Yale scientist’s big new advance is to find the 2,600 billion trees humankind had not known about. Before now, 82% of the Earth’s trees were not counted, unknown, missing. This increases the tally of known trees by 7.5-fold. Phew. They reckon there are now 3.04 trillion trees, or roughly 422 trees per person.
They also estimate that humans have deforested exactly 46% of the trees on the planet in the last 12,000 years. (How fortunate that tree density estimates and satellite records are still available from 10,000 BC.) Presumably, the human deforestation factor is around 46% plus or minus 100%. Pick a number. Spin the wheel.
The idea was dumb enough to be produced by Yale and published in Nature.
Seeing the forest and the trees, all three trillion of them
A new Yale-led study estimates that there are more than 3 trillion trees on Earth, about seven and a half times more than some previous estimates. But the total number of trees has plummeted by roughly 46 percent since the start of human civilization, the study estimates.
Using a combination of satellite imagery, forest inventories, and supercomputer technologies, the international team of researchers was able to map tree populations worldwide at the square-kilometer level.
Their results, published in the journal Nature, provide the most comprehensive assessment of tree populations ever produced and offer new insights into a class of organism that helps shape most terrestrial biomes.
Next thing you know they’ll tell us to set up a global market in the carbon embedded in trees…
REFERENCE
I’m not even going to bother.
Just a thought. 10,000 years ago, we were still coming out of the ice age. Vast tracts of what is now coniferous forest were still under ice. As there is virtually no data on forest growth-rate and spread, nor how much regrowth there was after deforestation had taken place, how on earth can anyone make such estimations with any degree of skill?
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You need to attend, “Applied Carbon Accounting 101”, then you will be able to appreciate the total illogicality of it all.
But be careful. Some attendees, who suffer from congenital rationality, have found that their brain gives up, and tries to exit down the nose. I am told this is a rather unpleasant experience.
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How? Well we shouldn’t argue that they shouldn’t try. Just qualify the findings appropriately. However, given the record of the people we are dealing with, it is prudent to be suspicious.
We have always had trees, and we have always had tree huggers. The origin of the Greens party lay with the treehuggers. The Marxists noticed that the tree huggers were against private property rights, and joined up.
In 1976 in New South Wales the ALP Wran government was elected. Neville Wran was a lawyer, and had already acquired the nickname “Nifty Nev”. Here is an example of how he got that name.
From wayback in NSW, there was a law that special permission was required to cut down a tree within 20 metres of a river. Nifty Nev wanted to reduce the power of the farmers to clear land to grow various kinds of grass.
So, instead of trying to change the law, he simply changed the regulation, declaring that all our creeks were rivers, and all named gullies creeks. Lots and lots of dry creeks. And lots more power to the government.
So look and see what changes were made in parameters to come up with this story, and look and see where will they go next. Methinks they are moving to stop all private management of vegetation. Marx rules!
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From: http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/current%20series/rpp/100-120/rpp109/09.html
“Queensland operates the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) from which downloaded data fulfils monitoring obligations and is used to annually update the Statewide Landcare and Trees Study (SLATs; Qld DNRW 2008a). The Change Detection Program in South Australia combines satellite imagery and high resolution aerial photography monitoring, contact with landholders and on-site inspections for clearance activity (SA DWLBC 2007b). Victoria is planning to implement the Native Vegetation Permit Tracking System, a vegetation remote-sensing mapping system, as part of the Net Gain initiative. It will assist the monitoring of native vegetation clearing and associated offset schemes and analyse tree cover change.”
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Good point, Ted. Sounds like the EPA designating every stream channel (ephemeral to intermittent to perennial) as “Waters of the US” (also called navigable waters). The idea that these streams and even small ponds that fill after a rain and in a day or so are dry again, come under government regulation and control although the majority of them are are on private property.
First the energy, then the water. What next, regulate trees on public and private property, then agricultural industries? Big governments getting bigger and bigger and completely out of control of the people they rule.
90
Very recently, the South Australian government attempted to make farmers pay for water they use from their own dams, on their own property.
(I don’t know if it ever actually came to pass, but sadly, it was not a joke)
50
Kevin the big hint in applying such fuzzy logic is when they say ‘Using a combination of satellite imagery, forest inventories, and supercomputer technologies, yes the age of the supermodel is not dead they’re the attention demanding divas of the science world.
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You are right, however, these days the models need a big cup size or groin protector. Not easy being a super climate model, economic climate model etc. More often the wardrobe is the most expensive accessory.
120
Supercomputer technologies?
They tell me the iPhone 5 contains more than a billion transistors. There are a number of reasons why I would never have given this credence had I not had prior warning.
I would like to know, what was the last year that this iPhone, had it been produced then, would have been a supercomputer?
90
The last time I looked for a definition of what constitutes a Supercomputer, it was switching speed, rather than the number of transistor junctions, that was the distinguishing factor.
It is measured in megaflops.
Which for some reason, sounds like the sort of word, that should not be used in polite society.
60
Use with care.
00
They say a billion components for the iPhone. I recall about 1994 the Pentium cracked the first million components on a processor. How that measures in megaflops I wonder.
00
3.1 million transistors. With the famous/notorious FDIV and F00F bugs …
The P5 (75MHz version) returned 4.04 Million FLoating Point Operations Per Section for unoptimised code to 7.56 MegaFLOPS for compiler optimised code according this collation of the of the LINPACK benchmarks for scientific computing.
10
The supercomputers often use teraflops.
00
No, petaFLOPS is the unit used for the world’s fastest computers today. One ‘petaflops’ is equal to 1,000 teraflops, or 1,000,000,000,000,000 FLOPS. The fastest computer today uses Intel XEON Phi 80 core CPUs, and makes 33 petaflops.
The fastest supercomputer on earth, in mid 2015, is in China, and is called Tianhe-2, but is almost useless, as there is no code for it to run, except research benchmarks (lol!), and will take about ten years to have the code needed to actually utilize it, and will be bypassed by then, so is a hardware research project (my Wirrie is bigger than your!!). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianhe-2
The second fastest is the Cray Titan at Oak Ridge, which is half as fast, but actually works, right now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_%28supercomputer%29
Interesting to see Cray at the top again.
40
Correction, even that info tidbit was a bit out of date as the peak processing speed is even higher:
Rpeak – This is the theoretical peak performance of a system, measured in PFLOPS.
00
… because they often have thousands of CPUs each contributing a thousand or more MegaFLOPS.
It enables the British Met Office to make bigger errors faster.
Ain’t tekkernology wonderful?
30
Clueless people using “supercomputer technologies” are still clueless people, regardless of how highly they regard themselves. Too bad our pop culture media doesn’t remind us of this fact every now and then (or ever, even).
50
That phrase leapt out at me, too, even before I saw you had highlighted it. A “supercomputer” is a ridiculously expensive bunch of Unix boxes, linked together. They are good at number-crunching and not, frankly, at anything else. If the numbers are twaddle, the outcomes aren’t going to be any better.
60
They do fantastic rendering jobs for movie FX.
00
OK, I’ll give you that, but 3D rendering IS all about number-crunching. It’s also all about faking stuff, like bringing poor, old Peter Cushing “back to life” (a very much nicer man, I understand, than many of the characters he played).
10
Going by the logic applied to this study they could have just asked Jane Fonda what it was like back then, iirc you didn’t need many clothes either about 1 million BC, but the crabs were monstrous!
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Correction I meant Raquel Welch not Fonda, my models still maintain the size of crabs though.
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Please don’t mention crabs and Rachel.. or Jane for that matter… in the one sentence !! 🙁
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Ah, Raquel! I had a (relatively) fully clothed pin-up of her on my locker door at school in Edinburgh. Does that make me very old?
10
No, it makes you very presbyterian.
20
We’re still in a modern day ice age down here in Victoria and can’t find enough dead dry wood for heating, yet gum trees keep sprouting everywhere in our yard like weeds. Lost trees? We have plenty of them here.
140
Bemused
And remember that the aboriginals in this area patrolled the creeks and pulled what was considered excess gum seedlings.
I wonder if this crew quoted Bill Gamage’s “The Biggest Estate on Earth”?
80
Same here…freezing wind and too many feral gum seedlings everywhere!
100
Not enough dead wood? What about your latest state gummint?
50
Unfortunately, rotten wood doesn’t burn.
30
Take my State (Qld) Government, Please!
30
The truthful reply is you can’t estimate the tree inventory from 10,000 years ago. You can’t even estimate the tree inventory from 5000 years ago. You CAN however, continue to play “proxy god” and computer buffoon and do anything you wish with virtually minimal programming skills and a desire to do something.
He have a sense of recordings in anecdotal form for the last 5000 years or so, and from this we can deduce some useful information. When you get into “proxy country” and “bit twiddling,” you have left the relatively sound ground of science and gone off to see the wizard down the yellow brick road.
Unless you can absolutely be certain of every possible natural act that could change, say, an isotope ratio, be it magnetic or electrical or whatever in nature – even the Solar System moving through a different region of interstellar space, you cannot state emphatically that a proxy is anything beyond a semi-intelligent guess at anything, based on what we see in a ratio now. It’s all fun and mostly games, but it rolls in the “dough” for those that know how to kneed it.
The fact that “proxies” are what they are, is at the foundation of why the “models” cannot predict anything. Not only are they manipulating the small amount of data that we know from our records, but they are putting all their faith in “proxies” developed from the data that they have manipulated. In another hundred or so years, having kept good data records, there probably would be enough real data to “model” with, but that doesn’t make money now. Better to do your city planning with a knock off from “Sim City” than to use logic and common sense.
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Great to see a site that bangs on about the scientific method and evidence etc stampede to dismiss out of hand a serious long term study without ANY evidence to the contrary.
12
The method used to estimate the number of trees seems reasonable to me.
The only quibble I can think of is some of the tree loss may have been natural. It might be hard to distinguish natural deforestation from human-caused deforestation.
02
Yes, but think of how many Christmas trees have been needed world-wide since 1AD!!!
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This is great, isn’t it?
