FORESTRY: A BIG PUBLIC/PRIVATE DIFFERENCE IN CALIFORNIA

On public lands, Greenies prevent reforestation after fires



On one side of the property line, a new forest is taking root -- a glassy-green sea of waist-high pine planted by a timber company after a massive wildfire swept through six years ago. On the other side, on public land managed by the Lassen National Forest, dense mats of brush cling to a landscape dominated by charred dead trees, some standing, others not. "Nobody on the Lassen is proud of that land line," said Duane Nelson, who manages reforestation for the Forest Service in California. "We actually refer to it as our wall of shame."

Reforestation -- the planting and natural regeneration of trees -- is the most critical part of forest management. But across the West, vast parcels of Forest Service land scorched by increasingly catastrophic wildfires have not been replanted. The consequences may linger for centuries. Imagine a Sierra Nevada that yields not gin-clear snowmelt but coffee-colored torrents from eroding canyons. Imagine shrub fields that stretch for miles, so dense that even birds and backpackers avoid them. That is the future Doug Leisz -- a former associate chief for the Forest Service -- envisions unless the agency replants more quickly. "It's an extremely serious matter," said Leisz, 80, who lives near Placerville. "Our forests are too precious to lose this way."

Large fires across the West since 2000 have sparked enormous concern in Congress, state legislatures and forest communities. They have led to huge new investments in firefighting and prevention. But far fewer dollars have been routed to the tricky business that follows a fire: getting the trees growing again. The scope of the challenge can be viewed not only from lonesome backcountry roads, but also in a handful of government reports, including three by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Among their findings:

* While the Forest Service spends 40 percent of its $4.5 billion budget on fire, only a tiny fraction -- about one percent -- goes toward reforestation.

* As wildfire's footprint grows -- this year a record 9 million acres have burned -- the agency's reforestation backlog grows, too. In 2004, the most recent year for which data is available, 900,000 acres of Forest Service terrain slated for planting was left unplanted, up from 722,000 in 2000.

* Even where trees are planted, the agency often has no money to care for them. As a result, young stands grow into shadowy thickets where dead limbs dangle like wicks into brush -- an invitation to more fire. Nationwide, 2 million acres of planted ground need thinning, an area three times the size of Yosemite National Park.

"I'm disappointed. I'm saddened. I'm frustrated," said Gil Driscoll, a retired mechanical engineer who lives near one overcrowded plantation in the Plumas National Forest. This is not the first time the Forest Service has faced a reforestation backlog. In the '70s, an even bigger swath of land -- about 3 million acres -- needed replanting, largely because of logging. Pressured by Congress, the Forest Service chipped away at that backlog, paying the bill not with tax dollars but with money made from selling timber. Much of the backlog evaporated.

In those days, "reforestation could be planned and scheduled," Joel Holstrop, deputy chief of the Forest Service, told Congress last year. "Much of this predictability is lost when the principal causal agent creating reforestation needs" is wildfire. And wildfire -- fed by a massive buildup of woody debris, the legacy of a century of firefighting -- is gobbling up more terrain than ever, and burning in destructive ways. Big, old, seed-producing pines that have weathered fire for centuries are dying in today's super-novas. Making things worse, the timber industry dollars that paid for reforestation in the past have diminished as environmental lawsuits throttle the sale of Forest Service timber. The upshot: Forest Service terrain that needs replanting is growing rapidly, but money for reforestation is not. "This is a swing back to the dark side," said Leisz, the retired Forest Service associate chief. "The backlog is getting bigger. It's growing like a cancer."....

Yet there are few better places to see the consequences of the agency's failure to replant than in the expanse of brush and charred timber in the upper reaches of the Feather River, where the Storrie fire blackened 56,000 acres in 2000. Obstacles to reforestation were numerous. Money was tight. In the Lassen National Forest, where 27,000 acres had burned, 21,000 acres were set aside as a natural area. They could not be touched. But Lassen officials determined that 1,100 acres could be replanted and planned to pay for it by logging trees killed in the blaze. So began more than a year of planning -- required by the National Environmental Policy Act and other laws. Then, in 2002, five environmental groups appealed, alleging the Storrie restoration project would hurt the area by damaging water quality and spotted owl habitat.

