MONTANA: GREENIES DESTROY HOME-GROWN LUMBER INDUSTRY

And trees are a highly renewable resource! But the Greenies really don't want us to have ANY resources

After years of battling the U.S. Forest Service, environmental groups and fierce international competition, Jim Hurst announced Thursday that Eureka's Owens & Hurst Lumber Co. will permanently close in May. "For our company, the hill has become too steep to climb and the path continues to be littered with obstacles," Hurst said in a statement released to media. "Pure and simple, the anemic Forest Service timber sale program is the overriding factor in our decision to close." Hurst told employees Wednesday of his decision "to fold up the tent." Hurst said the mill's 90 employees "could see the handwriting on the wall. They just thought we could hold out for a bit longer, maybe two or three years."

Others in the community were caught off-guard by the announcement. "Needless to say, we're stunned," Lincoln County Commissioner Rita Windom said. "It will have a significant impact on Lincoln County, and I'm just heartsick, because we just went through this two years ago with the Stimson mill." The Stimson plywood plant in Libby closed at the end of 2002, putting 200 people out of work. When Owens & Hurst closes, just two small wood-products facilities will remain in Lincoln County, considered Montana's timber basket for the last century.

The Owens & Hurst sawmill -- Eureka's largest employer -- generated a gross payroll of $3.6 million last year. But that number doesn't adequately reflect the mill's significance to the community, said Marianne Roose, the county commissioner who represents the north end of Lincoln County. "It's not only the 90 families that are employed there, but what it means to the community as a whole," she said. Owens & Hurst sponsored a collegiate scholarship at the local high school, it purchased 4-H animals at the county fair, it provided summer jobs that allowed college students to return home and it sponsored countless community events and causes.

Hurst said the mill has been financially sound recently, but the outlook for improved timber availability from the Kootenai National Forest is "dismal." The mill has relied heavily on importing burned timber from Canada in recent years, but that source of wood is now drying up, he added.

Hurst said the mill currently has enough Forest Service timber under contract to operate the mill until next winter, but he would prefer to avoid layoffs at Christmas, leaving workers unemployed throughout the winter..... He said the U.S. Forest Service is "dysfunctional and leaderless," responding mostly to the threat of lawsuits from environmental groups rather than the needs of rural communities that have historically relied on national forest lands...... But the main problem has been a lack of predictability in the available timber supply on the Kootenai Forest in recent years, he said.

Kootenai National Forest Supervisor Bob Castaneda acknowledged the problem. "They are entirely right. The ideal situation is for us to be able to provide a steady amount of timber," he said. "We can do our part on that, but if [timber sales are] held up by litigation, then it's out of our control and it's in the courts' hands."

Just two years ago, the bulk of the Kootenai timber program -- and most of the Eureka mill's contracted sales -- were stopped by litigation from the Missoula-based Ecology Center and the Lands Council of Spokane. Hurst and other community leaders organized a bus trip to Missoula and personally appealed for the Ecology Center leadership to back off on the litigation. The group did not, and last year, a federal judge ruled that the timber sales could proceed.

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THE NEW SHRILLER CLIMATE SCARE AGAIN

I mentioned on 3rd. the demolition by Australian earth scientist Warwick Hughes of the recently upgraded climate scare put out by the Greenies in a last ditch attempt to shore up their tottering global warming theory. Below are some further comments on the latest nonsense by Anthony Lupo, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He likens the latest scare to a cartoon

A new study published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature late last week, made headlines with the claim that the climate of our world may be more sensitive than we previously thought. The study, authored by a group based at Britain's Oxford University, indicated the Earth's climate might -- itself too strong a term -- warm as much as 11 degree Celsius (about 20 degree Fahrenheit) under certain scenarios with a doubling of the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2). Coming on the heels of a another report from Britain, Meeting the Climate Challenge, stating that the "point of no return" for forestalling disastrous climate change would be reached in 10 years, the mainstream media made the sensational 11 degree C warming scenario the lead subject.

What to make of this? As the author Michael Crichton (whose recent book State of Fear pillories undue environmental alarmism) jokingly told a Washington audience last week, "The mass media's dictum is to simplify and exaggerate; the same thing Walt Disney told his cartoonists." The unfunny thing is that is exactly what is going on with the study in Nature. Indeed, the authors of the study, more than likely, did not intend to highlight the extreme scenario, which almost doubled a high-end estimate of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Third Assessment Report (TAR) of 6 degrees C (about 11 degree F) by the year 2100.

The real point of the Nature article was more boring. The study created a database involving more computer generated General Circulation Model (GCM) climate simulations than ever before. The authors refer to this collection as a "super-ensemble." They accomplished the task of creating it by allowing volunteers to download a computer program that: 1) brought in the GCM to the volunteer's computer, 2) generated a model simulation and 3) uploaded the results back to Oxford. This procedure allowed the scientists to take advantage of unused computing power available worldwide in order to advance science. That is the newsworthy fact -- the ability to take advantage of unused computer power worldwide -- not the results of running the model simulations.

Indeed, the results actually bolster a point made by scientists who are more skeptical of an impending climate disaster. Prominent "skeptics" have pointed out that the large majority of model-generated climate change scenarios point to a more modest warming on the order of 1.4 - 2.8 degrees C (2 - 5o F) by 2100.

In the Nature article, too, the overwhelming majority of the "super-ensemble" simulations show a global warming of 2-4 degrees C within 15 years of doubling the atmospheric concentration of CO2. This tendency for the majority of the simulations to fall into the lower portion of the projected climate change range is consistent with the critique of the skeptics. What's more, despite the extreme range for future warming (1.9 - 11.5 degree C) reported in the article, the global temperatures in the model stabilize after these 15 years

So, the real news of this study published in Nature consists of those things which generally have gone unreported - that the study was able to make use of unused computer power worldwide, that most model simulations showed somewhat modest temperature changes and that the models showed temperature stability after the warming took place. Those things are a little more complicated to report than a cartoonish 20 degree F warming, thus validating what Crichton jokingly called the media's prime dictum -- to simplify and exaggerate.

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THE NEW ZEALAND GREENS

There is a good survey of some choice idiocy here. He summarizes the Greenie message as follows: "You are all too dim to know how much income and wealth you want to trade off against quality of life or whatever. You need us to do it for you. We have the answers for we are those endowed with the special insight lacking in you mere mortals. Sit back and relax, we will put everything in order and you need not worry about a thing, not a thing".

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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