All those carbon dioxide sinks, that we never knew we had. And of course they will grow, and in doing so, take more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The news gets better and better …
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Next thing to be discovered is that austerity, world wide financial collapse countries being bombed back to the stone age, also actually reduces CO2 emissions.
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Carbon Credit where Carbon Credit is due, to Greece for instance.
OMG, when is the penny (sarc) going to drop? The suspense is elucidating me.
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*OMG (Oh My Goodness)
70
“All those carbon dioxide sinks”
Its called COAL !!!!!!!!!!
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“European Coal Hits Seven-Year Low as Costs And Demand Drop”
About “About 212,000 results” for the search terms “coal declining demand” during the past month alone in a google search a few moments ago..
That is a big carbon dioxide sink in global demand for coal that needs to be seen to by climate scientists, or economic climate scientists.
90
So are you saying that coal was originally a sink before it was re-classified as a source of CO2 pollutant?
If it was both a sink and a source doesn’t that make it NEUTRAL overall??
KK
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Quite so – I refer to coal as sequestered organic biomass when speaking to eco loons.
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“doesn’t that make it NEUTRAL overall”
YES.
It is very important to world food supplies that we bring that sequestered carbon back into the shorter term carbon cycle.
Accidents happen, but we have the technology to remedy the situation…
.. the side benefit being electricity !
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Well done Andy … I was waiting for somebody to get the link 🙂
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So if Drax power station can flatten forests in the USA to get (subsidised) wood chip to burn, and is judged “carbon neutral” because the new trees will soak up the released CO2 in 100 years, or so, why can’t they claim emissions from coal are “carbon neutral” because they will turn back into coal in a few million years?
It can’t be a matter of time because we are told the “matter is urgent” and disaster will come real soon (see predictions 1972, 1981, 1983, 1988, 1992, 1995, 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007, 2010 et al), long before much of the excess from wood chips has been absorbed. And there is evidence that increasing CO2 levels increases plant growth, as distinct from the lack of evidence for warming, weather disruption, increase in plagues etc.
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Twould be sensible to burn high energy-dense coal and simply plant the requisite number of trees somewhere in the world.
If cutting trees and transporting them halfway around the world to burn them simply because you trust someone will plant more trees to compensate is deemed acceptable, then burning coal and planting trees to compensate makes more sense.
110
It is about vacuuming up tax payer money and not about making actual logical sense. It is also about collapsing western economies so the Elite Totalitarians can shout: SEE CAPITALISM DOESN’T WORK!
…..
Maurice Strong chair of the 1972 UN First Earth Summit and the 1992 Rio Earth Summit (Kyoto)
Report from Iron Mountain
1967
80
I think that I shall always see
tree burning for the subsidy.
Trees that in Winter are bare
Rapidly turned into hot air.
Trees in Summer are green
until burnt with haste obscene
You’re not allowed to disagree
else you won’t get a subsidy
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
40
Some of them will grow. Lots will die. Here a bit of relevant history.
Near where I grew up is a wilderness area we call The Poggy Scrub. It is now part of the Goulburn River National Park. The land formation is similar to the sandstone country around Sydney, but drier.
When my father (born 1914) was a small boy the vegetation was open timber with grass growing underneath. After a bushfire in 1926 up came dense wattle scrub. When I (born 1944) was a small boy that is what I remember. Then after an intense bushfire in 1952 I was astonished to see that in this scrub, which had been totally consumed, i.e. to bare sand with a little charcoal, there stood the trunks of scattered big trees, maybe 5 – 10 to the acre. These did not all die.
After that it returned to dense wattle scrub. You could not see 10 metres off the road. Then, starting in the summer of 1964/65 we had a bad drought. In the spring of 1965 the thick scrub started to die from moisture stress. It rained in October and again in December to stop the dieback, but after that you could see into the scrub in some places for hundreds of yards, and grass began to grow there.
In 1994 we had a worse drought. It didn’t rain till late November/December, and more scrub died, allowing more grass to grow. Had we had that 1994 drought in 1965 when the scrub was thick so much scrub would have died as to take us back to the open timber and grass that my father remembered before 1926.
Which shows those who have eyes to see that the tree huggers, like the warmists, greatly overestimate the power of man.
160
While driving home yesterday I heard an item on the radio telling me that 90% of all oceangoing birds had ingested some part of the massive plastic waste pile that pollutes the worlds oceans.
I have not heard Greenpeace or any other Eco Group making a fuss about this; assuming it is true.
This is a real pollution issue but why are none of the usual suspects involving themselves; surely it’s not because birds don’t have bank accounts and so cant be TAXED?
KK
190
KK,
Real pollution issues, require real solutions, with real means of measurement and common methods of assessment of success, or failure, or unintended consequences, and an independent audit of the results, and the experience gained.
The Eco groups are not able to do any of that. Their skill is in making placards, and creating soundbites for the radio news. Any alignment with reality, is purely coincidental.
291
Don’t forget making giant paper-mâché heads. All those arts degrees have to express themselves some way.
170
“All those arts degrees have to express themselves some way.”
Don’t stress their minds.. we need our cafes. !!
And have you seen those pretty patterns they put on the coffee?
How cool is that….. from an Arts graduate, too !!
160
Rerekee Wakaaro,
And rarely to be found. 🙂
Abe
181
I’m pretty sure the placards are made for them and handed out before the protesting begins.
That’s why they are printed on quality cardboard and sometimes contain a message contrary to what the placard carrier thinks it says.
30
Agree Rereke. The eco loons or eco leftists have no real useful skills. If they did they might abandon that philosophy and do useful things.
10
I thought the ingestion of plastics was only relevant to swallows……sorry 🙁
90
No, that is lead. !!
80
Poly want a cracker?
50
We don’t generally eat ocean-going birds… so what’s the problem? 😉
120
KK. @ # 3
This world, our planet is far, far more diverse, complex, robust and adaptable than we humans can ever contemplate and get our minds around at our current and fairly ignorant level of knowledge.
ALL LIFE above the level of single celled bacteria are actually an evolved collection of co-operating single cells that have through evolution, amalgamated and adapted and evolved until whole groups and collections of highly specialised cells have assumed very specific and assigned tasks in every complex living organism.
There are NO exceptions to this in our very complex planet’s Life forms above the level of the single celled species.
It all started to happen some 3.5 billion years ago with the appearance of the first extremely primitive but self replication collections of amino acids and proteins but the amalgamation of the evolved single celled life forms into the more complex multi celled creatures such as the slime molds and onto the animal and plant kingdom of today took some 2.5 billion years before multi-celled life forms started to appear around 850 million years ago, based on the fossil record.
Plastic waste in the oceans actually turns out to be a very good substrate for a number of bacterial species that have finally found a good man made plastic home in what from their perspective, is the vast wasteland of a barren ocean with few homes available to settle down on.
One of the puzzles despite the propaganda to the contrary, is the apparent disappearance of much of the estimated tonnage of plastics that go into the global oceans each year.
The amounts that can be located, mostly in the great ocean gyres, don’t appear to vary very much at all which has created some angst amongst those researchers who expected and promoted the belief that they would see oceans covered with dense layer of mankind’s plastic debris.
So it was quite a shock to ocean researchers only a couple of years ago to discover that mankind’s plastic debris is very suited as the home and as a foraging source for a whole range of ocean micro flora, bacteria and assorted other minute ocean life forms.
The abstract below for one of the papers on the observed bacterial use of ocean plastic debris.
Life in the “Plastisphere”: Microbial Communities on Plastic Marine Debris
201
Thanks for that ROM
I had not really given it much thought after viewing a massive pile of plastic filmed somewhere on the oceans a few years ago.
It makes sense that much of the plastic would be susceptible to the same forces of degradation as wood since they share much of the same chemistry C and H.
I could easily imagine a log floating on the ocean and being eventually a home for all sorts of marine life and organisms before it disappeared with plastic being a little more complicated because of the cross linking which may be a bit poisonous.
While it’s good to know that plastics are degradable it was a worry to me that the self righteous eco fraternity don’t seem to be honing in on the real problems; ocean being used as a dump just as an example.
ps I know you write a lot here but there is so much stuff I don’t get a chance to read more that a tenth of it. Tony goes on about electricity relative costs of generation, Bernd on the more engineered side of things, RW prodding us all along ; it’s just mind boggling. Every time I read yours there is something useful and readable – thanks.
KK
.
110
That “massive pile” was probably created by ecofreaks from their own accumulated trash. The “gyre” contains little visible plastic. It’s mostly particulates and, spread over a large area, can’t be seen from boat decks as a “pile.”
50
Jorge
I suspect that there are still many in the world who put their rubbish onto barges and take it out into the ocean to dispose of.
Cheaper than paying for land fill areas.
KK
40
Shhh. Sea Shepherd will make them dig holes in the water. 😉
20
You can find polystyrene naturally in wood. (Good luck finding a link to the information.) I remember it from back in 1985 or there abouts because it really surprised me.
40
While I can not find a source for natural production of polystyrene, I can find some (limited) references to natural styrene. This one http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-styrene.htm appears to cover most bases …
Most often referenced natural styrene is with cinnamon bark and from the hulls of Prunus dulcis (sweet almond), both of which are found to produce relatively large quantities of the styrene. Styrene also occurs in many fungi including edible truffle species.
Styrene is well tolerated by humans. Extensive study finds after very long term exposure (glass fiber reinforcement industry) of 20 years small but inconclusive rises in cancers.
From http://monographs.iarc.fr/ENG/Monographs/vol82/mono82-9.pdf
20
A very interesting post!
40
Rom, I remember a basic tenet…Nature abhors a vacuum! As you said …a home in a barren wasteland.
A very thought provoking post, thankyou.
10
probably you didn’t look. It is easy to claim that someone else doesn’t care about something if you don’t ask them if they do
http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/oceans/wildlife-facts/albatross/
An even more tragic cause for albatross mortality is consumption of marine debris, mainly plastic, that they mistake for food.
I have a feeling this thread is going to be full of unsubstantiated bs comments due to the leadership given by the proprietor
227
Yet Greenpeace worships off-shore wind turbines…. DOH !!!
161
What has that got to do with the fact that Kok was wrong?