"There is no evidence ... that sensitive species will not be further fragmented and that (habitat) connectivity will not be compromised by this plan," wrote Patricia Puterbaugh of the Lassen Forest Preservation Group, in one of the appeals. In August 2002, a Forest Service appeals officer ruled the project could go ahead. By then, the trees were starting to rot. Timber companies showed little interest. Eventually, only 234 acres were replanted at a cost of $266,000. And the job was paid for not with salvage revenue, but with tax dollars. "What is causing our failure to get trees in the ground is delay," said Nelson, the reforestation manager. The key to getting fires reforested is to move quickly. Time is not our ally."

Bush administration officials are backing a House bill aimed at speeding up the process. "If we have to hug every tree and carry it out with six pallbearers, restoration work is going to become prohibitively expensive," said Mark Rey, undersecretary for natural resources and the environment at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Forest Service.....

Much more here






IS THE GLOBAL WARMING DEBATE REALLY 'OVER'?

Over the past week, activists, scientists and politicians have taken to the airwaves to declare the debate on global warming over. The established position is that global warming is clearly occurring and it is also clearly caused by human activities. But what does it really mean for a scientific debate to be "over." Scientifically, what this means is that all available data (or very nearly all available data) relating to the subject of the debate have been collected, analyzed and interpreted, the result of which yields one single, inescapable conclusion. Some other scientific ideas for which the debate is "over" include: gravity (at least the physical phenomenon on planet Earth), the Laws of Thermodynamics (again, at least here on Earth) and the Ideal Gas Law (PV=nRT). Add to this list Human-caused Global Warming!

In truth, scientific ideas must pass through three levels of certainty before they are accepted as scientific truths. The first and least certain level is the hypothesis. A hypothesis is merely the formal statement of an idea - for instance, "Sunlight causes plants to grow." To test this hypothesis, a scientist would conduct an experiment that controls all other variables (water, minerals, etc.) and subjects plants to varying amounts of light. The scientist would then measure and analyze the growth rates of the plants receiving different amounts of light. From this conclusions are drawn. If differences in growth are detected, the scientist can then conclude that sunlight influences growth. However, one thing that is frequently lost on the non-science public is that these experiments must be repeated, many times, in order to verify results. It is possible in any experiment that the scientists' results occurred because of some error, mistake in experimental design or merely by chance. As a result, experiments are supposed to be repeated to verify the results and interpretations.

Ideas subjected to this type of repeated experimentation that are continually supported by the data and evidence graduate to the next highest level of certainty in science, the theory. Some current scientific theories include: Evolution, Relativity and until recently, Global Warming. Theories are scientific ideas for which all data collected to date support the idea as truth. This is not to say that some piece of data won't someday be discovered that refutes the theory. It is merely an expression of increased confidence in the validity of the idea by the scientific community.

This brings us to the newly minted Law of Global Warming. Laws are merely theories that have been supported so continuously over time that their validity is no longer questioned. Again, this is not to say that some piece of data won't someday emerge that refutes the law, it is simply the scientific community's highest expression of confidence in a tested idea. The debate is "over" for most established scientific laws.

The declaration that the debate on global warming is over by activists, politicians and liberal scientists is indicative more of their contempt of the public than it is a result of vigorous scientific examination. Global warming proponents rely upon the publics' lack of scientific training and experience to force their agendas into the political arena and then establish their acceptance. When confronted with the reality that there are scientists still in the scientific community who 1) are not convinced that global warming is occurring for a variety of valid reasons and 2) are not convinced that humans have anything to do with global warming if it is occurring, the agenda-driven dismiss these dissenters by asserting that they are so few in number their objections are meaningless.

In the 1500s, the debate was also "over" concerning the position of the Earth in the heavens. Almost every scientist, school and government accepted as fact that the celestial bodies (the Sun in particular) revolved around the Earth. There existed only one notable dissenter at the time, Copernicus. It took more than 100 years before the debate was reopened, the political results of which forced Galileo to recant his support of the theory in 1616, before finally publishing his studies in support of the theory in 1632. Such is the danger of declaring any scientific debate "over."

