ...and I always remember the movie "Medicine Man" with Sean Connery where they were (kind of) delivering the message that as we lose the rain-forests we lose sources of possible new medicines... or was that just 'hollywood'...
I haven't kept up with all of it recently, so I have little more to share about tropical rain forests. That was a really cool movie, Medicine Man. I showed that to my students. They thought they were having fun, and they learned some history, and some science. Real science.Remember the Doctor looked all over for this particular plant....and he could never reproduce his experiments....until it was shown that the plant was NOT the missing ingredient, but rather the ants that lived in it!? That's how experimental science works...you keep pushing back layers until you finally see "it" and then you can shout "Eureka"!
I know much more about forestry practices in temperate climates, especially in our own USA forests. We have heavy machinery which can cut selected trees from stands in mature forests and leave others intact. That way we can selectively remove trees for use now and preserve the forest for harvest next year....and so on. Additionally, new trees are replanted to grow and replace the ones we've used. Wood is a renewable resource, and it's pretty easy to do with today's methods. I suppose we could manufacture some items without using forest products, but that would consume non-renewable resources and that's not a good idea. That is, it's not a good idea to replace renewable resources with those that cannot be renewed.
All vegetation takes C02 out of the atmosphere. So all vegetation has the potential ability to reduce at least some of the green house gasses. If a large forest is removed, all that potential green house gas remains in the atmosphere until that forest is fully regrown. If that forest is burned (such as in the Amazon area) all that carbon which is stored in the trees (that's what they are made of - - wood - is a carbon compound) is immediately released into the atmosphere adding to the CO2 quantity.
Co2 is only locked up inside of material for so long as that material remains intact.
Forests which provide lumber and heating fuel; are cycling their co2. It all gets released to the atmosphere each time it gets burned. In nature, annual forest fires, burn the rotting wood and brush so again it gets recycled back into the atmosphere.
Only by taking wood, coal, oil [or some other natural material that holds CO2] and burying it in a sealed fashion, could we make it hold it's CO2 forever.
Even lying on the forest floor, wood rots and releases it's CO2.
That amazon forest, still burns in nature, it still rots, it still recycles it's Carbon. And many species of plant depend on their annual burning before they can reproduce [Redwood trees for example].
I've said my piece on the whole "global warming" business often enough, but I haven't repeated this one lately, so here goes:
The only things that are truly economical to recycle are aluminum and plastics. Recycling paper generates more toxic waste than harvesting new trees. The paper companies know this. They are also the biggest tree farmers on the planet, because paper is literally a cash crop for them. It doesn't matter much if the tree is "old growth" or "new growth", they all scrub CO2 from the atmosphere.
Plastics truly are wonder products when it comes to recycling. You know the saying "familiarity breeds contempt"? You work in a candy store, you start to hate chocolate, that sort of thing. I did some contracting work in a plastics plant for several years, and the exact opposite happened. Instead of gaining a growing hatred of plastic as polluting and unnatural, I learned a healthy respect for that petroleum goo. The only material waste that plant generated was the trash from the lunchroom. All the leftover plastic foam from when the picnic plates were punched from the sheet was just collected, ground back into tiny bits, and fed through the foam extruders again. No toxic paper sludge, no refining dross, you just keep re-using it until it becomes part of a plate or a cup and goes out the door. If demand for foam plates goes down, you dump your recycled foam into the plastic bag assembly line and it becomes trash bags. And it's all from petroleum we can't use as gasoline. The only downside is that there are many different kinds of plastic, and you can't mix them when you recycle.
Recycle glass? Eh, why bother. Glass is made from sand. We have absolutely no shortage of that. It's another thing that adds to pollution because it burns more gas to haul it off to recycle the stuff or destroy it because demand for recycled glass is so low.
Aluminum is not that easy to extract from its ore, bauxite. It's far easier to melt and recast old cans, and that's why it's about the only thing you actually get cash for when you recycle it.
interesting stuff Zixar, all I know is that they made and built this house out of recycled stuff... the studs, the floors, the roof, the counters, etc...
- - sigh - - Zixar it would have taken just a few sentences to post your ideas about global warming here.
He doesn't believe it - rather - maybe the planet is a tad warmer but it's part of normal cycling - I believe that's the gist of his thoughts. Additionally, he believes politicians manipulate public thinking by using any reference to global warming for political advantage.
well - - - - I needed to practice my search skills anyway! However most of the readers on this thread may not remember you clearly since we don't see you so often and I, for one....miss that.