114
Ok, so you prefer them minced.. OK. !
110
It is worse than just minced sea birds. Of shore wind turbines are horrible for the marine environment.
“Patricia Mora, a research professor in coastal ecology and fisheries science at the National Institute of Technology in Mexico, has been studying the impact of wind turbines
More
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/26244-mexico-researcher-raises-alert-about-environmental-risks-in-region-with-highest-concentration-of-wind-farms-in-latin-america#14414054851781&action=collapse_widget&id=0&data=
Here is another report of interest on the problem of sound:
“Infrasound from wind turbines: An overlooked health hazard” (Clinical report, Sweden)
70
KK was NOT wrong.
read his statement again, and flex your meagre comprehension skills…
“I have not heard Greenpeace or any other Eco Group making a fuss about this”
Then prove he is wrong…
30
What has that got to do with the fact that KK was wrong?
214
If we had spend even a fraction of the funds totally wasted on renewable non-energy, we could have at least started to clean up some real pollution issues.
If it is such an issue, why isn’t Greenpeace or someone out there mopping up sea plastic instead of wasting their money on the anti-CO2 climate scam ?
Oh wait.. no money to made in doing that.. is there. !!!!
170
Gee Aye,
For a while, I lived on the Otago Peninsula, near Dunedin, in the South Island of New Zealand. The Otago Peninsula is home to one of two breeding sites for Albatross, outside the antarctic circle.
Because we lived in reasonably close proximity to the reserve, we would often walk down to see how the season was going, and take a packed lunch with us. We spent some time watching the birds, but more time watching our lunch! If we didn’t keep an eye on it, it would disappear into an Albatross, greaseproof paper, or plastic wrap, and all. The food would stay in the bird, but the paper (or plastic) was eventually ejected in the normal way.
New Zealand has other birds that can pass plastic through their elementary canal too.
The Kea is a member of the parrot family, that will dismantle car windscreen wipers, just for fun. There is a YouTube clip of four or five Kea’s removing the entire flashing light nacelle on a highway patrol car. They have strong beaks, and have learnt how to unscrew nuts. They can also remove the trim around car headlights. Nobody knows why they do it. Perhaps they are just having fun.
I have no real beef with Greenpeace – they mean well. But they do tend to anthropromorph situations, when the subject of their emotive concern, actually does give a sh*t, eventually, which puts the world to rights.
Having fishing boats jettisoning damaged nets, is a different matter entirely. That is the real danger to diving birds, like the Albatross, not plastic.
160
Lovely. KK was still wrong and what did you think of the paper about trees?
011
You mentioned albatross mortality as being caused by the consumption of marine debris, mainly plastic, that they mistake for food.
I am pointing out that you are misinformed.
In regard to the paper, that is the subject of this post, I gave it little credence. Nature used to be a prestigious journal but it has sided with Mammon, and I sense that Jo has also dismissed the whole thing as being somewhat light weight. Also, it is my observation, that any science that is reliant on computer modelling, can only be as relevant as the programmer wants it to be. And I say that as an ex-modeller.
230
So you know nothing about the paper. Cool
08
Btw dead birds are full of discarded fishing items. So?
09
Some things pass through, sharp things get stuck. There is a difference. The artical was about plastic.
140
Another btw is I’ve spent time down south studying Keas. I know the behavioural,ecologists etc. it doesn’t really help me understand what this has to do with the discussion except as an extension of a long term discussion with you
09
I have a scar on my right index finger, from a Kea’s kiss. They have character.
100
My pet Magpie would never bite the hand that feeds it.
It will cleanly lift a piece of bacon rind from my palm or fingertips without even a kiss and sing us a song to say hello.
On the other hand the local Peacock was only fed like that once. He kissed my hand with his powerful beak and that was an unrepeatable experience.
KoK
110
Hi Gee Aye
As someone who loves nature I share your concern about plastic but want to take a moment to point out that my main issue was about the disparity between action by all activists, not only GP, on real issues as compared with their activity on Man Made CO2 which I think we all understand is a scientific Non-Issue.
In going to the GreenPeace site I was hit as a first response by a request for money (donation) and this happened several times while on that site. Having some thought on the expense accounts of the operators of this business I decided not to donate.
One of my great irritations is to see animals suffering because of human sloth and indifference.
The sloth relates to people who throw their garbage anywhere in public.
We all should know that 90% (sorry I made that figure up) of this ends up in the oceans but most people don’t have a clue.
This allows Local Government ( a very loose term considering the amount of thought and effort most councils put into “governing” their localities) to allow storm water to discharge to the ocean without any form of filtering or catching of solids which eventually end up inside some poor bird or fish.
The money saved on doing without screening of waste water can then be used for more obvious vote catchers like Climate Change awareness programmes etc.
Sorry but over the last few decades I have become more and more disenchanted with the management of the world at all levels of “government” from the UN to our local council.
All seem to be peopled by individuals who want to be players on the world stage rather than doers who really, truly look after things.
Having said that, I am sure that there are good individual at all levels of politics who want to do some good but get stymied by other more powerful groups.
KK
170
I went on a boat trip from Wollongong NSW organised by a group called OSSA,they study Albatross populations and we learnt lots of stuff as they captured,banded and released the various species of Albatross,I had no idea there were so many species. The Wandering Albatross of the Ancient Mariner story made an appearance,but nobody would want to capture and band one of these specimens,apparently the big problem with the reproduction of the Wanderer are rats eating the eggs laid on the small islands off South Africa where the birds breed. Plastic was not mentioned as a problem,but it would not be a plus,long line fishing is not good,anyway if you have some spare time and happen to be near Wollongong this trip is great value and very informative.
20
.
KK,
I agree totally that the Green movement has lost the plot!
Now Greenpeace are concerned about fish in Climate change induced storms
Where do they go?
How do they cope with these storms?
What species hide & shiver in fear?
Real pollution from rare earth mineral mining is ignored
Killing of birds & bats ignored
Greens are totally focused on the money only!
150
The greatest world good for the environment could come from Eco Groups going into third world countries and forcing better mining and industrial activity.
Bye and large Western industry is so much better than it was 60 years ago in looking after the environment but so called emerging countries engage in wholesale environmental degradation and willful damage when it comes to a balance between saving money or doing the right thing.
The west is not perfect but the others are creating overwhelming problems that mean people die and land is unusable for centuries because there is no United Nations looking after the environment.
Instead it focuses on the taxable issue of man made CO2 and the greatest lunacy Carbon Sequestration.
KK
120
If you get a watch an old episode of a TV series such as “The Sweeney” filmed around London (mainly) about 40 years ago showing the outdoors; especially the summer skies (probably filmed on a Sunday), you can clearly see the brown cloud over the city. And that was with comparatively few cars on the roads.
London roads are now choked with fabricated congestion but despite that the summer skies tend to be remarkably blue; when it’s not overcast. Very little “brown”.
In my personal experience, I’ve compared a visit to my father’s home town which was in East Germany in 1987, to subsequent vists about a decade later; and the cleanup by “reunification” that shut down the worst polluting industries almost overnight was very quick. The natural environment bounced back. Instead of a sickly brown fog (and smell) hanging over every town most of the time, the air was clear.
Even the West of Germany achieved substantial environmental changes in the space of perhaps 2 decades. The roadside smell of unburnt hydrocarbons largely disappeared over the 1990’s. Unfortunately, such success may have fuelled the cleanup mania that has dominated popular culture ever since.
40
Hi Bernd
Interesting anecdotes. My earliest experiences included stoking the fire to heat the kettle. Coal.
Newcastle being a steel making town the air was full of dust and other hydrocarbonaceous (please excuse that, it is Sat night after all) globules that made health matters a little uncertain. Still we had great beaches and lots of offshore winds to send all that mess inland in the afternoon.
Current air quality almost 70 years later is much better although we no longer have steel making unfortunately.
Local power generation produces, if memory serves me well, off gases that are so well scrubbed and precipitated that they are cleaner in some measure than surrounding air.
I think off gas mercury levels are lower than local air. Better than the old daze.
On the other hand everybody now has a car or two and driving into Sydney can sometimes present you with a pall of material hanging over that fair city. A bit of a worry.
Stories about industrial processes in some emerging countries make my hair stand on end. Long way to go there.
KK
20
I see conflation of urban (often seasonal) air pollution with co2 emissions being made all the time. At least once a week by somebody in the news media since Obama’s announced his clean power plan. Such scientific ignorance on public display…..
As you point out urban air pollution and urban smog is hardly the problem it once was.
The big change was two fold. Catalytic converters that completed combustion in autos, and electronic fuel injection with computerized engine management.
The only significant emissions from newer autos became water vapor and co2 by 1990s. Interesting how co2 became the new devil during the 90s. Who would of thought that co2 could become taxed? Easier to tax than water vapor I guess.
30
Dave
Reminds me of smelling benzene as a kid and later the fumes when we visited Saigon in the early days.
Was aware that there had been some improvement in the design of engines but your outline has been great; short sharp and to the point. Now I can tell people that the pall over Sydney is mainly as yet un-dispersed water vapour.
KK
10
“Now Greenpeace are concerned about fish in Climate change induced storms”
But doing absolutely NOTHING about mopping up sea plastic.. !!
And ACTIVELY SUPPORTING bird mincing.
Follow the money.
100
I spent a decade of the ’90’s cutting open fish caught in the Indian Ocean. Only one cod from tens to hundreds of thousands, contained any plastic. Either, they don’t eat it, or it passes straight through. Nothing to worry about. Meanwhile, wind turbines and solar panels do massive damage to birds, bats and bees.
60
Tom Harley,
I would also surmise that vibrations transmitted to the seabed from offshore windmill will impact badly on sealife. These shallow areas were windmills are planted are the natural nurseries for so much marine life. The plant life may like the lack of marine grazers though.
20
Killing of birds & bats ignored…
That is my really big beef. Where the heck are all the protesters who should be chaining themselves to WINDTURBINES? Why they are out getting photo ops with their signs protesting Global Warming on nice civilized city streets.
As far as the plastic and rubbish tossed out goes. Look at the difference between the Tea Party and the left wing “Occupy Wall Street’ protests.
