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The "Global Warming's a crock" or "Global Warming is real" thread.

amicus said:
KC:
You are such a devout believer KC, that I doubt one can ever break through your faith based mentality concerning your immersion in 'big brother', be it King, Baron or Pope, or the EPA, to give you guidance in human affairs.
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No... I only "believe" that there are serious problems which can ONLY be solved by collective, e.g. governmental action and control. Sorry. I wish it weren't true but it is. I am a believer in the free market system as much as possible but the chaotic nature of it just goes off the track sometimes, as 99% of us realize. Almost by definition, these "problems" (such as pollution) effecting all or even some citizens occurred within the free market system..... So if this system somehow "automatically" fixed things... there would be no problems! And sticking your head in the sand and wishing they would go away just isn’t helpful.

amicus said:
That an individual or a corporate gathering of individuals has a codified, protect right to own property is not only of great relevance to the so called 'global climate change' farce, it is essential and seminal.
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What??? See… this is what I am talking about. You keep saying that silly stuff over and over…. What the hell do the “codified” corporate laws and regulations (Gee…. Something else generated and regulated by the “government” to solve the problem of how to protect individuals from liability claims so they can engage in business) have to do with global climate change??? You never quite get around to addressing just what this relevance is.

amicus said:
Your fancifull flights from reality as you envision a perfectly managed society, from above, of course, unfortunately sacrifices the individual human rights contained in our founding documents as a nation; as do most of the 'usual suspects' when they foment their usual collective dreams.
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For the last fucking time. My hommies and I on the commune treasure our human rights as individuals and fight mightily against efforts by others to use OUR government to intrude into our bedrooms, our mail and our dope stash, etc.

You keep throwing around this crap that I or anybody else here is in favor of some totalitarian state. Far from it. But I live in the REAL world. It’s a place where, sometimes, problems by their very nature require some “collective” governmental action or attention.

amicus said:
Had the courts acted to protect the property of individuals in the style and manner they are authorized by law to do, then the first puff of polluted smoke drifting over an adjacent property owner would give way to due course of action the through litigation.
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Now……. We have it. We will use the courts and litigation to settle everything. You want to live in LAWYER HEAVEN! And if the courts decide, (as they did, actually) that as a free enterprise there is no legal impediment to them choking your family on their fumes…. Then I guess you are just well and truly fucked. Damn… if only they had an EPA in Amicusland….. oh well. Sorry. Try using gas masks.

amicus said:
However, since government agencies approved and licensed that commercial entity and gave it free liberty to pollute, there was and is no recourse and government licensed coal fired plants continue to belch pollution over the countryside.
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Do you actually read this stuff before you post it? Don’t you appreciate the petard that you placed squarely up your own ass?

I guess I thought I had heard everything….. but NOW, pollution is caused by the government approving it. Sighhh…. And the money making enterprise that actually generated the pollution? They are innocent bystanders?

Of course, it is true that they did permit it in the past … but I wonder why they started permitting and approving anything… I think it was in return for the legal monopoly that John D and his kin were desirous of. Are you seriously suggesting these enterprises would NOT have generated pollution had the governmental agencies did not existed?

And it is true, these plants were approved and received operating permits to belch smoke in the past…But no longer, your absurdness. no longer. They are required to have scrubbers, NOx controls etc.. and that is a good thing.

And that change did NOT come about as a result of Ann Rand and reactionary apologists such as yourself.. It came about because we the people voted in politicians to make it happen because we were tired of breathing that crap.

amicus said:
Now, stretch your little cookie crumb mind and extrapolate back and forward and try to entertain one small property owner filing suit to shut down the coal fired monster that violates his rights
with the full police power of the Courts behind him protecting his property rights.
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You are right… all that dope makes me stupid. And this vodka they keep forcing down my throat kills a lot of brain cells I obviously can’t afford to lose.

But those precious few synapses which continue to fire off…. Well I could swear you just described the Sierra Club…. And all those environmental maniacs I thought you were opposed to! I’ll be damned! You are a closet environmentalist!!!!! Wait until Rush hears about this!!! You won’t be allowed in the clubhouse anymore…….

amicus said:
Since y'all seem to believe that those belching smoke stacks are in some way responsible for, omg, global warming, ala Prince Gore, you wouldn't have a leg to stand on and you would be forced, if you cared at all, to actually study global weather patterns and root causes.
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Obviously this is serious dope I have been smoking because your statement just seems not to make ANY sense. Let me try to remember this logic thing…. “If A is B, then C is D”….. nope. Can’t sort it out. You will just have to be patient and explain that to me again.

I gather you are saying that the belching black smoke (actually it more like light grey now) with lots of CO2 is NOT responsible for any global warming…. But you think we should go to court and stop the belching CO2 smoke producers because it drifts over your property…. So….