My big problem is the sensationalization of what should really be cold, impartial science. Climatological change models are only as accurate as the available seed data, and we simply do not have accurate enough temperature information recorded over a long enough period of time to predict where we're going with any bankable accuracy. It's somewhat similar to predicting the rest of a person's life from a five-minute observation and listening to stories from his friends and relatives to fill in the rest. (The five minutes is our current high-precision temperature data, the stories are hundreds of years of "well, we sure had a cold one this winter.")
The political maneuverings are utterly reprehensible. There's a lot of furor over the United States' refusal to accept the Kyoto Protocols and the like. Makes great political fodder for any party in opposition, even though no sane U.S. President would ever sign such an agreement, regardless of political party. The environmentalism lobby basically wants to charge energy-consuming nations and credit third-world nations with the proceeds. It would strangle our economy and bankrupt the US. Personally, I don't care if France is the world's largest consumer of uranium, and I don't expect them to pay us for doing so. In the same manner, I suspect the poor farmer in Ethiopia equally doesn't care if we consume the most crude oil. Al Gore screaming about Bush not signing Kyoto, painting him as some sort of environmental rapist, is just another example of the political leverage of hypocrisy and bull.....
But again, that strays far afield from the continuing science of the matter. Politics suck.
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I hear you nandon!
I'd be interested if RumRunner (or any of the others we have around here that are knowledgable about the earth) has any ideas on deforestation and it's effects on the environment...
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washingtonweather
Belle, I have not seen he movie, but what I have seen is the Smithsonion exhibit 4 years ago and then a couple weeks ago. It is warming, the atmosphere is changing. The exhibit explains all of this.
The thing I found interesting was this one exhibit where you can see how something in Asia effects something on the other side of the planet. The Mt Penetubo particulates were all over the world, it was absolutely fascinating.
http://www.mnh.si.edu/exhibits/atmosphere/
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Belle
(((((WW))))) Thanks!! I'll check it out tonight!
Nandon, I'm reconsidering my position based on the information I've obtained today. See below for details.
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krys
I don't have the same finese and updated knowledge as RumRunner, but I can lay things out in broad strokes. When he returns, he may fill in some details.
The Carbon Budget tracks carbon (and some of its compounds) as they cycle through various pathways of the planet much like your checkbook keeps track of your money.
With respect to deforestation, that may be a very large impact leaving a large void to fill if the deforestation area is large.
All vegetation takes C02 out of the atmosphere. So all vegetation has the potential ability to reduce at least some of the green house gasses. If a large forest is removed, all that potential green house gas remains in the atmosphere until that forest is fully regrown. If that forest is burned (such as in the Amazon area) all that carbon which is stored in the trees (that's what they are made of - - wood - is a carbon compound) is immediately released into the atmosphere adding to the CO2 quantity.
Even if another human never so much as lit a match, the CO2 in the atmosphere will still increase from natural causes such as lightning strikes (especially dry lightning) which can start forest fires, but also from the natural decomposition of dead and decaying organisms both plant and animal. Volcanos also add CO2 to the atmosphere.
(there is more, but I want to post this so it doesn't get lost in the ether....I'll add more later if you want.)
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krys
Once a sizeable piece of land has had it's surface vegetation removed, by cutting, or any other method, other changes may follow - depending on conditions.
Sunlight can reach the soils directly and change the nutrients present. Sometimes they may be leached, or removed by high intensity sunlight. Sometimes intense sun and heat may bake the soils into a clay-like material where seedlings cannot catch root to grow.
At the very least, the top layers of soil will dry out and the particles of soil will be picked up by wind and moved elsewhere. More layers become exposed, more drying out, more movement by wind (similar to the way our wheat-belts were damaged previous to the crash of '29 - abject poverty can be thrust onto farmers who were just getting by before.
Once deforestation has ocurred, heavy rains can do more damage. Whenliving trees stand in an area, they hold the soil in the midst of the extra water they themselves don't use. With the trees gone, the roots can't do this, and so the floods carry soil and nutrients downhill (whatever direction that is) displacing more soil and nutrients. Rivers get choked with this material and they themselves may flood. The addition of the solid particles may fill the riverbed itself making dredging necessary if the river is to be used again for navagation.
Deforestation also impacts any and all animals that lived there. Some species may die out, but most animals will endeavor to move somewhere else where they may compete with those species living there
Deforestation may also alter local weather or climate. Transpiratioin moves water from the soil through the plant and is evaporated out of the leaves of trees and other organisms. You can fill in the blanks if a sizeable forest is removed.
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Belle
Please do continue, Krys!! :)
It's fascinating and, in a sick way, it's humorous to me because these are the things I groaned about HAVING to learn in school.
