Postcard from Berkeley

Vine and Walnut, Berkeley the Original Peet's Coffee

Last Saturday, Mary and I were going to meet with the daughter of Walter Lowdermilk–a Rhodes scholar, forester, and soil scientist–and were too early. So we wandered off to toward Tilden Regional Park and happened across the Berkeley Rose Garden. It’s on a hillside in a shallow draw that looks perfect for a concert. We lingered there a while and then used my iPhone’s map app to find the nearest Peet’s Coffee. It came up with one on Vine St and Walnut Street.

Inside the store we found the eclectic mixture of people that is emblematic of the People’s Republic of Berkeley. Conversations about politics and the environment drifted past us. We also found lots of Peet’s memorabilia. Mary and I had stumbled upon the very first Peet’s Coffee and Tea store in the country. I suspect some of the people there had been coming to this store since it opened. And since, Mr. Peet had trouble getting people to leave (at one time removing all the chairs which only caused the people to sit on the floor) they may never have left.

I Love Trees

This is what a plantation looks like, it's hardly a monoculture

I love trees. I love them standing. And I love them horizontal. I love them on the stump and off. I love all the stuff they provide, tangible and intangible.  I love all the types of forests that exist, young, old, and in between.

My name is Norm and I’m a forester. It’s good to finally say it, after all these years.

I recently met others of my kind at the California Licensed Foresters Association (CLFA) convention, March 4-6 in Sacramento. The Hilton’s parking lot held more pickup trucks than a Hollywood gala has Prius sedans.

It’s easy to recognize a working foresters’ pickup. And, don’t let the patina of dirt and mud-caked splashes around the wheel wells fool you, you’ll see that on the trucks of people who just play in the mud. Foresters don’t play in the mud. They work in mud during winter. And they work in ankle-deep dust in the summer. The way to spot a forester’s pickup is found in the back of the truck. There you’re apt to see the tools of our trade: chainsaws, handsaws, double-bit axes, loppers, shovels, tow straps, plastic flagging, and fueling dispensers (complete with nozzles and meters. You may also see some odd looking stuff with even odder names: hoedads, dibbles, McLeods, Pulaskis, and log chokers. You’ll also find tree bark, leaves, and more dirt in the back of a forester’s truck.

It’s easy to recognize foresters. Inside the Hilton, we stood out like bib overalls at a black tie affair. Carhartt jeans and plaid-flannel shirts are the most common. We didn’t don our normal footwear, our caulked (pronounced “corked”) boots, which was fortunate for the floors. By the way, do you know how to recognize an extroverted forester? He (or she, yes, there are women in the woods) is the one looking at the other person’s boots.

Like nerds, we possess an impaired fashion sense (we wouldn’t know couture from a coat rack), love of Skol, and all things earth, foresters are quite intelligent. They aren’t knuckle-draggers, far from it. Our group included several PhDs and scads of Bachelor of Science degrees. Almost every attendee was an RPF (Registered Professional Forester).

The RPF license requires seven year’s forestry experience and successfully passing a killer comprehensive exam. The exam covers everything about managing forests including: silviculture, surveying, vegetation management, forest protection, forest sampling and measurement procedures, timber growth, yield, and utilization; forest economics, forest valuation, statistics, and soils science, silviculture (forest care), mensuration (forest and tree measurements), dendrology (tree identification), wood technology (identification and wood characteristics: tensile and elasticity), to name just a few.

Despite working in the only industry that is net carbon-positive (see the table on this post ), we’re in an industry struggling to stay alive. I’m sure some can’t wait to dance on forestry’s grave and have thrown lawsuits large enough to choke a bear. Due, in part to their efforts at helping logging’s demise along, costs of producing THPs (Timber Harvesting Plan) have risen 1200 percent over the past 30 years. It’s a formula to squeeze some of the greenest jobs out of the state. As I said, we cut trees to grow trees because what is left standing is the important part. A t-shirt I saw said it more succinctly than I, “Trees. Cut ‘em down…they grow back! DUH!!!”

Stumps, logging slash of bark and branches, and skidding trails can look nearly devastated. I already see the decades beyond. My training has ingrained in me the need to monitor progress and see what has and hasn’t worked. Not everyone sees harvesting as I do.

The folks who don’t like logging also love trees. We have tree-hugging in common. They hug, perhaps, to tactilely become one with the tree and totally grok its nature. I hug trees to throw a D-tape around them to measure diameters for subsequent volume calculations. That’s my nature. Different flings for different things. You love trees your way I love trees my way.