For honest, truth-seeking scientists, vigorous debate over scientific ideas is never really over. Scientists are supposed to seek truth first, as indicated by the scientific data collected. The pursuit of truth and data is never supposed to end for the scientist. The declaration that the global warming debate is over says more about global warming proponents' agenda than it does about the science of global warming. What are the proponents of the theory afraid that honest science is going to find out about global warming? Why are they reluctant to let the scientific dissenters voice their opinion? And perhaps most importantly, why are they determined to prevent an honest public discourse that permits non-scientists to formulate their own opinions regarding the theory?

Source




MORE ON ENVIRONMENTALISM AS A RELIGION

Part of a review of Monbiot's "Heat":

Given its near-universal acceptance how is it that the belief that over-consumption threatens life itself has failed to impact on behaviour? It is not that people have failed to curb their consumption sufficiently. On the contrary, consumption, and specifically energy consumption continues to rise year on year, individually and collectively. If the leaders of Friends of the Earth and Stop the Climate Chaos are frequent fliers, so are the rest of us: frequent drivers, who leave our televisions on standby and our houses un-insulated.

To George Monbiot, this sounds like hypocrisy, and he is right. But he misunderstands the relationship between ecological thought and consumption. That climate change threatens the planet is not a belief that leads to a restriction in consumption. On the contrary, one could state as a law of politics that the relationship between green thinking and increasing consumption is not contradictory, but complementary. The greater role that consumption plays in our lives, the more we are predisposed to worrying about the planet. Ecology is to the twenty-first century what Christianity was to the Victorians. The harder those patricians blessed the meek on a Sunday, the more viciously they exploited them from Monday to Saturday. Green thinking is the religion of the consumer age. As sure as night follows day, the very people that are most preoccupied with the environment will increase their consumption from one year to the next.

We know this because environmental activism and beliefs are also stronger among the better paid and educated - the very people who command more of life's resources. The stream of advice on ethical consumerism does not result in restricted consumption, but more complex, which is to say more costly consumption, like the ethical tourism that Monbiot denounces.

The environmental belief pattern fulfils all the demands of a secular religion, elevating the elect few above the common herd of vulgar, unthinking consumers; creating secular rituals, like fastidious eating, and garbage-sorting, as well as a full calendar of public worship, or protest. And like all religions, ecology has its eschatology, its end-time, the belief in the coming apocalypse, or to give it its modern name, climate change.

The motivation for the book is the proposition that if carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rises above the current level of 380 parts per million by 2030, combining with other `greenhouse gases', it will trap the sun's rays in the atmosphere raising temperatures by two and six degrees Celsius - causing irreversible and catastrophic climate change. Melting polar ice caps will raise sea levels flooding coastal cities and towns; Africa, Australia and the Mediterranean will suffer frequent droughts; grain yields will collapse leading to famine; malaria will increase; species will become extinct.

But Monbiot says he is trying to avoid despair. The world can avoid the disaster if we reduce the carbon given off in energy production and other industrial processes, by 60 per cent, so that each of us produces no more than 0.33 tonnes of carbon by 2030 (with an intermediate target of 0.8 tonnes by 2012). But with energy use highest in the developed world, our target here is a 90 per cent reduction. The book sets out, in broad outline, how the saving can be made, supported with case studies on domestic energy use, the energy industry itself, transport, retail and concrete production.

It is the attempt to realise the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, or to achieve a balance with nature, that is Monbiot's error. Like religious belief, environmental thinking is not supposed to be resolved. Rather, the belief persists precisely because it is the mirror image of consumerism. Without consumerism, environmentalism would cease to exist. Some Victorian religious sects made a similar mistake, trying to create religious communes in the New World, or sometimes retreating into the forests to escape worldly sin. Generally they ended up quarrelling and destitute. Once realised, all the absurdities of the belief system become writ large.

So it is with George Monbiot's blueprint. In attempting to show that the necessary reduction in carbon emissions can be achieved Monbiot is forced again and again towards the one likely source of resource efficiency, greater technological development. Hence he is forced reluctantly to concede that nuclear power is a more plausible source of clean energy than biomass; that supermarkets' internet delivery services, an example of the advantage of industrial concentration, could reduce energy use. Monbiot explains very well that rules on energy efficient house-building would have little impact because the rate at which Britain's housing stock is replaced is glacially slow - but fails to understand that the low level of new building that leaves us all in energy-inefficient Victorian houses is a direct consequence of environmental constraints on housing developments.