The loss of the Amazon is far reaching and seriously impacts the environment as a whole...and once the soil is exposed to continuous sunlight, it could render the land unsuitable for restoration should they try to do that anyway? Does that also include global warming being impacted in a big way? Is that what's happening in CA with all the forest fires and then killer mud slides following, or are the mud slides in different areas?
How does all this fit with the fact that winters are getting worse and lasting longer?
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RumRunner
Excellent job Krys! Thanks for adding that to the carbon cycle references.
I have only one more thing to add (for now) which is the rarely mentioned contribution by coastal phytoplankton to the depletion of greenhouse gases and to their contribution to the carbon budget as well.... of course that is all well and good but too many of them and you have other nasty problems as well with red tides and hypoxia. Hypoxia is a loss of enough oxygen in the water for fish, etc to survive. This happens if there are large algal blooms (too much phytoplankton). When they die, like all carbon life forms, they oxydize, i.e. consume oxygen from the water. Phytoplankton live mostly in the top 3 meters of ocean - and - as if by coincidence that is where the majority of the oxygen is as a result of their respiration and consumption of CO2. So when they die - the process consumes the oxygen they have produced. If there is enough O2 loss it results in fish kill and can span large portions of the ocean based food chain - which then can affect portions of the land based food chain... most of us do eat fish after all.
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excathedra
rummie just saw your name here. haven't seen the thread
i'm watching something on the history channel about tsumanis and was thinking about you
wanted to say hi, love ya
many hugs
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krys
No! And I believe most agree on that now. A few decades ago, slash and burn was the practice. Forests were chopped and burned. This was done in order to make space to grow more crops. The practice gave at most 2 years of decent farming because the nutrients were lost from the soil. So, unless someone was willing to invest huge amounts of cash in fertilizer, that was a bad idea. Additionally, many traditionally edible foodstuffs cannot grow well in that climate!
Of course these remarks apply to all Tropical Rain-forests, no matter what continent they exist on.
I love RumRunner's statement "don't crap in your dishwasher". The whole earth as a planet and the various ecosystems have the ability to refresh themselves if left alone OR properly stewarded. Weren't God's instructions to Adam and Eve at least in part to steward the earth? We should walk more lightly on it than we presently seem to be.
At least that's my opinion
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rhino
Some things I'm confused about ... burning wood is supposed to be carbon neutral ... so taking a bunch of trees out just returns the carbon to wherever? And when they clear the trees, don't they grow soybeans or sugar cane or something? Why would they pay to clear it just to leave it in mud?
And yeah, those darn phytoplankton ... that must be a tough one to model.
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RumRunner
Hey Rhino
Burning wood is actually mostly carbon neutral - although not entirely depending on how clean the fire burns. However carbon neutral is only part of the picture. It is not CO2 neutral. A long term CO2 consumer has just been destroyed.
On the phtyo topic...There are some good sites at Rutger's and LSU that show some very nice phyto and Chlor-A (a type of chlorophyll) work. Try the Coastal Ocean Observing Laboratory at Rutger's and the Earth Scan Laboratory at the Coastal Studies Institute at LSU.
To directly answer your comment - the bear of modelling phyto is that a lot of their harmful blooms are based on phosphate point source polution - man made and often hard to identify until the bloom occurs.
Regards,
RR
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krys
I doubt that this deforestation contributes in a large way toward global warming....at least with respect to the whole planet!
The planet has oceans and land forms. Both play parts in the Carbon budget....I suspect that the land plays a smaller role because it is smaller than the oceanic parts, but I have no numbers to back that up...it is only a "guestimate" kind of thing.
With respect to CA - the wildfires come from dry lightning. Heavy rains do cause mudslides, but I've never seen a place in CA where a wild fire was followed by heavy rains, so I can't speculate or give you other information. However, it is probable that quite a bit of land clearing happened in order to build roads and those houses which fall over those cliffs. Someday, people may realize where it isn't really safe to build homes although they are exquisitely beautiful vistas...they will be temporary homes at best.
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krys
I don't think this is a correct statement, Belle! Here in NJ we've had one of the mildest winters this year in terms of temperature. It was a long spring, but that's not saying the same thing as a longer winter.
Storms are the result of uneven heating someplace. Warm or hot air rises, and cooler air rushes in to take it's place. The greater the heat, the greater the storm potential. This means more wind and more moisture. Warmer surface waters (down to about 3 meters) in southern Atlantic and Pacific regions certainly produced a string of very strong hurricanes. I can certainly see global warming having an effect there. But also winter storms will be more severe....more heat during the summer evaporates more water vapor, so more water vapor is in the atmosphere to precipitate down in the form of snow during winter months.
