It’s About Making Babies!

Wired.com has an article up on ill and dying trees, especially in the Western US, “Climate Change Killing America’s Trees at Ever Faster Rates”.

Trees in western North America are dying at faster and faster rates, and climate change is likely to blame.

The mounting deaths could fundamentally transform Western forests because tree reproduction hasn’t increased to offset losses, according to a new study published Thursday in Science. New seedlings aren’t rising quickly enough to fill the gaps.

“If current trends continue, forests will become sparser over time,” co-author Philip van Mantgem, an ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, said in a press conference call. This would be a setback in the fight against global warming because thinner forests with small, young trees store less carbon, so more heat-trapping carbon dioxide would cycle into the atmosphere.

Um. Like, when Brazil brags about switching to Ethanol, even to the point of being the sole motor fuel supplier for the 2009 Indy car circuit? Or when they brag about cutting down and burning another 1,000 square miles of native rain forest?

Drought

Drought is a period of significantly reduced, or completely absent, amount of rainfall. Historically, there have been drough “seasons” that last a month or three, or a year. Many Californians know that droughts often happen in seven (7) year stretches.

We have had droughts in the US before – few as dramatic as the 1930′s Oklahoma “dust bowl”. They happen. The weather shifts, sometimes for long periods. Sometimes we mere ephemerals mistake an abberation – say, the mildest decade in recorded history, the 1950′s – for “normal”.

This article speaks about how the current drought condition is having direct (lack of enough water for the trees) and indirect (increased population of predator bugs) effects. Why a drought is necessarily related to climate change is a mystery, that part is just assumed and implied. I guess the casual reader could even be forgiven thinking he means global warming – the article expresses concern.

“If current trends continue, forests will become sparser over time,” co-author Philip van Mantgem, an ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, said in a press conference call. This would be a setback in the fight against global warming because thinner forests with small, young trees store less carbon, so more heat-trapping carbon dioxide would cycle into the atmosphere.

They do mention global warming directly.

The research revealed that tree mortality rates in old-growth forests from southern British Columbia to Arizona have doubled every few decades over the past 50 years.

This is likely because region has warmed considerably during this period too, the scientists say. Since the 1970s, temperatures across the West have risen by 0.5-0.9 degrees Fahrenheit every ten years. Such warming has led to reduced snowfall, a smaller winter snowpack, and earlier spring melts

I wonder how this plays with recent announcements by Nasa and the US Army that other planets in the solar system are warming at the same time as Earth? Or the report a few months ago that the observed cooling in the last year has offset all of the warming in the previous century?

The global climate is getting less stable. I understand that. I also understand what Rush Limbaugh pointed out ten (10) years ago and more, that there are very few things that man can do, that compares to the climate effects of a volcano eruption. Except, maybe deforest Asia and Africa (as is happening now, for lumber and charcoal for home heating and cooking). Or maybe destroy the Amazon Rain Forest in Brazil. And again last year. A thousand square miles of ancient growth rain forest per year.

Brazil is on track to lose more than 5,700 square miles of rain forest for the year ending in August 2008, based on the rate at which land was deforested between August and December 2007. That would be a 34 percent increase over land cleared in the previous 12-month period.

I recall Mom telling me some Iowa farmers were double cropping – wintering over in Brazil to farm there during the Iowa off-season. Most all of the Brazil deforestation is to clear cattle-grazing pasture, and a few years later, farm ground. I cannot believe the US tree-hugger story, that cattle gazing federal lands (a federal law suit, no less!), excuse me, grazing on leased federal lands, makes a significant contribution to global warming. Not when grazing cleared rain forest is a much more direct link.

Should we be concerned? Yes. Drought, pest proliferation, and loss of habitat concerns us all. Recall, that the origianal European settlers found North America to be heavily forested. They burned off Georgia and much of the south, and proceeded to farm the life out of the ground in a few decades – leaving farmground unable to support crops. So they moved west to find (and despoil) more fertile ground.

Should we be concerned about restoring the old forest growth destroyed as America was developing? Probably, if we consider an unsullied “natural” state something sacred. Or even if we want to restore the local albedo, water cycle, and carbon cycles that seem sustainable over the long haul. Again from Brazil, June 2008:

Lula said that Brazil will have to face a strong worldwide debate on environmental preservation, ..

The president said Brazil’s record of environmental preservation is equal to that of any country in the world. “Europe, for example, only has 0.3 percent of its native forest still standing. Brazil still has 69 percent,” he said.

Individuals in Oregon and New England have shown that with judicious care, patches of forest can be maintained, provide a living, and not be diminished. (I recall a couple of articles in the Small Farmers Journal, Sisters, OR, from some years back.) Small scale logging, using oxen or horses, can make productive use of rough terrain, with much less impact than clearing dozer trails and truck roads.

And micro-logging, a tree at a time, might be a way to salvage value from recently dead trees while removing infestation points.

While we wait to see if this is a drought, a climate change, or the start of the long-delayed Ice Age that one story claims has been held off since the 1200′s, by the burning of forests and fossil fuels.