Tea Party vs Occupy Wall Street in pictures
(And yes I have spent hours in local forests, rec areas and in caves backpacking out the rubbish that the citified ‘Greens’ have dropped.)
I used to be a member of Greenpeace, WWF, and Sierra Club. They have evolved into sheepleshearers for the young and gullible. Their purpose is threefold.
1.To suck up money.
2. To connect behind the scenes Big Money with an acceptable front pushing the Malthusian-Luddite politics designed to bring the peons back under the yoke of totalitarian masters.
3. To soak-up and divert the energy of adolescent rebellion into avenues useful to our would be totalitarian masters.
This was the whole point of NGOs when Maurice Strong came up with the idea in the 1970s. Now NGOs are considered by politicians and the MSM to represent “The Will of the People” the ideas of the “Grassroots’ when all they are is a puppet show put on by the big buck foundations representing bankers and industry.
130
wow!
50
All this carbon(sic).
In trees. In the ground.
It will be the end of all of us:
Global Warming Could Make Carbon Dating Impossible
The technique is used to determine the age of organic artifacts in fields like archaeology, geology, and ecology.
But it could become unreliable within decades.
By 2050, Graven wrote in a paper published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the large amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will make new organic material appear to be 1,000 years old based on today’s carbon-dating models.
By the year 2100, the atmosphere will have a radiocarbon age of 2,000 years old.
. . .
Someone really needs to get a grip here, and, despite my name, I don’t think it’s me.
140
Oh good grief haven’t these idiots ever heard of above ground bomb testing? Or are they still drooling in their playpens?
STEPPED-COMBUSTION 14C DATING OF BOMB CARBON IN LAKE SEDIMENT
70
OH NOes!
What will the De Beers family of South Africa do? They invented Carbon Dating. They made the face centered cubic Bravais point lattice of carbon part of the human dating ritual.
170
Haa…I like it! Very funny.
80
I date carbon atoms all the time. The usual scenario is, “Let’s go on a date, honey. I’m sorry I acted like such an ______ last night, and you deserve better.”
Her usual response is, “Yes, I do. Where is he?”
110
Thank, I am going to have to remember that response.
80
I read, “Carbon Dating”, and had a vision of two atoms sitting in the back seat of a car.
I think I need more coffee.
Or perhaps, less?
50
I think we are getting punch drunk from the never ending stream of Gore Bull Warbling printed in the MSM and need a bit of comic relief.
40
Jo and JoNova denizens,
Thank you all for the comic relief! Just-What-I-Needed to get the week-end off on the right track.
Laterz,
Abe
100
Comedy.???
Hey.. I’m being totally serious !!!!
70
So earth had roughly 6 trillion trees before horrible humans inflicted Gaia with their carbon skidmark, hmmmmm I wonder how many trees survive ice ages or a growing dinosaur population?
120
I’m not sure Gaia likes them too much herself. She buries them with floods and volcanoes regularly. But they keep popping up and ruining the beautifully sculptured landscapes she makes.
30
‘The federal Coalition’s policy of planting millions of new trees will do little to offset Australia’s carbon dioxide emissions, a study by leading climate change scientists has found.
‘The report warns that an absence of significant cuts to fossil fuel emissions would undermine any attempt to store carbon in trees and soils.’
Oliver Milman / Guardian 2013
——
Abbott’s plan is to soak up all that excess human induced CO2 by planting millions of trees. One estimate: 1.5 trillion new trees should do the trick.
70
With the increase in atmospheric CO2…. a few billion trees will plant themselves !!
150
Absolutely, anywhere east of the divide, native trees grow like weeds, in oz we just need to leave things alone for a while and hey instant forest courtesy of the Eucalypt weeds we are blessed with.
20
The groiniad says ‘The report warns that an absence of significant cuts to fossil fuel emissions would undermine any attempt to store carbon in trees and soils.’
Of course that is what is said. They didn’t waste trillions on propaganda just to get us to plant a few trees. They want OPEN ACCESS to out wallets and nothing else will do.
140
Instead of trees, how about a huge Chinese market garden in the top end. Like they are doing at the Ord.
100
“huge Chinese market garden in the top end”
You mean the top end of Australia ?
Coming soon.. I assure you. 🙂
80
Its said that industrial hemp converts CO2 to oxygen better than trees.
Perhaps Tony Abbott’s Green Army should be ordered to go all out to save the planet.
40
Do you have a link?
I would really love to post it on Obama’s Organizing for Action website since Hemp is so loved by the Left in the USA.
The story goes …Dupont had patented nylon, and wanted hemp removed as competition….
Dr. Robert G. Brown, Duke University at WUWT has an interesting History of Hemp
80
‘Do you have a link?’
I havn’t come across anything tangible (of an academic nature) but there must be tons out there. I’ll keep looking, but in the meantime here are some numbers from HempNews.
‘It follows that every tonne of industrial hemp stems contains 0.445 tonnes Carbon absorbed from the atmosphere (44.46% of stem dry weight).
‘Converting Carbon to CO2 (12T of C equals 44T of CO2(IPCC)), that represents 1.63 tonnes of CO2 absorption per tonne of UK Hemp stem harvested. On a land use basis, using Hemcore’s yield averages (5.5 to 8 T/ha), this represents 8.9 to 13.4 tonnes of CO2 absorption per hectare of UK Hemp Cultivation.
‘For the purposes estimation, we use an average figure of 10T/ha of CO2 absorption, a figure we hold to be a reasonably conservative estimate. This is used to predict carbon yields, but CO2 offsets will be based on dry weight yields as measured at the weighbridge.
‘The roots and leaf mulch (not including the hard to measure fibrous root material) left in situ represented approximately 20% of the mass of the harvested material in HGS’ initial field trials. The resulting Carbon content absorbed but remaining in the soil, will therefore be approximately 0.084 tonnes per tonne of harvested material. (42% w/w) (5).
‘Using Hemcore’s UK yield estimates (5.5 – 8 T/ha) this represents 0.46 to 0.67 tonnes of Carbon per hectare (UK) absorbed but left in situ after Hemp cultivation.’
10
To equate Trees as the sole means of the so called natural carbon sequestration is crap.
Quite a few decades ago when this whole so called and very ignorantly mis-named “Carbon” became another means to an end for a whole host of very shonky pimps and pushers of anything that could be thoroughly scammed, I came across an article by the author of the paper [ possibly in Scientific American when it still had some remnants of credibility left,] where a thorough piece of research had shown that an area of the annual Long Prairie Grass locked up, or for a more sciency sounding name, “sequestered” more Carbon, the real stuff this time, than a whole forest of trees covering the same acreage and with a time period for the grass land extending over the same period as the entire life cycle of the forest.
In short, over a many decades long period of the forest’s life cycle, the carbon sequestered by the annual growing Long Prairie Grasses exceeded the amounts of carbon sequestered by that forest.
So you don’t need heaps of trees, aka forests at all to tie up lots of carbon.
You just need a biological carbon based life form such as grass which includes grain crops and pulses and rice and sugar cane and etc and etc to soak up and retain carbon in both the plant material and to incorporate that carbon into the soil as organic carbon when the let overs, the harvested stubbles left after harvesting those crops is incorporated back into the soil.
A practice that farmers are now using almost universally.
A sowing technique now very common is to use GPS based centimeter guidance systems with automated tractor steering to sow the current year’s crop between the 200 or 250 mm gaps in the standing residue stubble rows of last years crop.
Called inter row sowing
The price for this almost complete lack of cultivation and in biology there is always a price to be paid for whatever you do, is the lavish use of herbicides and insecticides and fungicides to control pests and invasive weeds that are no longer kept in check by eliminating last season’s stubble with its carry over of fungal diseases and pests nor the disrupting of the weeds and pests life cycles by disturbing the soil with cultivation.
The price of that is now we are seeing weeds that are resistant to ALL herbicides and can only be kept in check by resuming regular cultivation.
But there are a few other twists to this carbon sequestration thing by grasses and plants and and trees.
A few years ago before Copenhagen I think when all this stuff was THE incontrovertible future, the use of the word ” incontrovertible” of course leads to considerable excitable pants wetting by the alarmists, an expert on soil carbon gave a presentation to a hundred or so farmers and ag reps at our very active, farmer run Victorian southern Mallee “Birchip Cropping Group.”
He was actually quite good.
So yours truly tosses in a question of just how do you differentiate between organic soil carbon and inorganic soil carbon when doing a carbon soil analysis.
[ I had done some homework before coming to the seminar ]
A bit of shoe shuffling followed before he got on with the answer.
The answer basically was “With great difficulty”!
In fact he told us, following my question, that great care had to be taken to see that the minute particles of inorganic carbon, the carbon that had over immense decades of time been incorporated into the soil as the outcome of fires in the growth above ground including the fires from the vast forest and grassland fire of the aeons past as well as the fires from farmers burning the stubble residues of the past seasons that was standard practice for most of a century in Australian agriculture, did not contaminate the measuring of the soil’s “organic carbon” levels.
Organic being the carbon atoms incorporated by the plant material itself.
As I have posted here not so long ago, the grasses also sequester carbon in the crystalline structure of the silica grains that are a part of the cell walls in plants and trees.
Grasses particularly sugar cane, sequester very large amounts of this carbon in those silica grains which are called Phytoliths or Plant Stones.
At the height of the price on carbon, any carbon, around pre Copenhagen, when it was promised farmers would make lots of moola from selling their soil as a carbon sequestering sink, an Australian company was set up to take advantage of the Phytoliths / Plant Stones ability to sequester carbon for up to 30,000 years or more.
So anybody who spins away merrily and rabbits on about needing trees to sequester carbon is plain damn ignorant and needs to get out a bit more and maybe read a bit of plant and biology science as well.
Or take up farming where he will get his education the hard way!
130
There are still some missing from their map, as every copy I have seen has got eastern Australia and New Zealand chopped off. Intentional, or incompetence ?
70
I noticed that too. I remember flying from Brisbane via Darwin and the forests seemed to last forever. There are plenty here in Vic too.