Whether it is having any impact or not on the climate, we will not have to worry because it will not be there!!! I get it!

That’s a solution, I suppose. A little over the top but if we can get everyone signed on…. Hell yeah. Uhhh where do we get the power from? Just turn out the lights?

amicus said:
Thas, why, in brief, individual property rights are relevant to the discussion.
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You know….. I guess I do understand now. You think we can just go to court because the air is your personal property and somebody is fucking with it. And the court will fix it. Or not. Thanks for that valuable contribution to this learned debate.

I have this vision of you dressed in an Air Force Generals uniform as the army closes in and you are explaining why you sent a nuke to Russia….”the loss of my precious bodily fluids and personal property”….

Damn that’s some good shit.

-KC
 
No... I only "believe" that there are serious problems which can ONLY be solved by collective, e.g. governmental action and control.
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Okay KC, educate me. Which of those 'collectives' demonstrated the ability and foresight to solve problems?

Was it the Soviet Union? Perhaps Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy, maybe Communist China? Which 'collective system' do you pimp for anyway?

I don't mind that you haven't a clue about human freedom, few people, at least on the forum seem to.

I trust you will find happiness abrogating your rights as an individual on your happy little commune.

Amicus...
 
amicus said:
Okay KC, educate me. Which of those 'collectives' demonstrated the ability and foresight to solve problems?

Was it the Soviet Union? Perhaps Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy, maybe Communist China? Which 'collective system' do you pimp for anyway?

I don't mind that you haven't a clue about human freedom, few people, at least on the forum seem to.

I trust you will find happiness abrogating your rights as an individual on your happy little commune.

Amicus...
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Since you asked.... and I have told you about a 100 times... It is this somewhat imperfect USA collective thing that I subscribe to complete with Social Security, Medicare, Food Stamps, SEC, IRS (shudder), GAO,OSHA and the EPA, etc....warts and all.

What? if anything in reality, do YOU subscribe to?

I am also fond of any number of other "western" and even some "eastern" democracies which all seem to have different and varying degrees of governmental programs. Some have better ideas on specific programs than we do.

And I am open to suggestions on how to improve things. But make them specific and rational. Please!

Actually, on the way to work this morning here in the heart of Russia.... A model for YOUR vision of utopia complete with an unbridled free market and certainly uncontrolled "personal property" occurred to me....

Yeltsin's Russia. Man... you would have the loved the place back then....Amicus.

Hardly any government to speak of... (the could barely collect any taxes!)
Totally in the hands of aggressive young entrepreneurs (they were called "oligarchs” and “mafia" here) Where were you???? And….. if you had enough thugs and guns… you could actually hold on to your “personal property”….. Reminiscent of our own government back in the late 19th century.

Oh, and to answer your question... we all just vote on things in the commune, Amicus. We abrogate nothing. We each retain the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We did agree to all chip in on the dope and share it, however. We got a better deal that way.

So….. What or where do you subscribe to?

Hmmm?

-KC
 
Hmmm? I will start as you ended.

Russia is a large country with a long history. It was not a focal point of my education, but I did pick up a few things along the way.

As with every other place in the world, America being the anomaly, Russia has a mixed history of conquest and occupation. Russia, like China, is somewhat unique in the history of humankind and the chronology is fascinating.

I made exception to America on purpose, of course, to be more accurate, I should expand that to both the North and South American continents, being the 'new world' and not a part of world history until long after the main events in Europe, Middle Europe and Asia.

Personally, I subscribe to nothing and no one. I was born American and I am American, but were I born elsewhere, I would strive to become, 'American' because of the concepts that formed this new nation a scant three hundred years ago.

I am not sure how to tell you to describe what I 'subscribe' to, other that I am a radical for human freedom.

I am not a politician nor an advocate of any political system other than absolute human freedom.

I am not interested in compromise or Utilitarian solutions to problems, rather I am an advocate of individual human rights in both a political and a philosophical sense. I am not a practical person in any way, nor do I have patience or concern for those who are.

When you or anyone advocates giving up human freedom of choice for the 'greater good', what ever you define that to be, I am in immediate and uncompromising opposition.

You folks will have to figure how to compromise and ameliorate your differences; I will continue to advocate human individual freedom as the ideal to which I strive to understand and implement.

Of course, I did not just pull that philosophy out of my ass on a whim, it is, as I comprehend it, the ultimate stage that the whole of humanity has reached after millenia of experimentation.

I wish to take it a step further.

Amicus...
 
amicus said:
Hmmm? I will start as you ended.

Russia is a large country with a long history. It was not a focal point of my education, but I did pick up a few things along the way.

As with every other place in the world, America being the anomaly, Russia has a mixed history of conquest and occupation. Russia, like China, is somewhat unique in the history of humankind and the chronology is fascinating.