Sharon writes on Casaubon’s Book about “Our Tails Get In the Way: The Problems and Principles of Energy Descent”

Item 5 of her ‘problems blocking change’ list bothers me. “The sheer cowardice of most of us. ”

This perspective seems overly prejudicial, an attitude that has caused the term ‘tree hugger’ to become a derogatory catch-all phrase to label those concerned about the environment.

Change or growth is measured in pain. People tend not to change because change is a ‘little death’, a clearing away of the life that went before to make way for a new life. Since we can’t know what a changed life will be, in terms of comfort and security, or in terms of what we treasure in our current life, we have less trust in change than in working to preserve our current life.

Volcanoes happen, and earthquakes and floods and tornadoes. Much of the real devastation is to the survivors. They have to rebuild their lives, to persist from hour to hour until their lives settle into a pattern, and they learn to trust and treasure their new life.

What is being demanded to stabilize the environment is no less traumatic than asking people to step in front of a drunk driver. Only the suicidal is willing. For the rest of us the demands for change sound like encouraging suicide – to throw our old way of life away without understanding what lays on ‘the other side’ for us.

Cowardice is fear of facing danger. Calling fear of suicide ‘cowardice’ makes you sound weird, and untrustworthy. And to achieve real change you need to be trusted, your facts need to be trusted, and your solutions need to be trusted. Using the word ‘Cowardice’ throws all what you are concerned about into doubt.

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I have reservations about the whole greenhouse gas problem, and whether it is affected by what we do as a community of mankind.

That is, either carbon emissions are bad, or only bad for those that poor nations can thumb their noses at. If it is accepted that we need to accomplish something in the next 5-20 years, then trees make a really good way to capture carbon, short term. But the thousand square miles of rain forest Brazil (the ethanol-fueled tree-hugger hero) proudly reports burning last year, or the expected denuding of the Asian Continent in the next few years for China’s construction boom and charcoal for basic home heat and cooking are all A-OK. I guess poor-people carbon doesn’t count as much as non-poor people carbon.

The have been reports that cows belch methane as they digest their food, mainly grasses and some grains, depending on how they are raised and fed. What I haven’t seen is whether the land they grazed, or the crops that produced the grain, would have produced more or less carbon and greenhouse gases, averaged over the years, with cow grazing or without. That short-sightedness is akin to the Ethanol Blunder. That is, it takes more energy (read: Greenhouse Gas Emissions) to produce and consume ethanol than the energy ethanol provides. Yes, burning ethanol actually increases the amount of greenhouse gas, when you account for all the transportation and processing. Doesn’t that make Brazil look like real paragons?! Shouldn’t we be that great!

Only – ethanol does accomplish one goal. It keeps fuel on hand for war machines. We are seeing food riots around the world. That cannot get better before the next crops are harvested – which will be a while. Increase oil a bit more, or keep the prices this high much longer, and the urge to conquer and blow away the bad guys raising the price so high will become irresistible. Wars have always been fought over money. The amount of money at stake keeps going up – and support for war to secure energy resources will grow. We could be at war again before the next election.

Last year NASA reported an increase in global temperature, not a big surprise hear on Earth – or is it? The report claimed an increase on every planet in the solar system. Whether the increase is due to a change in the Sun’s energy or gravitational tides (if there are tides to gravity) or other energy transfer mechanism, what we do with our carbon emissions is not affecting Mars. But gravitational effects could well be triggering the recent major earthquakes and volcano eruptions. But the Kyoto Protocol doesn’t address changes that affect the whole solar system – only enhances careers of activists and ‘underdeveloped’ country developers.

Speaking of volcanoes. Notice how many thousands of times the total industrial pollution of the world gets dumped into the atmosphere by one good volcano eruption? Cubic miles of dust, thousands and thousands of tons of ozone-depleting compounds similar to Freon, radioactives, etc. And all outside the careful ‘tax the rich guy’ policy of the Kyoto Protocol.

So I have my doubts about global warming, or whether we are beginning the next ice age (global temps over the last 12 months average lower than the last 100 years – wiping out the increase the Global Warming crowd are so unhappy about).

I do know that there is less seed available, and less variety, for farm use in the US. Seed companies got their ‘genetic patent’ to outlaw planting harvested seed. Now the only seed available in a given season is what the seed companies deign to produce (if they under-supply seed, they get to raise their prices, see?).

I do know that current prices for fuel and metals are raising costs for equipment and operations to the point that farms and businesses are failing, or postponing a crop for a year (won’t that make us look good while people are rioting for food?). Farming is a skill, and agribusiness is equipment-intensive. It takes years to replace each farm operation that shuts down – and when neighbors expand to farm the affected ground, it makes the cost in ability to produce that much more susceptible to individual farmers getting hurt or ill. Or going broke.

I kind of resent the ‘cowardice’ label, when the story for change hasn’t convinced me that the coward-callers aren’t mistaken.