I also noticed a distinct lack of green colouring in England on their map and that contrasts with our observations just in the last few weeks.
80
C’mon Jo, this is argument by ridicule. That paper (not the media coverage) has substance and a lot of hours of work. It was not a joke endeavour.
If you’d be so kind as to provide a filter for comments so I can only view those by people who, like yourself, have read the original publication, that would provide an antidote to your headline. Or a blank page.
Just to take one bit of your comment. Could you fill us in on the 46% figure. Are their error bars? Is it a rounding? Is there a scientist in the whole world who “estimates” it as “exactly” 46%. Yes, that does sound silly but only one person wrote it that way. Am I mischaracterising your characterisation or was your characterisation actually accurate reporting?
Is this a lazy filler, awaiting a 20 part follow-up? Am I mischaracterising?
PS… anyone wanting the original hit me up…
417
“It was not a joke endeavour”
Correction..
“It was not MEANT TO BE a joke endeavour”
90
I’ll reply once you’ve read it
011
I’ll reply once you have understood it. !
100
Tell me leaf-brain..
Claims that 15 billion trees are removed each year.
What is their estimate of how many trees are renewed, naturally, each year ?
100
“Why should we show you our estimate when all you want to do is find something wrong with it?”
/s
90
What a stupid question. Why should I estimate such a thing? Read the research before debunking i
09
Answer the question. Don’t run and hide.
30
Read their research if you want to know their estimate. I am not your research conduit
06
So.. nothing to add to the conversation.. as usual.
Come on… at least make a guess.. 😉
20
“This study highlights how much more effort is needed if we are to restore healthy forests worldwide.””
OK.. step 1.. INCREASE ATMOSPHERIC CO2. !
130
” In short, tree densities usually plummet as the human population increases.”
LOL.. its called a CITY !!!!
110
And could someone remind me how many trees they chopped down to make way for wind turbines in Scotland…
and how many trees they are using to feed Drax? (Shipping them half way around the world )
Gee.. if you cared.. you would care !!
120
.
Yes it deserves ridicule as does the entire CAGW propaganda stunt. When you make a complete donkey’s rear end of yourself do not expect to be taken seriously. (Unless the seriousness is anger at the wholesale waste of tax payer dollars on idiocy so a few can make megabucks.)
You want serious Gee Aye?
Here is serious
Henry’s Law, CO2 and the Oceans
Of course the PC idiot who wrote this chemistry lesson didn’t mention the increase in ocean temperature is caused by solar insolation and not by back radiation ‘by greenhouse gases’ as he implies. Nor does he mention that as the earth warmed out of the Little Ice Age the increase in solar insolation CAUSED the oceans to warm and CAUSED the oceans to outgas. Hence the observed increase in CO2. Instead he says “…This will increase the atmospheric concentration of CO2, causing further increases in temperature of the atmosphere, etc….” implying runaway warming that has never ever happened even when the atmosphere was at 12,000 ppm CO2 and the earth was ~10C colder than now…Snowball Earth @ 635Mya: -20C with CO2 @ 12,000 ppm or Snowball earth @ 750 to 715Mya -15C with CO2 @ 4,000 ppm…. OMG – Runaway cooling!
………….
— I really wish all these unthinking idiots had had a decent geology course when they were young. This is very embarrassing seeing this drivel coming from a Uni professor in my field. —
…………….
Plus
Carbon starvation in glacial trees recovered from the La Brea tar pits, southern California
Plus
La Brea Tar Pits, Elevation — 164 feet (50 meters) above sea level
Now add all the data up.
The trees at that low elevation were showing signs of carbon dioxide starvation. That means few if any trees at higher elevations and most of the earth is higher than a 50 meter elevation.
Absolute drivel based on the premise that the earth was a static unchanging paradise before the Serpent (Mankind) entered the scene and screwed things up for Mother Gaia.
160
What you are saying is that you didn’t read the paper. Yet you consider it a”stunt”?
010
Gee Aye.
The study was “A new Yale-led study ”
That means it was led by all of Yale.
Easy peasy mate.
71
From the article: “In fact, human activity is the largest driver of tree numbers worldwide”
It doesn’t specify exactly which humans/corporations were the drivers. It might be a very useful study if it could include exactly who the ‘drivers’ are as i am sure there are a percentage of humans that are not driving.
50
please specify what you mean by “the article”. Did you read the original? Be interested I your specific comments on the science.
110
““In fact, human activity is the largest driver of tree numbers worldwide””
Yep.. all those trees cut down to make way for wind turbines and solar parks..
truly sad. !!
110
And to feed Drax , of course.. can’t forget that!
100
And cleared to allow for farming of ethanol crops.
Another really good idea, hey Gee !!
130
No not good at all. Btw read the paper
04
I suggest you do likewise.
See that the supposed loss is well less than the supposed error margins from their supposed modelling.
Percentages of different areas stated to 2 dp.. are they serious !!
A 10 second look was enough for a good laugh. 🙂
Oh dearie me. !!!!
50
Wee bit of conflict of interest maybe?
110
gai,
“…Harvard and other major American universities are working through British hedge funds …”
So, they don’t want trees, they want hedges!
Would that be a secret privet hedge fund?
🙂
100
Yes, Yes… Have to watch those wily privet hedges although it is the wild rampaging boxwood hedges that drive me nuts here. They have gone feral and are take over. Not even my goats will eat them and they laugh at herbicides and the chain saw.
90
And yes there is a Privet Fund Management LLC
that is basically a hedge fund.
I do not endorse, or have any interests in, or offer any advice on investing, so at your own risk here is Privet Fund Management LLC home page.
50
The companion article make it clear the confiscated land is not put to use for growing food.
Oilseed and some of the sugar go to manufacture ‘Biofuels’ while fruits and vegetables are shipped out of the country to pay for the debt to the World Bank. This is an old old story.
“…Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) are economic policies for developing countries that have been promoted by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) since the early 1980s by the provision of loans conditional on the adoption of such policies. Structural adjustment loans are loans made by the World Bank….” –WHO
50
Why don’t you tell is what the error bars are Gee Aye? How could error bars be calculated for a totally made up figure?
Have you read the paper yourself?
80
So you want me to tell you what is in the paper?
Regarding your error comment, I think you might need me to tell you all about stats as well.
07
Yes.
20
Be easier for me if you read it yourself. A couple of links below contain more meat than the science news article
05
I presume then, that you have not read the article yourself!
30
A quote he missed..
“There are so many margins of error in this study that the real number could be anything between the two – or even 10 times higher,” he said.”
Yet they can count a change of 0.5% or is it 0.05% !!
truly funny stuff. 🙂
40
And note… they used a “supercomputer”
crikey.. gees !!
40
And I would love to see their satellite data from the dawn of civilization.
I’m sure they have it somewhere. Probably archived right next to the global temperature records.
40
.
Peter C,
You are correct, they used 1-km2 pixels with computer estimations for trees per pixel within each biome!
Even though they had no zero values in the desert plots, the vast majority of desert pixels contain no trees?
Work that one out for error!
Plus there is no data in reference to the 46% reduction. It was based on the estimate that over 15 billion trees are cut down each year? And from that they extroplate:
They finish most of their guestimates with
Instills a lot of confidence NOT!
The spreadsheet of Trees per person per country is quite interesting though!
30
.
Plus smaller places like Bahrain?
Trees plotted 3,034 total but with an error rate of + or – 31,155 trees?
If you google Bahrain in maps, this figure is obviously WRONG!
30
So the science is now what? Settled? Finally?
Can this really be called science?
I wonder what number of trees the models model?
80
Democratic science. Science is now based on democracy.
50
just as hilarious was how the CAGW MSM spun it as something alarming.
explain this: u discover 2.6 trillion extra trees and yet Yale’s Crowther tells the Daily Mail: “This study highlights how much more effort is needed if we are to restore healthy forests worldwide.” huh!
Daily Briefing | Earth has 3 trillion trees but they’re falling at alarming rate
03 Sep 2015, 09:00
Carbon Brief Staff
The most comprehensive study of the world’s forests ever carried out reveals that more than 3tn trees now grow on Earth, or 422 per person. That’s more than eight times as many as previously thought but overall we’re losing 10 billion trees each year through deforestation, forest management and changes in land use, say the researchers. At that rate, all of Earth’s trees will be gone in about 300 years, says The New York Times. Lead author Thomas Crowther, post-doctoral fellow at Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, says in The Daily Mail, “This study highlights how much more effort is needed if we are to restore healthy forests worldwide.” BBC News, The Washington Post, NatureNews, The Times, The Guardian, TIME and ThinkProgress all cover the new study, with many pointing out that almost half the trees on Earth have been cut down since the start of human civilisation. Reuters
http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2015/09/daily-briefing-earth-has-3-trillion-trees-but-theyre-falling-at-alarming-rate/
was there a hint in Christiana’s $45 trillion needed over 15 years (namely 3
TRILLION DOLLARS A YEAR) that she had read about Yale’s fantastic “discovery” (on behalf of a UN-affiliated youth group no less) before making this statement? these 3 trillion trees could be the TOTEM of which Rachel speaks:
3 Sept: RTCC: Rich countries to unveil climate finance package at World Bank/(&IMF) summit
The plan needed to be “detailed and credible” she (Christiana Figueres) added with a clear pathway towards hitting $100 billion and meeting demand for low carbon investment experts believe could top $45 trillion between 2015-2030…
In a webcast briefing on Wednesday, World Bank climate envoy Rachel Kyte said the climate finance commitment had become “totemic”…
http://www.rtcc.org/2015/09/03/rich-countries-to-unveil-climate-finance-package-at-world-bank-summit/
80
ZERO acknowledgement that since the use of coal replaced ‘bio-energy’ the forests in the EU and the Northern hemisphere have grown back.
Border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
Guess which country can afford coal?
https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/haiti-and-dr.jpg
It is poverty that is the greatest threat to the global environment. Therefore the inescapable conclusion is that the only way the global environment stands a chance is if poor countries can develop economically. That means cheap reliable COAL instead of trees, twigs, grass and dung as fuel for cooking and keeping warm.