But please - keep in mind that while the general consensus is in that the planet is warming, there is real credible evidence that points to cooling factors too. People want scientists to give them answers...and eventually I'm sure science will deliver. But at this moment, the verdict is still out on that front. No real predictions can be made that have any meaningful value at this point.
I spent some time last week reading many blogs and papers dealing with earth's heating mechanism and found some strange "new" info. Whether it will prove out or not remains to be seen. Some cosmologists believe that the sun is in a temporary heating mode....if the sun puts out more heat....we get more heat put in here no matter what else is going on. Is that a factor? I dunno...let the cosmologists work on it a while.
Some geologists think the earth's core is getting hotter....are they off their rockers? or will this pan out to be accurate?
The more science and technology answer questions on our behalf, the more questions we raise...and so it goes. I'm not hedging....I'm just pointing out how very complex this stuff gets once you get into it.
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Tom Strange
I don't understand what people who do makeup have to do with global warming... do they use more pancake base?
(sorry couldn't resist)
I know that we've had a milder winter the last couple of years and we're also in the middle of a drought that's lasted about the same length, we're down almost two feet of annual rainfall in that same time span... are the two related? is it just coincidence? is it just a cycle?
Thanks for all of the info on the deforestation... it's not a good thing, right? It's my feeling that we should be able to manufacture most of the construction items that these 'old growth' or 'rain forests' are supplying... but you're saying that they're clearing the land for crops? ...and I always remember the movie "Medicine Man" with Sean Connery where they were (kind of) delivering the message that as we lose the rainforests we lose sources of possible new medicines... or was that just 'hollywood'...
What I've also taken out of the discussion so far is that there are a lot of factors at work here...
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dmiller
*Deforestation* -- is happening -- as we speak -- in the BWCA.
(Boundary Waters Canoe Area) north of Grand Marais Minney-soda.
(From the local paper -- Duluth News Tribune --)
The thing that has all worried -- is that the fire is approaching a *blow down* area.
The blow-down (of 1999) left literally millions of trees flattened by straight-line winds.
The local greenies up here cried *FOUL!!* when local lumber companies
wanted to go in, and harvest the downed timber.
BWCA is a protected wilderness, and NO MACHINES are allowed in there.
So, with many millions of board feet of lumber available ---
(conservative estimate of the U.S. Forest Service is --- 4,000,000 TREES lost in 1999),
AND NOT ONE BOARD FOOT OF THAT WAS HARVESTED, BECAUSE OF RESTRICTIONS!
Now -- 7 years later -- all that wood is still there, dry, rotted, and tinder for the fire.
And the fire is headed it's way, and it's gonna be a b!tch to contain.
(I fought forest fires in So. Cal back in 1977 -- so I know a little where-of I speak
So -- Deforestation?????? We had winds blow down 4 million trees here 7 years ago.
More are being destoyed by fire -- now. Today. By nature. Again.
So -- it happens all the time --- NATURALLY. And the forest, the world, whatever,
is better for it. New growth happens after fires go out.
New life is re-juvinated (sp?), and things return to normal.
Ask any forest ranger -- they will tell you the same.
Meebe if there is such a thing as global warming -- it's due to nature -- and not us??
Just a thot!
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Tom Strange
I hear ya Dave... the deforestation I've been talking about, and interested in, is not the "natural" type... I was thinking about the clear cutting of the Amazon Rain Forest, etc (like Krys referenced)...
The "natural" cycle I'm not worried about...
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krys
There is probably no correlation between these 2 items. Water for snow or rain to break the drought would come from perhaps thousands of miles away. IMHO this is coincidence.
Let me clear something up about deforestation. Today, very little if any clear cutting via slash and burn to make room for crops is done anymore since finding out it doesn't work to greatly increase croop production.
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krys
I haven't kept up with all of it recently, so I have little more to share about tropical rain forests. That was a really cool movie, Medicine Man. I showed that to my students. They thought they were having fun, and they learned some history, and some science. Real science.Remember the Doctor looked all over for this particular plant....and he could never reproduce his experiments....until it was shown that the plant was NOT the missing ingredient, but rather the ants that lived in it!? That's how experimental science works...you keep pushing back layers until you finally see "it" and then you can shout "Eureka"!
I know much more about forestry practices in temperate climates, especially in our own USA forests. We have heavy machinery which can cut selected trees from stands in mature forests and leave others intact. That way we can selectively remove trees for use now and preserve the forest for harvest next year....and so on. Additionally, new trees are replanted to grow and replace the ones we've used. Wood is a renewable resource, and it's pretty easy to do with today's methods. I suppose we could manufacture some items without using forest products, but that would consume non-renewable resources and that's not a good idea. That is, it's not a good idea to replace renewable resources with those that cannot be renewed.