I made exception to America on purpose, of course, to be more accurate, I should expand that to both the North and South American continents, being the 'new world' and not a part of world history until long after the main events in Europe, Middle Europe and Asia.

Personally, I subscribe to nothing and no one. I was born American and I am American, but were I born elsewhere, I would strive to become, 'American' because of the concepts that formed this new nation a scant three hundred years ago.

I am not sure how to tell you to describe what I 'subscribe' to, other that I am a radical for human freedom.

I am not a politician nor an advocate of any political system other than absolute human freedom.

I am not interested in compromise or Utilitarian solutions to problems, rather I am an advocate of individual human rights in both a political and a philosophical sense. I am not a practical person in any way, nor do I have patience or concern for those who are.

When you or anyone advocates giving up human freedom of choice for the 'greater good', what ever you define that to be, I am in immediate and uncompromising opposition.

You folks will have to figure how to compromise and ameliorate your differences; I will continue to advocate human individual freedom as the ideal to which I strive to understand and implement.

Of course, I did not just pull that philosophy out of my ass on a whim, it is, as I comprehend it, the ultimate stage that the whole of humanity has reached after millenia of experimentation.

I wish to take it a step further.

Amicus...
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Ahhh Got it. You are fond of giving myself and everyone else here labels... so here are a couple for you .... Anarchist and Nihilist. I can't tell which you are... you seem to vacilate in the name of "human freedom". That's cool. there is room for you... not in our commune, of course.

Thank you. But please stop calling yourself an American because it never was and never will be whatever it is this never never land you thing is that you are not sure of.

-KC
 
amicus said:
...I should expand that to both the North and South American continents, being the 'new world' and not a part of world history until long after the main events in Europe, Middle Europe and Asia...
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In a vain attempt to bring you two back on track:

The "New World" is and always has been part and parcel of the world's climate system and what happens there eventually eventually affects the weather/climate of the rest of the world whether there were any "real people" around to document whatever happened.

The (pre-columbian) peoples of the New World seem to have done a bit better at not changing the world's weather patterns than Europeans, Africans, or Asians, but they did have some adverse effect on climate and ecology -- even without access to modern technologies like the wheel.

The pre-columbian world-wide effects from the New World do end to be of the "Natural Disaster" variety, (like Mt Mazama changing it's name to Crater Lake) and Mother Nature has reclaimed whatever pre-columbian slash and burn deforestation they managed -- flint axes and straw baskets just don't leave the lasting scars that bulldozers and chain-saws do. :p

There isn't much pre-columbian data on what actual effects the formation of the Sahara had on New World weather patterns/climate, but theoretical models suggest that the Sahara is largely responsible for a large part of the "modern" hurricane pattern, which hammers the Southeast and Gulf Coasts with late summer storms.

Actually, I don't thik I've ever seen any mention of any studies that attempted to corelate "prehistoric" events in one part of the world with changes in another -- except for the vulcanologists tacking the Tooba super-volacano erruption that may have triggered the Little Ice Age -- which contrary to some opinions expressed in this thread WAS a world-wide phenomenon.

The Tooba super-volcano, Mt Mazama/Crater Lake, Yellowstone Super-volcano, the Chixalub asteroid are well-studied natural events -- although with little real climatology involved -- but I haven't seen anything about possible widespread or global effects lesser "events" except a cryptic allegation that the Great Wall Of China disrupted weather patterns as far away as Moscow when it was being constructed.

I don't think science has enough real information on prehistoric climate and global weather patterns for reliable extrapolaions about our future global climate -- predictions reliable enough to be worrisome, but not nearly as relible as some would have us believe.
 
ha!

amicus I am a radical for human freedom.

with nothing to say about arbitrary detention and torture as practiced by his own country. :p
 
Pure said:
amicus I am a radical for human freedom.

with nothing to say about arbitrary detention and torture as practiced by his own country. :p
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Amicus should be up for war crimes the way he tortures logic.
 
note to weird h.

thank you for your response. you make some good points, and tell a good story. i will comment on a couple points and your overal approach.

WH What I'm saying is that the "pristine nature" of Old Growth Forests is in large part a figment of people's imaginations.

With very few exceptions, like California Redwoods and Joshua Trees, Old Growth forests are are the managed care nursing homes of "Forestry Mangement" -- they're filled with old, dying, and often downright dangerously weak trees that are at or past they're natural lifespans. The only ecological reason for keeping most "Old Growth" stands un-exploited is to allow the elderly a place to "die with dignity."

P: it's a clever metaphor and slick rhetorical move with the obvious implication of euthanasia, cut' em down and destroy 'em. it might sway someone unless they ask, "what exactly is wrong with dying and dead trees?" and if, ftsoa, we assume there are somehow too many, what is it that prevents removing some of them, and leaving the rest of the 'old growth.'

you present as spokesperson for a hygienic modern forest with no dead or dying trees; decay that is part of a natural cycle, is somehow evil to you, as compared to making the tree into lumber when it's 30 or 50 years old. i fear for the "elderly"--trees or persons-- in your area.

