Rainforest Eco-Hysteria

Post lifted from Cheat-seeking Missiles

BBC reports Brazil's Amazon rainforest deforestation figures: A drop of 50 percent in the last year -- 3,475 sq miles in the last year vs.6,950 sq miles in 2003 to 2004. That seems like a lot, but there are 2.5 million sq miles of rainforest down there, so last year, only .00139 of the Brazilian forest, a bit over one-tenth of one percent of the forest was converted. Of this, a portion was converted to agriculture or development, but much was logged and will grow back. Brazilian environment minister Marina de Silva attributed the drop to greater government control and more emphasis on sustainable development projects.

Environmentalists, of course, don't take good news well. BBC quotes Greenpeace saying it is too soon to talk about a long-term slowing of the destruction of the forest. They warn that illegal loggers may just be biding their time. Greenpeace also warns that a new economic initiative by the Brazilian government is bad news for the rainforests:

In January 2001 the Brazilian government announced its plans for "Avan‡a Brasil" (Advance Brazil). This is a US$40 billion plan to cover much of the Amazon rainforest with 10,000 km of highways, hydroelectric dams, power lines, mines, gas and oilfields, canals, ports, logging concessions and other industrial developments. Scientists predict that these planned developments will lead to the damage or loss of between 33-42 percent of Brazil's remaining Amazon forest.

In other words, they want us to believe that Brazil intends to wipe out up to 1,050,000 square miles of rainforest! Really?!

The United States is not quite three times bigger than the Amazon rainforest, covering 3,537,441 square miles. Of this, almost 1.7 million square miles is either developed or in agriculture. Adusting for the size disparity, if the U.S. were the size of the Amazon rainforest, it would have 1.2 million developed square miles.

We are a heavily industrialized country that's been hard at work at conquering the wilderness for 500 years -- 150 in mechanized earnestness -- and we've just barely accomplished on our entire subcontinent what Greenpeace says may happen to the Brazilian rainforest.

The claim isn't merely mathematically ridiculous. Brazil has a lot of much more developable land outside the rainforest, so whatever resources are poured into developing that country will be spread around, leaving only a portion for the rainforest. We didn't concentrate our development in the Louisianna bayous; the Brazilians won't concentrate it in the rainforest.

Like so many environmentalists fears, this is another that is nothing more than eco-hysteria.




THE IMPACT OF COSMIC DUST ON CLIMATE

Yet another factor missing from the Greenie climate "models" that are used so omnisciently

Cosmic dust from meteors could have a bigger impact on our climate than once thought, scientists say. Researchers at Australia's Davis base in Antarctica, who discovered the vapourised remains of a meteor that disintegrated as it entered the atmosphere, report their findings in the journal Nature today. Lead author Dr Andrew Klekociuk from the Australian Antractic Division in Tasmania says analysis of the dust particles by remote laser sensing after the explosion shows the particles were much larger than expected. "It's previously been thought that when large bodies burn up in the atmosphere ... it turns the body into tiny particles of smoke, but there's been no real observational evidence for that," Klekociuk says. "What we found to our surprise here is that the dust seems to be larger."

The particles were about 1000 times larger than the international team of scientists predicted; they were in the micrometre scale as opposed to the nanometre scale. In sufficient quantity, the particles observed at Davis may have been big enough to potentially influence the weather.

Klekociuk says the house-sized meteor that had been orbiting between Venus and the Earth disintegrated into cosmic dust as it entered the atmosphere in September 2004, south of South Africa and about 7000 kilometres from the Davis base. The explosion released as much energy as the nuclear bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima and produced 1000 tonnes of dust.

Klekociuk says the disintegration of the meteor is unlikely to have had any immediate impact on climate. However, the findings about the size of the particles should cause us to rethink the cumulative effect of cosmic dust globally, he says. Dust has the potential to warm or cool the Earth depending on the size and composition of the particles. It can do this by either scattering or absorbing solar visible light. If light scatters away from the Earth cooling occurs, and if it's absorbed there's warming. It can also trigger cloud nucleation, which occurs what drops of water cling to a speck of dust, eventually causing clouds to form.

The magnesium, iron and silica composition of the meteor dust could also react with chemicals in the atmosphere, potentially eroding the ozone layer. "If the dust from large meteors was much larger it would have a much larger climate forcing potential," Klekociuk says. Analysis of the dust could also predict how the climate would be affected if a meteor were to crash into Earth.

Klekociuk says around 40 tonnes of cosmic dust fall to Earth each day. "If you ran your finger along your window sill at home some of that will actually be meteoric dust," he says. He says the researchers believe they have retrieved some dust from the September event from ice near Davis and will analyse it further.

Source

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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.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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