I already went through ‘Genocide by Eucalyptus.’ and the first direct murder by CAGW. Friday Mukamperezida’s death by burning was thanks to New Forests Company who is repeating the ‘Clearances’ that caused the deaths of many peasants in the UK. The reason? to get rid of subsistance farmers and plant trees to ‘farm’ Carbon Credits….
Excuse me now I have to go lose my breakfast…
120
AHHH, yes the World Bank.
WHAT IS IN IT FOR THE BANKERS?
This does not produce a single penny of actual wealth or actual scientific advancement. Instead it acts to short circuit the scientific advancement and wealth building of an entire civilization.
As I just mentioned the World Bank is much hated by developing countries because of the Structural Adjustment Policies that ruin their internal economies.
80
Has the tree data been homogenised?
110
The ISOH (International Society of Homogenisers) will have an annual picnic fiddling around with tree numbers.
The witch doctors (oops Climate Scientists) will also have a field day (or few) discussing the definition of “tree”.
60
46% – definitely not 45% or 47%. Although it could be 45.763% rounded up. Finding umpteen billion misplaced trees is a very exact science, far to exact for these approximate integer results. Or is it 46% ± 37%.
80
tennis has distracted me today from backgrounding the following:
NPR: Thomas Crowther was inspired to do this tree census a couple of years ago, when he was working at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. He had a friend who was working with a group with an ambitious goal: trying to fight global warming by planting a billion trees. (link at jo’s previous thread)
elsewhere, it is stated this was Plant for the Planet, but I have not seen Crowther’s “friend” named anywhere:
founded by a nine-year-old researcher!
Wikipedia: Plant for the Planet
Plant-for-the-Planet is a children’s initiative that aims to raise awareness amongst children and adults about the issues of climate change and global justice…
The idea for Plant-for-the-Planet was first developed in Germany in 2007 by a nine-year-old boy called Felix Finkbeiner . It was when Felix’s teacher set the assignment to prepare a school report about the issue of climate change, that Felix was first inspired. While conducting his research he came across the story of Wangari Maathai, the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate from Kenya who had worked to plant over 30 million trees across Africa as part of her ‘Green Belt Movement’…
The funding needed to plant trees comes from individual and corporate donations. Plant-for-the-Planet promises to plant one tree for every Euro donated…
Professor Klaus Töpfer is a patron of the organisation. The AVINA Foundation, the ***Club of Rome and the Global Marshall Plan all offer administrative support to the organisation. Develey, Ernst & Young, Hess Natur and Toyota also provide financial support…
Celebrities who have supported this campaign include Prince Albert II of Monaco, Wangari Maathai, Peter Maffay, Gisele Bündchen, Hans Küng, Mary Robinson, Princess Haya of Jordan, Gesine Schwan, Achim Steiner, Oliver Kalkofe, the Prince of Asturias and many more…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant-for-the-Planet
Plant for the Planet: Tree study: Humankind has Destroyed Half of all Forests
The study, which was initiated by Plant-for-the-Planet and published September 2nd, 2015, in the journal Nature…
A further trillion (1000 billion) trees would sequester more than 1/4 of the CO2 emissions for which humankind is responsible, currently 36 billion metric-tons. The children and youth of Plant-for-the-Planet are therefore calling for wealthy people and companies, Heads of States as well as all individuals to join the Billion Tree Campaign.
***“One thousand multinational corporations and billionaires planting one billion trees each, would be enough to reach our goal of 1,000 billion trees by 2020”, stated Felix Finkbeiner (17), founder of Plant-for-the-Planet from Germany…
Download Plant-for-the-Planet’s Press Release here…
http://www.plant-for-the-planet.org/en/about-us/tree-study
60
Don’t let them get you down, Jo.
40
very interesting. MSM today spoke of Plant for the Planet upping their goal to 1 TRILLION TREES as a result of this just-released study:
NPR: “Based on this, they really want to upscale their efforts hugely,” says Crowther, who explains that the new analysis has spurred them on. “Their goal is now to plant a trillion trees.”
4 June 2015: PR Newswire: Plant-for-the-Planet Calls on the G7 to Support the Greatest Afforestation Project in the History of Humankind
TUTZING, Germany: Message of the youths reaches G7 on flight to Elmau: “Plant trees for our survival”
The children’s and youth initiative Plant-for-the-Planet has called upon the G7 to support the greatest afforestation project in the history of humankind…
***”Planting 1,000 billion trees is a realistic goal, as confirmed by Yale University.” – Yugratna Srivastava (19), from India, Plant-for-the-Planet Global Board member.
The 1,000 billion new trees will sequester a quarter of human-made CO2…
“The survival of 3 billion children and young people should be worth much more than the survival of a few banks,” stated Felix Finkbeiner (17), who founded Plant-for-the-Planet, referring to the sums provided by all governments after the financial crisis in 2008.
***”If every corporation and every billionaire on the Forbes list pledged to plant one billion trees, we could reach our goal to plant 1,000 billion trees by 2020.”…
The summit is a co-operation between Plant-for-the-Planet, the United Nations Environment Programme UNEP and the Evangelische Akademie Tutzing. The world’s leaders are invited to the next summit on 11-16 May 2016, to jointly work on the detailed implementation of a global energy revolution…
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/plant-for-the-planet-calls-on-the-g7-to-support-the-greatest-afforestation-project-in-the-history-of-humankind-506106791.html
coming up for Crowther:
British Ecological Society: Climate Change Ecology and Plant, Soils and Ecosystems Groups Conference
Ecosystems and Climate Change mitigation
2-3 November 2015
Location: Charles Darwin House London
Approximately 30% of cumulative anthropogenic carbon emissions have been taken up by natural terrestrial ecosystems and a similar amount by the ocean. Today about a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions come from deforestation, agricultural emissions from soil and nutrient management and livestock. Changing the way we manage the land is an important component of climate change mitigation (intervention to reduce the sources or enhance the sinks of greenhouse gases; IPCC 2015). There is however a risk that future climate change and other pressures will reduce the strength of the global carbon sink…
Committee: The organizing committee currently consists of:
Franciska de Vries, The University of Manchester (Secretary)
Mike Whitfield, Trinity College, Dublin
Sarah Pierce, Imperial College,
Relena Ribbons, Bangor University and the University of Copenhagen,
***Tom Crowther, Yale University,
Michael van Nuland, University of Tennessee,
Ellen Fry, The University of Manchester,
Richard Bardgett, The University of Manchester, will support the committee in an advisory role…
As well as invited speakers there will be scope to offer papers and opportunities to present posters.
http://www.britishecologicalsociety.org/getting-involved/special-interest-groups/plants-soils-ecosystems/
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Why not just do some Chlorophyll Flourometry and estimate the entire plant kingdom? Why exclude exclude other plants.
Chlorophyll fluorometers
The development of fluorometers allowed chlorophyll fluorescence analysis to become a common method in plant research. Chlorophyll fluorescence analysis has been revolutionized by the invention of the Pulse-Amplitude-Modulation (PAM) technique [12][13]and availability of the first commercial modulated chlorophyll fluorometer PAM-101 (Walz, Germany). By modulating the measuring light beam (microsecond-range pulses) and parallel detection of the excited fluorescence the relative fluorescence yield (Ft) can be determined in the presence of ambient light. Crucially, this means chlorophyll fluorescence can be measured in the field even in full sunlight.[1]
Some modulated fluorometers can determine both ambient light and dark adaptation parameters (Fo, Fm, Fo’, Fm’, Fv/Fm, Y, Ft, Foq, Fms and OJIP transients) and can calculate photochemical and non-photochemical quenching coefficients (qP, qL, qN, Y(NO), Y(NPQ) and NPQ). Some fluorometers are designed to be portable and operated in one hand.
Consistent further development into imaging fluorometers facilitate the visualization of spatial heterogeneities in photosynthetic activity of samples. These heterogeneities naturally occur in plant leaves for example during growths, various environmental stresses or pathogen infection. Thus knowledge about sample heterogeneities is important for correct interpretation of the photosynthetic performance of the plant sample. High performance imaging fluorometer systems provide options to analyze single cell/single chloroplast as well as sample areas covering whole leaves or plants.
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“Nothing new under the sun”
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From http://geospatialworld.net/paper/application/ArticleView.aspx?aid=239
“Most studies have shown that there is high correlation between vegetation spectral index extracted from satellite images and the green biomass and yield.”
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And then it would be possible to obtain an estimate of how many individual plant cells are photosynthesizing in real time.
Other than that, optical recognition of trees could be obtained from the Google Earth database so that the size of the trees could also be enumerated.
If counting trees is paramount, then there should have to be a cutoff point so that trees beneath a certain size could be designated as shrubs. This research topic clearly excites me 🙂
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classic ABC headline, upon discovering there are 2.6 trillion more trees on earth. they chose this headline for an AFP piece which was headlined “Earth has three trillion trees: study”:
Earth has three trillion trees, and falling
ABC Online · 1 day ago
the BBC piece I heard last nite:
AUDIO (first 6mins9secs): BBC Science in Action: Jack Stewart: Counting the World’s Trees (interview with Crowther)
There are just over three trillion trees on Earth, according to a new assessment. This is eight times as many as the previous best estimate, which counted perhaps 400 billion at most. The more refined number will now form a baseline for a wide range of research applications – everything from studies that consider animal and plant habitats for biodiversity reasons, ***to new models of the climate, because it is trees of course that play an important role in removing the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p030xlzg
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Why can’t we just keep endlessly posting that, of all the CO2 in the atmosphere, the proportion of anthropogenic CO2 is merely less than 3.5%? I.e. it is insignificant proportion of an insignificant gas, but the solution is killing people, (in Britain, not just Third World people which no one cares about, especially the Left…), is causing economic stagnation, and is keeping the Third World impoverished and sick (due to inhalation of fumes from indoor cooking fires and not allowing clean, fossil fuel powered electric stoves).