-----

as to the other excerpts below: let me get this straight: in part A you argue that a terrible and stupid thing the sierra club did is prevent 300 GPM fire fighting equipment into a particular wilderness stand, resulting in burning 30% of a particular area.

in part B, you argue that burns, including burns of everything [i.e. after clear cutting], down to the ground, are part of a 'natural cycle'; and you clearly imply that it's craziness for envirogroups oppose such burns, as presumably they generally do, according to you.
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more generally, and in several of your postings:

as to laws, you seem to argue that because some big companies, according to you, are model eco-citizens, that the (relevant) laws and (related) agencies are fit to be junked as bungling and meddling. it's sort of like arguing that since the senior citizens in my mother's building rarely commit crimes, the local police department should be closed down.

further, you suggest that not only is it unnecessary for the public, through its agencies, to tell your favored corporations anything (by way of limiting action), but that it's somehow wrong to do so; since after all, every "resource" * (=tree) is there to be (benevolently) exploited (=cut down for timber).
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*outside of a handful of long-existing 'national wilderness areas.'


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weird h said in part(s)
There is no particular reason why a law decreeing that no internal combustion engine or fire-making device -- like a hiker's propane camp-stove -- can be permitted with the boundaries of a designated area. The US has several such places that are designated "National Wilderness Areas." I think they are a fine and noble idea as long as the interpretation of the restriction isn't taken to ignorant and destructive extremes:

For Example:

[part A]
In August 1967, Lightening started three small fires in the Jefferson Wilderness Area in Oregon. The USDA/FS immediately dispatched Smoke Jumpers from their base in Pendleton, OR and they dropped three groups near the fires. Because of near drought conditions that year, the Smoke Jumpers soon radioed for reinforcements and some gasoline powered high capacity water pumps.

The Sierra Club eavesdropped on the call for reinforcements and before the USDA/FS could pack the pumps for an air-drop had an injunction citing the "no internal combution engines in a wilderness area" clause.

[…]
Those three minor lightening strikes eventually wound up burning something like 30% of the Jefferson Wilderness Area and about a million 1967 dollars worth of country homes and luxury vacation cabins -- this was a fire that three gasoline powered 300GPM water pumps could very well have stopped at three very small clearings burned into the wilderness area.

---
[Part B]


Part of a forest's natural cycle is Fire. Fire is necessary for disinfecting diseased sections and for some species seeds to germinate. That's one of the reasons that the "slash" (or waste wood) in clear-cut units used to be routinely burned in a controlled manner during the cold, moist months.
 
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??

ami I am not interested in compromise or Utilitarian solutions to problems, rather I am an advocate of individual human rights

who has nothing to say about US torture, a practice defended on utilitarian grounds --prevents terrorist attacks on the US.
 
Pure said:
as to the other excerpts below: let me get this straight: in part A you argue that a terrible and stupid thing the sierra club did is prevent 300 GPM fire fighting equipment into a particular wilderness stand, resulting in burning 30% of a particular area.

in part B, you argue that burns, including burns of everything [i.e. after clear cutting], down to the ground, are part of a 'natural cycle'; and you clearly imply that it's craziness for envirogroups oppose such burns, as presumably they generally do, according to you.
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Apparently you're too stupid to recognise the difference beween Mother Nature's "burn them all and let god sort it out" wildfires and controlled burns that reproduce the beneficial effects with minimal risk to mankind's works.

The rest of your twisted assertions are simply too rude and insulting to bother with and you've destroyed another interesting discussion by resorting to them.

Ciao.
 
don't let the envirohobgoblins get ya tonite weird harold! :rose:
 
notes to weird h.

hope you survived halloween!

1) the difficulty of debating or discussing with you, weird h, is that you often debate from "facts" to which you alone are privy. see for instance an account below of the aftermath of the Jefferson fire, whose occurance you disapprove. controlled burns by timber companies, you apparently do approve.

2) generally you subscribe to a 'man over nature' view, and a view that natural processes can be better managed by man. e.g. the decay process in an old growth forest offends you, but the _cleaner_ processes in a man managed forest that reaches 50 years of age and is cut down is somehow superior, in ecological terms.

3) you waver in terms of your reference for timber management. rather than simply say, "this is the logging companies' land, they simply pursue their (human) interests to get the 'harvest' of timber" you claim their practices, for reasons you don't state, have superior "ecological value."

i will concede that sometimes "man" does well to intervene, eg there are efforts to save niagara falls by preventing the toll of erosion that moves the fall upstream.