In every instance, however, the ethical meaning of ecology, its romantic protest against modernity, reasserts itself. This is clearest in Monbiot's predictable hostility to the car, which he associates with a vicious libertarianism, in which motorists perceive society, pedestrians, cyclists, road-humps, as a barrier. But this only illustrates Monbiot's prejudices. Society is represented by pedestrians and cyclists. But drivers are society, too. Indeed, with car journeys making up 85 per cent of all distance travelled, they are a much greater share of society than cyclists, making up 0.5 per cent. Heat follows the conventional calculation of the costs of motoring unrepresented in the price of petrol, like health care and traffic policing. But it is wholly ignorant of the un-reckoned advantages of motoring, like greater mobility, and sociability.

Though wreathed in statistics, Heat fails to reckon the basic contribution to human existence of consumerism and motorisation, as if these could be tossed away without severely limiting its quality and duration. Take a look inside your fridge: more than nine-tenths of what you see there was delivered to the shop or supermarket by road, as indeed were the goods in your home. The organic vegetables and the spare parts that keep your bicycle moving were not delivered by bicycle, but by a man in a white van. Monbiot worries about declining agricultural yields and pressure on farmland, but fails to acknowledge that motorisation and fertilisers have massively increased output, bringing down prices, and releasing more land every year from cultivation.

Monbiot opens Heat with a quote from environmental activist Mayer Hillman on what a society that cut greenhouse gases by 80 per cent would look like: `a very poor third world country'. Monbiot aims to disprove this argument, by showing that reduction could be achieved without reducing us to penury, but he fails because he does not understand the extent to which our quality of life is dependent upon the very technologies that he considers destructive. Monbiot protests at `skeptical environmentalist' Bjorn Lomborg's economic calculation of how money could be better spent solving world problems than wasted imposing restrictions on manufacturing output. This calculation he thinks is immoral. What price can you put on the subsequent deaths from malnutrition in Ethiopia caused by global warming? But Monbiot singularly fails to recognise that his restrictions would also have a human cost.

Those countries with low carbon dioxide emissions, like Ethiopia and Bangladesh, are also those with high infant mortality, low life expectancy and poor quality of life. To recreate their levels of energy consumption in the developed world would be to recreate their social conditions also. What is more, no across-the-board reduction in living standards has ever been achieved without social conflict and violent repression. Alongside the depressions of the 1930s and 1970s came police brutality. Monbiot's ideal, wartime rationing, was achieved by terrifying the population with the threat of foreign invasion and militarising society. But Monbiot would reply that all of this is immaterial, because it is not possible to reproduce western standards of living in the developing world, because of the absolute limit of catastrophic climate change.

But even here, despite its welter of statistics, Heat is unconvincing. Monbiot calls his critics climate change deniers, not balking at the comparison with Holocaust denial. Anyone who does not support his linear connection of industrial carbon emissions, to the greenhouse effect, to climate change, ending in environmental catastrophe is deluded. But this is not the language of science, whose findings are always provisional. More to the point, though, even where it can be shown that industrial output has had an effect on the earth's temperature, the extrapolation from that to necessary ecological disaster is all entirely speculative. All the changes modelled are projected into the future, failing Karl Popper's test of falsifiability. And while there is a small industry dedicated to modelling the negative effects of climate change, any positive effects are excluded out of hand.

Monbiot accuses air-travellers of killing future generations of Africans, through the Malaria and famine that he says will increase because of climate change. But he ignores the Africans dying of malaria today because environmentalists persuaded the World Health Organisation to ban DDT there or the Africans suffering food shortages already because environmentalists got the United Nations not to fund the use of chemical fertilisers in aid programmes.

The gloomy warnings say more about their authors than they do about the future. We have been warned by environmentalists that by 1997 one-third of the population will be stricken with `human-BSE', that genetically modified organisms will enter the food-chain altering our DNA, even that, as Nature reported in the 1970s we are on the brink of a new Ice Age. The belief in impending disaster arises out of the psychological need for an eschatology, a secular version of Kingdom Come, that will under-gird the grandstanding of moralists like George Monbiot. Like the Dostoevsky character who worries that `if there is no God, how can I be captain', Monbiot has to believe in impending catastrophe so that he can denounce the unbelievers and weak of conviction. But there is a less painful way to overcome the clash between modern lifestyles and environmental thinking, and that is to abandon the latter, not the former.

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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