<3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5% <3.5%
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GEE AYE , i enjoy your comments because they often go against the grain or the general flow of opinions and views and at times can be thought provoking,but please we’ve just had best part of two days of staring at David Suzuki’s face and so if comments are a little flippant well maybe we needed a little light hearted humour in comments as a distraction. Dr Patrick Moore has lately made some rather slick glossey videos via his Prager University platform, a couple about CO2 and one about forests and trees,for which Gee Aye your opinion would be welcome. thanks and pax et amor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZN6QuAdxLI
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Thanks for the link. I agree with its contents.
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Watts is running the same story and has this vid.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqdOkXQngw8
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The study abstract says global tree numbers have fallen “approximately” 46% – it is an estimate. No mention in the study abstract of when human civilization is deemed to have started.
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In general you can take the start of ‘Civilization’ or at least the switch from hunter to farmer around 10,000 to 12,000 years ago at the start of the Holocene.
This is also when the human brain started really shrinking, and the Agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago was key to the rise of ancient despots. HMMMmmmm sounds like it is time to go back to being primarily meat eaters….
For a bit of a chuckle
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Civilization probably started far earlier than that, fire has often been associated with reducing tree numbers to promote grasslands, in turn building up numbers of herbivores to eat. It’s still used that way.
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Being not surprised they lost count,
Of Earth’s trees with so vast an amount,
But to add a few trillion.
To four hundred billion,
Is a tally that needs a recount.
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error bars please…
i love the people counting the fish in the ocean too.
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It would be easier if they stopped moving around.
“Swim still, you lot …!”
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When I look at the map of this study, I see that it is very similar to an article on NASA’s new satellite that contains the sentence “NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 to acquire the new high-quality data”.
IIt appears that either NASA is wrong, the author of this study is incorrect and that I should re-read both of these studies..
Best regards,
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2.6 trillion lost trees, where were they? Down the back of the couch with the 2.6 trillion lost keys.
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“A Yale-led piece of research AND published in Nature….
So these scientists didn’t actually go and count the trees…
they used a satellite and a computer model… 😮
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Incorrect. Read the paper. Or even read the pop sci thing that Jo read or Read these instead
https://theconversation.com/global-count-shows-tree-numbers-have-halved-since-dawn-of-human-civilisation-46985
https://theconversation.com/three-trillion-trees-live-on-earth-but-there-would-be-twice-as-many-without-humans-46914
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How any did they chop down in Scotland to make room for wind turbines…
And how many to feed Drax..
and how many to make way for ludicrous biofuel plantations…
Why aren’t you and scammers like Greenpiece fighting those crimes against tree…
If you cared… you would care.
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All of this has nothing to do with what I write and does not indicate that I support the wind industry. Is there something about me that you know about that I don’t?
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feeling a bit tetchy about it, hey Gee 😉
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Accidental uptick GA. I hope you do care about some of those points Andy raised?
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The conversation.? Gees, why not use SkS instead !!
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Because TC pieces are written by people who are colleagues and peers of the people who wrote the paper and, having read the paper, I adjudged the links to represent the contents fairly well.
Appreciate if you could make comments that are less mocking.
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“Appreciate if you could make comments that are less mocking.”
Tears in the morning.
I don’t give a rat’s a*** what you’d appreciate. ! 🙂
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Its also a fact that coal burning countries are able to maintain and re-grow their natural tree-scapes.
As soon as electricity becomes unreliable and over-expensive, people turn back to burning wood.
One of the best ways of preserving trees is to use reliable electricity supplies, especially coal.
Coal has the added benefit in that it actually feeds the trees.
Again.. if you REALLY cared about the trees, you would be pushing hard for coal and oil based power rather than having trees chopped down for heating and cooking and to make way for turbines, fed as biomass, and cleared for biofuel plantation.
But you don’t care do you… just keep pushing the stupid anti-CO2 anti-plant-life agenda.
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Satellites show that the biosphere has expanded by some 10-15% with the increase in atmospheric CO2. 😉
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Andy,
It’s quite simple really. At about 200PPM C3 Plants die – growth stops, It’s now 200PPM above that, so roughly speaking growth increases by 1% for every 2PPM increase in CO2 (or conversely for falling CO2). So for a 50PPM fall to the 350.org target we are looking at a 50/2 or 25% fall in agricultural productivity, a loss of food for 1.8 Billion people in a world of 7 Billion hungry people. Greens that advocate a return to 270PPM preindustrial CO2 are advocating for 130/2 or a 65% reduction in agricultural productivity or starvation of 4.55 Billion out of 7 Billion.
350.org advocates starving the people of the world.
1% per 2 PPM change is a good rule of thumb to remember.
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for those who didn’t put together what Plant for the Planet are asking for:
Wikipedia: Plant-for-the-Planet promises to plant one tree for every Euro donated
(link above)
therefore, they are asking billionaires for the tidy little sum ONE TRILLION EUROS, or approximately $1.6 TRILLION AUSTRALIAN DOLLARS. just another huge money grab folks, basically for UNEP, if I understand it properly.
UNEP: The Billion Tree Campaign
The Plant-for-the-Planet Foundation was founded in January 2010 in Germany and is governed by a 14 headed Global Children Board and a two headed Adult Board. The Foundation is under the Patronage of Klaus Toepfer (a former UNEP Executive Director) and H.S.H Prince Albert II of Monaco…
http://www.plant-for-the-planet-billiontreecampaign.org/
UNEP: About
The Billion Tree Campaign was launched by UNEP and its partners on 8. November 2006 in Nairobi and handed over to the Plant-for-the-Planet Foundation on 7. December 2011 in Durban…
For the Billion Tree Campaign, the Foundation is receiving advice from an advisory council, consisting of Founding Partners: The Green Belt Movement, The Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation, the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Forestry and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)…
Recognizing that there are many tree planting schemes around the world, UNEP proposes to federate these efforts in both rural and urban areas…
http://www.plant-for-the-planet-billiontreecampaign.org/About.aspx
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Donate a buck? I rather go out in the yard and just plant a blooming tree. Actually I am planning on planting several this fall along with several acres of winter rye.
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A few days ago WUWT might just have flagged the ultimate answer to the “tree deficit problem”, and maybe the spark of an idea for a new subsidised Green tree industry:
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Hasn’t that already been tried? Er…, Easter Island.
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“They reckon there are now 3.04 trillion trees…” Well, not any more. I had two of the leaf and branching dropping gutter and drain blocking oxygen thieves removed last week. Nothing like the sound of chain saws and stump removers in the morning.
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Don’t worry the sweetgum trees on my property just dropped enough spiky green gumballs to plant a couple hundred trees.
The sweetgums have taken over a couple hundred acres down by the river since I moved in because the farmer next door quit growing corn down there.
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Are those what we call Liquidamber here in Aus? We have some here; they look stunning in the autumn but those sharp prickly fruits I could do without! 🙁
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But whatever you do, DON’T plant them anywhere near any drainage pipes !!!
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No, they are well away from any pipes. Thank goodness!
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Flowering gums. Plant a few flowering gums for the dispossessed wattle birds, nectar eaters, native bees and European bees and so on.
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They don’t grow here; it’s too cold and windy. The ones I planted all died.
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Ok, Snow gums then. Might need a stick to hold them up as they tend to grow sideways.
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Speaking of gums growing sideways. I have planted a few gums and a wattle and made them grow horizontally as far as was possible. I won’t plant any introduced species unless they are food producing like olive trees
The idea was that i have solar panels and did not want gums shadowing the panels. The solution was and still continues to be pruning and selecting new branches to bend using rope into the horizontal position.
There is one that i was able to grow around a corner and up the driveway. It takes a fair bit of pruning, but not too difficult as long as any vertical branches are caught in time before they take off.
Believe it or not, Here in Gippsland Victoria, i am pioneering the art of gum tree bending. And one wattle.
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Sweetgum is Liquidambar styraciflua. And yes it does turn a very strong red color in fall. One of the few pretty fall trees in this neck of the woods. I am used to the sugar maples up north that have incredible fall color.
Sweetgum leaf — they are really easy to ID:
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/2d/ff/b2/2dffb2fb07b2ce1b22a5f3ec3bae9f2c.jpg
Sweetgum ball:
http://walterreeves.code18interactiv.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/sweetgum-ball-500×375.jpg
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That’s it! Thank you Gai. 🙂
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Before the arrival of Europeans in Adelaide there were few trees, being on the fringe of a large desert, but the predominantly German immigrants turned the place into an oasis.
https://eyesonbrowne.wordpress.com/2012/09/28/more-trees-than-any-other-city-in-the-world/
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If only they had Obama and his planet saving carbon(sic) action ….
“But the total number of trees has plummeted by roughly 46 percent since the start of human civilization.
The results provide the most comprehensive assessment of tree populations ever produced and offer new insights into a class of organism that helps shape most terrestrial biomes.”
~ ~ ~
Sadly, for these 97% Doomsday tragics, lack of information doesn’t stop them:
“The only populated lands on earth that have not yet been explored in any depth are those which have been lost underneath the sea,” says Professor Vince Gaffney, Anniversary Chair in Landscape Archaeology at the University of Bradford.
“Although archaeologists have known for a long time that ancient climatic change and sea level rise must mean that Doggerland holds unique and important information about early human life in Europe, until now we have lacked the tools to investigate this area properly.”
Using modern genetics and computing technologies researchers will digitally repopulate this ancient country, called Doggerland, monitoring its development over 5000 years to reveal important clues about how our ancestors made the critical move from hunter-gathering into farming.
The cool, underwater environment means that DNA is better preserved here and offers archaeologists a unique view of how society and environment evolved during a period of catastrophic climate change and in a prehistoric country that had previously been lost to science and history.
(past horizons) Archaeologists, molecular biologists and computer scientists will work together to digitally re- construct a prehistoric country approaching the size of Ireland that, following climate change after the last Ice Age, was covered by rising sea levels and now lies beneath the North Sea.
. . .
Obama: “This was the moment when the rise of the seas began to slow, and our planet …”
Obama is a certified fool. Tell him he’s dreaming.
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I didn’t know any of this, thanx for bring it to my attention.
‘Around 6,200 BC, a huge submarine landslide took place off the coast of Norway; today, we call it the Storegga slide, one of the biggest known such events.