SOMETIMES, i can see intervening to shore up a cliff where there are houses atop. however, i think one should be clear. we are affirming that the home owners' (human) interests are to be honored RATHER than "mother natures" processes. one should be clear about human preferences and interests being the overriding factor and not claim that somehow keeping the cliff there is more sound as *ecological* policy or an *ecological value.*


3) you apparently waver on the important issue of legal process and "rule by law."

WH: In August 1967, Lightening [sic] started three small fires in the Jefferson Wilderness Area in Oregon. The USDA/FS immediately dispatched Smoke Jumpers from their base in Pendleton, OR and they dropped three groups near the fires. Because of near drought conditions that year, the Smoke Jumpers soon radioed for reinforcements and some gasoline powered high capacity water pumps.

The Sierra Club eavesdropped on the call for reinforcements and before the USDA/FS could pack the pumps for an air-drop had an injunction citing the "no internal combution engines in a wilderness area" clause.
--

Pure: You are stating that, with a law or regulation duly on the books, the Sierra Club went to court-- in Oregon-- and obtained an injunction.

You find this objectionable. The judge gave the injunction.

Was he removed for misconduct?

Was the law or regulations changed? I would suppose not. So you are basically saying to hell with it, and whichever administrator or officials are responsible for it.

At the same time, if an environment group disobeyed a law or regulation, let's say against trespassing, or building a platform way high up in a tree, you'd be all "law and order". Respect the judge's injunction, etc.

There are, of course, bad laws on the books. However it seems to me that if you get to disrespect those laws, you might concede the same right--civil disobedience-- to environmental groups.

Further, here the Sierra Club *followed the law*; they were not civilly disobedient, and it rankles you that they got their injunction. Had Weyerhaeuser obtained and injunction kicking the Sierra Club persons out of the forest area in question you'd be gung ho for the injunction, and castigating the scofflaws, even if they went to jail.



casper wyoming, star tribune
http://www.casperstartribune.net/ar.../wyoming/8c2fca97717cf83f872570560020fce6.txt

Wilderness area has corners of wonder despite scars from fire



By ROY GAULT
The Statesman Journal Monday, August 08, 2005
SALEM, Ore. (AP) -- The trail was hot and dusty, the shade eliminated and the thick stands of lodgepole pine and mountain hemlock in large part obliterated by the B and B Complex fire of 2003.

"Then you round a little bend, and Three Fingered Jack is right there and everything is perfect," said Hilary White, her face reflecting her amazement. "Nothing could be more perfect."

There are diamonds, but also a lot of lumps of coal, in the Mount Jefferson Wilderness, 80 miles east of Salem in the Cascades.

"The Mount Jeff has changed a lot, a third of it having burned three summers ago," said Bill Sullivan, a Salem native who made major revisions in one of his most popular hiking books this year after assessing the fire damage.
"A huge area burned, and you worry about some of your favorite places," he said. "The fire has turned a lot of it quite hellish, but there's an angel watching over some corners, and you can still find these places."

Sullivan has reduced several hikes to mere listings in the back of "100 Hikes in the Central Oregon Cascades," while moving others up to positions of prominence as a result of the fire.

He began his post-fire reconnaissance by cross-country skiing into the wilderness in the winter of 2003-04 and since has hiked all the trails.

"Hiking in on the Pacific Crest Trail from Santiam Pass, it's a moonscape, a hike I've decided to give a rest," Sullivan said. "But a lot of hikes on the east side of the wilderness start out in trees that have been hammered, then you get to places like Carl Lake and it's as pretty as ever. You can hike to Table Lake, where you've left the crowds behind, and you're deep in the Mount Jefferson Wilderness, still with creeks and meadows and monkey flower. There still are places like this. It just takes a little looking."

Or in the case of Sullivan's book, some reading and some map consultation.

On a hot July morning, a Sierra Club group from Corvallis hiked in from Jack Lake to take a look at Canyon Creek Meadows, a virtual Garden of Eden at the east base of Three Fingered Jack.

Along the way, Bob O'Brien examined the snags, the seedlings and the wildflowers, including a detour to snag-encircled Wasco Lake, proclaiming, "It's actually pretty, in its own bizarre way."

One thing the fire has done in isolated areas is induce the proliferation of wildflowers.

"I've never seen the penstemon like this, so thick," said Bob Frenkel, a retired Oregon State University professor of plant ecology. "Look at that beargrass. It's wonderful."

Frenkel was in heaven as he walked along, identifying Mariposa lily, cats ears, Washington lily, scarlet gilia and queen cup bead lily.

The fire has induced extra vigor in many of the plants.

"Smell that lupine? I've never smelled lupine like that," hike leader Doris deLespinasse said. "And those larkspur, boy, are they a deep purple."