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Tom Strange
I saw a "house of the future" built entirely (or somewhere around 95%) out of recycled material... that stuff that we can use, we should...
I believe in recycling... I don't know if it makes any more difference than a pimple on a donkey's a$$... but I recycle...
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Galen
Co2 is only locked up inside of material for so long as that material remains intact.
Forests which provide lumber and heating fuel; are cycling their co2. It all gets released to the atmosphere each time it gets burned. In nature, annual forest fires, burn the rotting wood and brush so again it gets recycled back into the atmosphere.
Only by taking wood, coal, oil [or some other natural material that holds CO2] and burying it in a sealed fashion, could we make it hold it's CO2 forever.
Even lying on the forest floor, wood rots and releases it's CO2.
That amazon forest, still burns in nature, it still rots, it still recycles it's Carbon. And many species of plant depend on their annual burning before they can reproduce [Redwood trees for example].
:)
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Zixar
I've said my piece on the whole "global warming" business often enough, but I haven't repeated this one lately, so here goes:
The only things that are truly economical to recycle are aluminum and plastics. Recycling paper generates more toxic waste than harvesting new trees. The paper companies know this. They are also the biggest tree farmers on the planet, because paper is literally a cash crop for them. It doesn't matter much if the tree is "old growth" or "new growth", they all scrub CO2 from the atmosphere.
Plastics truly are wonder products when it comes to recycling. You know the saying "familiarity breeds contempt"? You work in a candy store, you start to hate chocolate, that sort of thing. I did some contracting work in a plastics plant for several years, and the exact opposite happened. Instead of gaining a growing hatred of plastic as polluting and unnatural, I learned a healthy respect for that petroleum goo. The only material waste that plant generated was the trash from the lunchroom. All the leftover plastic foam from when the picnic plates were punched from the sheet was just collected, ground back into tiny bits, and fed through the foam extruders again. No toxic paper sludge, no refining dross, you just keep re-using it until it becomes part of a plate or a cup and goes out the door. If demand for foam plates goes down, you dump your recycled foam into the plastic bag assembly line and it becomes trash bags. And it's all from petroleum we can't use as gasoline. The only downside is that there are many different kinds of plastic, and you can't mix them when you recycle.
Recycle glass? Eh, why bother. Glass is made from sand. We have absolutely no shortage of that. It's another thing that adds to pollution because it burns more gas to haul it off to recycle the stuff or destroy it because demand for recycled glass is so low.
Aluminum is not that easy to extract from its ore, bauxite. It's far easier to melt and recast old cans, and that's why it's about the only thing you actually get cash for when you recycle it.
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Tom Strange
interesting stuff Zixar, all I know is that they made and built this house out of recycled stuff... the studs, the floors, the roof, the counters, etc...
(and I still use the Solitare method)
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krys
- - sigh - - Zixar it would have taken just a few sentences to post your ideas about global warming here.
He doesn't believe it - rather - maybe the planet is a tad warmer but it's part of normal cycling - I believe that's the gist of his thoughts. Additionally, he believes politicians manipulate public thinking by using any reference to global warming for political advantage.
well - - - - I needed to practice my search skills anyway! However most of the readers on this thread may not remember you clearly since we don't see you so often and I, for one....miss that.
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Zixar
My big problem is the sensationalization of what should really be cold, impartial science. Climatological change models are only as accurate as the available seed data, and we simply do not have accurate enough temperature information recorded over a long enough period of time to predict where we're going with any bankable accuracy. It's somewhat similar to predicting the rest of a person's life from a five-minute observation and listening to stories from his friends and relatives to fill in the rest. (The five minutes is our current high-precision temperature data, the stories are hundreds of years of "well, we sure had a cold one this winter.")
The political maneuverings are utterly reprehensible. There's a lot of furor over the United States' refusal to accept the Kyoto Protocols and the like. Makes great political fodder for any party in opposition, even though no sane U.S. President would ever sign such an agreement, regardless of political party. The environmentalism lobby basically wants to charge energy-consuming nations and credit third-world nations with the proceeds. It would strangle our economy and bankrupt the US. Personally, I don't care if France is the world's largest consumer of uranium, and I don't expect them to pay us for doing so. In the same manner, I suspect the poor farmer in Ethiopia equally doesn't care if we consume the most crude oil. Al Gore screaming about Bush not signing Kyoto, painting him as some sort of environmental rapist, is just another example of the political leverage of hypocrisy and bull.....
But again, that strays far afield from the continuing science of the matter. Politics suck.
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