‘At that time, Doggerland featured a coastline of lagoons, marshes, mudflats, and beaches. Despite being surrounded by waters, it was still a thriving land, with a significant hunter gatherer population.
‘The landslide created a 4-5 meter tsunami in the area, destroying the population, covering Doggerland and separating the people who migrated to today’s Britain from those who lived in Europe.’
ZME Science
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Thanks Handjive,
from the same website.
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Bonn fails as everyone is thrown under the bus…down the road!
original AFP headline: “UN climate talks kick can down the road” – Bonn (AFP)- 9 hours ago.
guess that was considered too negative?
5 Sept: AFP: New strategy to boost flagging climate talks
Bonn (AFP) – As a December deadline looms, diplomats wrangling over the text of a climate rescue pact kicked the can further down the road Friday, frustrated at their own lack of progress.
On the final day of a crucial negotiating round in Bonn, delegates turned to the joint chairmen of the UN forum for help in editing the unwieldy blueprint into a more manageable format.
The duo, Algeria’s Ahmed Djoghlaf and Daniel Reifsnyder of the United States, promised to have a streamlined version ready in time for the next round of Bonn talks from October 19-23…
“We have only ***1,800 minutes to agree on the draft package for Paris,” Djoghlaf said. “Every minute has value.”
The pair also announced that a dedicated “drafting committee” will be created to start work as soon as negotiators reassemble…
“Heads of state who care about their children should be angry with their negotiators,” Greenpeace climate policy director Martin Kaiser said of the Bonn outcome…
https://au.news.yahoo.com/world/a/29436695/un-climate-talks-kick-can-down-the-road/
***it’s down to “minutes” and “inches” now!
4 Sept: RTCC: UN climate talks ***inch forward as countries agree path to Paris
Co-chairs at Bonn conference to draft new negotiating text for global deal – set for release in first week of October By Ed King in BonnWork on building a global climate deal showed progress on the final day of a UN conference in Bonn, with officials chairing the process revealing they would release a new, slimmer draft text in early October.
Dan Reifsnyder, a State Department diplomat co-chairing the talks told reporters the proposed new text would be “coherent, concise, and comprehensive”…
Most observers RTCC spoke to said the document as it stood was not suitable but few countries at this week’s talks have offered a sense of how the text could be radically slashed in time for a December summit where a deal is set to be signed off.
Reifsnyder said progress had been made on clarifying the general objectives of the deal but admitted talks on who will provide climate finance and adaptation were complex…
WWF climate talks expert Tasneep Essop said news countries would allow the co-chairs to craft a text was a sign of the ***trust they had built with countries since taking control of talks in January…
http://www.rtcc.org/2015/09/04/un-talks-inch-forward-as-countries-agree-path-to-paris/
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…..minutes to go…..inch by inch…..huge document…..agree upon?????
Huh! It’s as simple as selecting one of two short statements.
(a) Shut down all CO2 emissions to save the Planet.
(b) Place a tax on those CO2 emissions and send us the money.
Now, you be the judge which one of those two simple statements will be the selected one.
Tony.
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Tony from Oz,
It is never that simple.
The reason for a long document and endless talks is all about how to divide up the pie and guess who is on the menu?
I often use as a companion piece Dr Evan’s Climate Coup — The Politics: How the regulating class is using bogus claims about climate change to entrench and extend their economic privileges and political control.
The two articles from two different hemisphere fit together very nicely and explain the politics that affect us every day.
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“Dan Reifsnyder …..co-chairing the talks told reporters the proposed new text would be coherent, concise and comprehensive” that is of a document not yet begun.
Reminds me of another deluded geriatric –
“I shall do such things – what they be yet I know not, but they shall be. The terrors of the earth”
King Lear Act 2 Scene 4
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Well I, personally, planted a million trees in the 80’s. But they cut a lot of them down to build a wind farm about 5 years ago.
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Meanwhile the real world continues its campaign of disobedience – Pause lengthens yet again.
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Global warming 1958
These bastards have been running this scam for as long as I have been on this planet.
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The trees are winning. Aided of course by a fifth column of ratbag greenies, who want all productive land returned to useless garbage scrub.
My neighbours 10,000 acre was fully developed grazing land. He is getting old, & his kids are too smart to be graziers, [they are public servants], so it is not all that slowly reverting to garbage scrub.
We used to train our eventers there, but now, in just 10 years it is so overgrown with brambly garbage that you would be cut to pieces if you galloped through it.
He used to burn it every few years to keep regrowth down, but new small acreage people moving in from the city complain about the smoke. He did not like the hate mail, so stopped.
My son flies small remote controlled battery powered aircraft. We are in the country, but he has to drive 10 kilometres to a find a 50 acre field free enough of trees to be able to do this. The fields owner is struggling with seedlings that are popping up everywhere after a couple of wet years.
The chemicals he used to use to control this regrowth are now banned. He is talking about giving up. The cost of maintaining his paddocks exceeds the return today.
Do keep up the good fight folks, I wish you luck, but don’t have much hope for you.
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As if life isn’t difficult enough with all this worrying about ruining the lives of future children because I happen to live in a developed country, now I have to look after 422 trees…?
Surely I could claim some carbon credits for them? The trees, I mean, not the non-existent children…
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Why should you not claim for nonexistent children James, thousands of academics are claiming research grants to research a nonexistent problem.
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So someone has counted the trees and found that the people doing the carbon calculations have underestimated the number of trees x7. So much for those calculations then.
As for somehow measuring the number of trees 10,000 year ago, what? Those satellite images were lost by the pyramid builders.
Anyone who has been across the vast forests of Russia knows there are a lot of trees. That trees are somehow more important than grasses is absurd. As for carbon storage, what about all the sea shells in the vast limestone reserves of the world. Currently in Rheims inspecting champagne caves, a tough assignment, the caves a typical Roman endeavour from 2,000 years ago, solid sea shells 30 metres under Rheims, Paris, Odessa. Great building materials, as with the pyrmids of Giza. This nonsense about element 6 in the Periodic table has to stop. The amount of Carbon stored and released by human lifeforms is not a tiny fraction of the planet’s Carbon. The idea that man has wrecked the planet is crazy. We cannot eat trees.
However the hotel has some lovely Green messages to save on washing towels. You can put towels you want washed in the bath tub.
Then “the planet will feel a little better as it rotates“. At this latitude this huge ball of molten rock is spinning at 1,000km/hr. We have to look after the planet which is apparently depressed! What childish nonsense. We have gone from flat earthers to pseudo science and tree worshippers.
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“currently in Rheims inspecting champagne caves, a tough assignment”
I bet it is. I admire your diligence, fortitude and drink suspension
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=drink+suspension
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Element six. Or the sixth element. There should be a blockbuster movie about it. One has already been done about Boron. “The Fifth Element”
Hydrogen, Helium, Lithium, Beryllium, Boron, Carbon, the sixth element. Timely reminder TdeF.
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I am a Shrub worshipper. A minor precursor to full grown tree worshipping.
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A lovely place TdeF; have a great time there. I feel jealous!
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let’s single out Saudi Arabia now…except it’s really the Saudis, the Like Minded Group of Developing Countries, or LMDC – which includes major players like China and India, and other Middle East oil economies including Algeria, Iran and Iraq – as well the Arab Group, comprising probably a large majority of the world’s population. then get Greenpeace and a couple of other pathetic NGOs to join the criticism. what a joke:
3 Sept: Deutsche Welle: Led by Saudi Arabia, Persian Gulf oil countries resist tough climate agreement
Saudi Arabia is being accused of trying to water down the climate agreement at international talks in Bonn this week. But the Middle East is vulnerable to the effects of climate change – and awareness may be growing.
“There is no doubt that Saudi Arabia’s position is harmful,” Greenpeace’s Jens Mattias Clausen told DW. “We need strong long-term goals and an agreement to phase out fossil fuels – Saudi Arabia is fighting against this tooth-and-nail. And they have a lot of influence, especially on other oil-producing countries.”
The Saudi Kingdom has used that influence within the Like Minded Group of Developing Countries, or LMDC – which includes major players like China and India, and other Middle East oil economies including Algeria, Iran and Iraq – as well the Arab Group…
And on the surface at least, there are strong economic incentives for these countries to stand together against climate mitigation. Around 80 percent of Saudi Arabia’s government revenues come from oil. Kuwait, Qatar, Iraq, Bahrain and UAE have similarly fossil fuel-dependent economies.
Oil revenues allow the rulers of countries like Saudi Arabia to pay out generously on welfare and subsidies, which underscores their mandate to rule, particularly in the wake of the Arab Spring.
“Telling Saudi Arabia it has to leave its oil in ground is tantamount to saying we support a revolution in your country,” said Jim Krane, an energy research fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute in the US…
The real problem, observers say, is that climate change is just not on the agenda there.
“I don’t think the Saudi royals think about climate change or take the issue seriously at all,” said (Wael Hmaidan, director of the Climate Action Network)…
“The climate negotiations just aren’t part of public awareness,” (Ali Shaaban, head of Green Gulf) told DW.
***People are just becoming familiar with the term ‘climate change,’ but they still don’t really understand the problem.”…
http://www.dw.com/en/led-by-saudi-arabia-persian-gulf-oil-countries-resist-tough-climate-agreement/a-18691721
***only vested interests “understand” the “problem”.
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Thanks Pat, right to the heart of the matter. What unites this disparate group the LMDC other than the problem that “climate change mitigation” precipitates, for them, a social and economic catastrophe far, far sooner than climate change impacts on the developed Annexe one nations. Any cognisant warmist must be equally aware of this therefore making it part of their agenda to inhibit the LMDC use of fossil fuels. Ironically this strategy is logical even if the near future is a “little ice age”. Incidentally the current price of oil renders most of these producers technically insolvent. No doubt though most will sign up to the newly expanded Sustainable Development Goals.
Funny how two words can encompass so many contradictions.
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I’m confused.
What is a tree?
When does a sprouting acorn become a tree?
What about shrubs? Do they count?
And if I have more trees than I’m supposed to, does this mean the government owes me some money…..
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Whatever happened to the one billion trees Bob Hawke said he was going to plant?
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