Mosquitoes became a distraction as the hikers neared the lower Canyon Creek Meadow, prompting an application of DEET. Then came that marvelous moment when the waves of shooting stars, columbine, red Indian paintbrush, lupine and larkspur spread wide under the backdrop of the east face of 7,841-foot Three Fingered Jack.

"Wow, it's almost like a dream. It doesn't look real," White said.

The group hiked through the meadow, at 5,500 feet elevation, and up to the rim of a cirque lake at the base of a small glacier at the 6,100-foot mark on Three Fingered Jack.

O'Brien looked to the north, Mount Jefferson presiding over the singed forest, and said, "Look at that destruction, for as far as the eye can see. I had no idea it was so immense."

After a scramble down to the meadow, the perfume of lupine thick in the air, deLespinasse observed, "You'd never know there's even been a fire when you're here. I felt so bad during the fire. I had expected this all to be fried."

It's an area that concerned Sullivan, too.

"Canyon Creek Meadows is one I was most worried about because it was in the heart of the burn, yet it's one of the most beautiful places on Earth," he said. "As it turns out -- you can see it on the maps in my book -- Canyon Creek Meadows is surrounded by cliffs, and they acted as a natural fire break and left a hole in the middle of the fire. The meadows are a doughnut hole that was not burned."

The hike to Duffy Lake is another that was minimally impacted.

Other lakes, such as Berley Lakes, have vegetation left only next to the water.

"The difference at Berley Lakes is that the entire four-mile trail was hammered. I mean, one tree in 100 (was) left alive, if that," Sullivan said. "There's nothing that's much fun anywhere around Santiam Pass. You don't want to try to go to Square Lake. There's nothing left."

The thing that Sullivan emphasizes is that this is nothing new.

"This is perfectly normal in a 200-year cycle, but it's shocking to us because we don't live in a 200-year cycle," he said. "For 20 years, it's going to look kind of bleak. It won't be like you remember as a kid, going into a lot of these places."

Janet Throop, a Sierra Club hiker, said the fire definitely makes the hike interesting.

"It's part of the natural cycle, not that I'm encouraging fires," she said. "But the meadows are just gorgeous, the flowers are outstanding, and I certainly want to come back again."

Frenkel, who had hiked the area dozens of times before the fire, was relieved after taking his first post-fire look.

"I don't think it hurts the quality of the hiking because there are other things coming out that make it interesting, things you otherwise would not have seen," he said. "I was afraid it was going to be kind of a devastated landscape, yet I've seen never seen flower displays quite like that."
 
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url for 'Forest Voice"

“Forest Voice” (Native Forest Council)

Spring 2006 Issue

http://www.forestcouncil.org/pdf/2006_spring_fv.pdf

On the Biscuit Fire Recovery Project, see p. 10

Siskiyou National Forest, Oregon

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Santiam River, in the Cascades, before and after pictures,
p. 6. Weyerhaeuser in action.
 
Just to lighten the mood...

... a recent post in a joke thread:
wally2450 said:
The New Element

Recent hurricanes and climatic issues are proof of the existence of a new chemical element.

Research has led to the discovery of the heaviest element yet known to science. The new element, Governmentium (Gv), has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.

These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons.

Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert; however, it can be detected, because it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact.

A minute amount of Governmentium can cause a reaction (that would normally take less than a second) any time from four days to four years to complete.

Governmentium has a normal half-life of two to six years; it does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which some of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places.

In fact, Governmentium's mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes.

This characteristic of moron promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a critical concentration.

This hypothetical quantity is referred to as critical morass. When catalyzed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium, an element that radiates just as much energy as Governmentium, since it has half as many peons but twice as many morons.

Any questions?
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Pure said:
1) the difficulty of debating or discussing with you, weird h, is that you often debate from "facts" to which you alone are privy. see for instance an account below of the aftermath of the Jefferson fire, whose occurance you disapprove. controlled burns by timber companies, you apparently do approve.
...
SALEM, Ore. (AP) -- The trail was hot and dusty, the shade eliminated and the thick stands of lodgepole pine and mountain hemlock in large part obliterated by the B and B Complex fire of 2003.
Click to expand...

The problem wih debaing with YOU is that you rebut with irrelevancies: Like citing studies of a 2003 fire in rebuttal to an anecdote about a 1967 fire tha thas nothing to do with my point in bringing up the 1967 circumstances.

The point is not that the Sierra Club -- and others --followed the Law, but they slavishly and fanatically followed what was obviously a BAD law not intenteded for the circustances they faced and as a result, not only natural wonders suffered, civilization suffered

You seem to be incapable of understanding the difference between an uncontrolled wildfire in the middle of a drought stricken forest at the height of summer and a fire deliberately set by federal government agencies responsible for managing public lands when the conditions are less favorable to firestorms and firecrews are standing by to limit the spread.

Fire Management strategies have changed in the last 40 years, in part because of the 1967 fire, and your article describes the result of the new fire mangment policies -- inaccurately termed "Let It Burn."

I'm in favor of living in harmony with nature, but that requires some compromises with slavish, fantatical devotion to "Nature First."
 
One additional point about slavish devotion to "pristine wilderness" and Wilderness Area Restrictions:
Pure said:
"The difference at Berley Lakes is that the entire four-mile trail was hammered. I mean, one tree in 100 (was) left alive, if that," Sullivan said. "There's nothing that's much fun anywhere around Santiam Pass. You don't want to try to go to Square Lake. There's nothing left."

The thing that Sullivan emphasizes is that this is nothing new.

"This is perfectly normal in a 200-year cycle, but it's shocking to us because we don't live in a 200-year cycle," he said. "For 20 years, it's going to look kind of bleak. It won't be like you remember as a kid, going into a lot of these places."

Janet Throop, a Sierra Club hiker, said the fire definitely makes the hike interesting.

"It's part of the natural cycle, not that I'm encouraging fires," she said. "But the meadows are just gorgeous, the flowers are outstanding, and I certainly want to come back again."
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The burned areas outside of the Wilderness area will recover faster and with less secondary damage from erosion because Nature can be helped by seeding with erosion preventing ground cover(s) and/or new trees.

The Santiam Pass generally hosts one or two fires every year. About every ten years or so it hosts a major fire. It makes me wonder why the hikers quoted in the article are so surpised at the conditons four years after the fire -- do they usually avoid the ugly parts of nature? Have they never followed the recovery of other fires? Just how lacking in real-life contact with nature are they?

Ecology and Environmental Science look a lot different in the ivory towers of universities (through selected photographs of the destruction wrought by man or nature) than it does out in the field where you can see the "fire-weed" sprouts hiding in the ashes under the burned logs that don't show on the panoramic photos.

I also have my doubts about the scientific qualifications of an (nature) author who doesn't know that Lodgepole Pine forests have a life cycle closer to 70 years than 200 years -- and in the specific case of the Jefferson Wilderness Area he seems to be unaware of a comparable fire forty years ago. Perhaps the damage from forty years ago was so completely recovered by the time he started hiking that he never noticed?
 
again you rely on "facts" not in evidence, not documented, and not referenced.
 
Pure said:
again you rely on "facts" not in evidence, not documented, and not referenced.
Click to expand...

IF you're that interested, you can find the 1967 fire as easily as you did the 2003 fire -- oh wait, there was no internet in 1967 and news stories that old often aren't online for either of us to reference.
To bring this back to the global warming topic. Did you know that young trees double their mass every year for the first seven to ten years (depending on species) while ancient giants add less than 1% more mass each year?

From a Carbon Sequestration standpoint, Old Growth and Ancient Forest trees have sequestered pretty much all the carbon they're ever going to, while the new growth is fighting for every gram of carbon it can steal from it's neighbors. Fast growing species like Southern White Pine that can be harvested every 20-30 years offer the potential of sequestering twice as much carbon as slower growing species like Douglas Fir, Spruce and Coast Redwood. (as long as they're no being burned or fermented for fuel.)
 
My Nobel Moment
By JOHN R. CHRISTY
WSJ, November 1, 2007

I've had a lot of fun recently with my tiny (and unofficial) slice of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But, though I was one of thousands of IPCC participants, I don't think I will add "0.0001 Nobel Laureate" to my resume.

The other half of the prize was awarded to former Vice President Al Gore, whose carbon footprint would stomp my neighborhood flat. But that's another story.

Both halves of the award honor promoting the message that Earth's temperature is rising due to human-based emissions of greenhouse gases. The Nobel committee praises Mr. Gore and the IPCC for alerting us to a potential catastrophe and for spurring us to a carbonless economy.

I'm sure the majority (but not all) of my IPCC colleagues cringe when I say this, but I see neither the developing catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most of the warming we see. Rather, I see a reliance on climate models (useful but never "proof") and the coincidence that changes in carbon dioxide and global temperatures have loose similarity over time.

There are some of us who remain so humbled by the task of measuring and understanding the extraordinarily complex climate system that we are skeptical of our ability to know what it is doing and why. As we build climate data sets from scratch and look into the guts of the climate system, however, we don't find the alarmist theory matching observations. (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite data we analyze at the University of Alabama in Huntsville does show modest warming -- around 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit per century, if current warming trends of 0.25 degrees per decade continue.)

It is my turn to cringe when I hear overstated-confidence from those who describe the projected evolution of global weather patterns over the next 100 years, especially when I consider how difficult it is to accurately predict that system's behavior over the next five days.

Mother Nature simply operates at a level of complexity that is, at this point, beyond the mastery of mere mortals (such as scientists) and the tools available to us. As my high-school physics teacher admonished us in those we-shall-conquer-the-world-with-a-slide-rule days, "Begin all of your scientific pronouncements with 'At our present level of ignorance, we think we know . . .'"

I haven't seen that type of climate humility lately. Rather I see jump-to-conclusions advocates and, unfortunately, some scientists who see in every weather anomaly the specter of a global-warming apocalypse. Explaining each successive phenomenon as a result of human action gives them comfort and an easy answer.

Others of us scratch our heads and try to understand the real causes behind what we see. We discount the possibility that everything is caused by human actions, because everything we've seen the climate do has happened before. Sea levels rise and fall continually. The Arctic ice cap has shrunk before. One millennium there are hippos swimming in the Thames, and a geological blink later there is an ice bridge linking Asia and North America.

One of the challenges in studying global climate is keeping a global perspective, especially when much of the research focuses on data gathered from spots around the globe. Often observations from one region get more attention than equally valid data from another.

The recent CNN report "Planet in Peril," for instance, spent considerable time discussing shrinking Arctic sea ice cover. CNN did not note that winter sea ice around Antarctica last month set a record maximum (yes, maximum) for coverage since aerial measurements started.

Then there is the challenge of translating global trends to local climate. For instance, hasn't global warming led to the five-year drought and fires in the U.S. Southwest?

Not necessarily.

There has been a drought, but it would be a stretch to link this drought to carbon dioxide. If you look at the 1,000-year climate record for the western U.S. you will see not five-year but 50-year-long droughts. The 12th and 13th centuries were particularly dry. The inconvenient truth is that the last century has been fairly benign in the American West. A return to the region's long-term "normal" climate would present huge challenges for urban planners.

Without a doubt, atmospheric carbon dioxide is increasing due primarily to carbon-based energy production (with its undisputed benefits to humanity) and many people ardently believe we must "do something" about its alleged consequence, global warming. This might seem like a legitimate concern given the potential disasters that are announced almost daily, so I've looked at a couple of ways in which humans might reduce CO2 emissions and their impact on temperatures.

California and some Northeastern states have decided to force their residents to buy cars that average 43 miles-per-gallon within the next decade. Even if you applied this law to the entire world, the net effect would reduce projected warming by about 0.05 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100, an amount so minuscule as to be undetectable. Global temperatures vary more than that from day to day.

Suppose you are very serious about making a dent in carbon emissions and could replace about 10% of the world's energy sources with non-CO2-emitting nuclear power by 2020 -- roughly equivalent to halving U.S. emissions. Based on IPCC-like projections, the required 1,000 new nuclear power plants would slow the warming by about 0.2 ?176 degrees Fahrenheit per century. It's a dent.

But what is the economic and human price, and what is it worth given the scientific uncertainty?

My experience as a missionary teacher in Africa opened my eyes to this simple fact: Without access to energy, life is brutal and short. The uncertain impacts of global warming far in the future must be weighed against disasters at our doorsteps today. Bjorn Lomborg's Copenhagen Consensus 2004, a cost-benefit analysis of health issues by leading economists (including three Nobelists), calculated that spending on health issues such as micronutrients for children, HIV/AIDS and water purification has benefits 50 to 200 times those of attempting to marginally limit "global warming."

Given the scientific uncertainty and our relative impotence regarding climate change, the moral imperative here seems clear to me.

Mr. Christy is director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and a participant in the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, co-recipient of this year's Nobel Peace Prize.
 
SummerMorning said:
That's a very good article.

Honest.
Click to expand...
Summer,
I congratulate you on your open-mindedness. I don't deny that there has been a very slight rise in average temperatures in the last twenty-odd years. It is extremely difficult, if not downright impossible, to prove conclusively that the rise is connected to any particular cause. Given that the earth has been around for roughly fourteen billion years, it's folly and an example of mass hysteria that a sample size of 25 years would be used by anybody to attempt to prove anything that would justify the proposed massive changes in human society that some contemplate. We should not forget that a mere twenty-five years ago, there were numerous warnings that the world was entering a new ice age.

Notwithstanding loud and widespread assertions of "settled science," there are numerous legitimate questions that need answering.



 
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SummerMorning said:
Let's see ... glaciers are in retreat globally, the northwest passage is open, the permafrost is melting, the atlantic conveyor is slowing down, storm strength and frequency is increasing, average recorded temperatures are increasing, the Antarctic ice-sheets are breaking up, Arctic polar ice is regularly at 20 year minimums, global concentrations and emissions of CO2 are increasing.

I told myself I wouldn't comment, so I won't. I would just like to ask Rox and Amicus to please comment on the above phenomena. What, pray tell, might they indicate? Hmm?
Click to expand...

Not only that...it didn't get cold enough last winter for the fleas to go dormant, and I had to Revolution my cats in the middle of February. I've kept cats for 30 years, and this is the first time this has happened.
 
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