I love trees. How do you love trees?

California’s Deforestation Due to Wildfire

This is a map of the National Forests in California. These forests comprise about half of the forestland in California.

The Forest Service graphic below shows the results of the 2000-2009 fire season in California. About 1% of California’s fires chalk up 90% of the total acreage burned. Half a million acres that had the potential to provide wood instead produced smoke filled with carbon dioxide and water vapor.

According to the United Nations, deforestation accounts for nearly one-quarter of human-caused greenhouse gases. Half a million acres were converted by fire and maybe one-tenth of that has been replanted.

How much deforestation is there?

I mentioned the other day in “What Killed the environmental Movement, that generally environmental organizations tell you how bad things are but will never say anything improved? Check this out:

[Illegal logging and unsustainable forest practices] lead to the loss of nearly 36 million acres of natural forests each year, an area roughly the size of New York state. The world’s poorest people often bear the brunt… – World Wildlife Fund

Now I crosschecked with the 2005 Global Forest Resources Assessment compiled by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO):

Deforestation, mainly due to conversion of forests to agricultural land, continues at an alarmingly high rate – some 13 million hectares [32.1 million acres] per year. – 2005 FAO report

Now, that’s close enough that I wouldn’t quibble, but the FAO adds that due to reforestation the number is less:

“At the same time, forest planting, landscape restoration and natural expansion of forests have significantly reduced the net loss of forest area.

And is the culprit illegal logging and poor forest management? Sometimes. From this FAO graphic it looks like it might be fuelwood gathering.

In fact, it’s an improvement. An improvement of over a million and a half hectares (4 million acres) per year:

Net global change in forest area in the period 2000–2005 is estimated at -7.3 million hectares per year (an area about the size of Panama or Sierra Leone), down from -8.9 million hectares per year in the period 1990–2000.

I know, I know, we’re still losing acreage and I agree with the WWF that “The world’s poorest people often bear the brunt…” but much of that is due to the United States desire not to harvest in its own forests.

Consider California. It has 40 million acres of forest with 313 billion board feet (BBF) of timber In 2000, 2 BBF were harvested.

California has 40 million acres of forest with 313 billion board feet (BBF) of timber. In 2000, 2 BBF were harvested from California and we consumed 8.5 BBF, a difference of 6.5 Billion board feet had to be imported from somewhere else.
(Source: McKillop, William. “Forestry, Forest Industry, and Forest Products Consumption in California.”)

Who Killed the Environmental Movement ?

“When the search for truth is confused with political advocacy, the pursuit of knowledge is reduced to the quest for power.”

– Alston Chase

Tales of doom and gloom are wildly exaggerated by many environmental organizations as a way to get you to care,

At the very least, they emphasize the bad and ignore the positive. Actually things have improved over the last century. Known reserves of fossil fuels and most metals have risen. Agricultural production per head has risen; and the number of people facing starvation has dropped in the developing world. The threat of biodiversity loss is real but overblown, as is the problem of tropical deforestation. And pollution is diminishing. How would I know? I’ve been around to see the changes. So has this guy, Patrick Moore:

Does this mean the world has no problems? That’s not at all what I’m saying. We certainly have problems. In fact, the Copenhagen Consensus Center has ranked the world’s greatest concerns as to where our effort should go. The Copenhagen Consensus (not to be confused with the climate talks just ended in Copenhagen) commissions “research that analyzes the optimal ways to combat the biggest problems facing the world.” It gores many Sacred Calves. Like a buyer for WalMart, the Copenhagen Consensus looks for where we humans can get the most bang for our buck. It turns out anthropogenic (a fancy way to say something caused by people) global warming wound up at #30, a fact that fries most greens and climatologists.

Speaking of goring sacred calves, Bjørn Lomborg‘s The Skeptical Environmentalist is still worth reading ten years after its first printing. It gores many of former-vice president Gore’s sacred calves.

Hot Air Cuts California Forests Out of Carbon Offset Program

In order for California’s proposed cap and trade system to be anything but a mockery we need to rip down the “Do Not Disturb” signs on much of California’s forests and commit ourselves to harvesting in California’s forests, even (gasp) clearcutting. Foresters and forest landowners aren’t the only ones who feel this way; the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) agrees.

Last month, an out-of-state special interest group derailed the forestry portion of a provisional carbon cap and trade system aimed at lowering California greenhouse gas emissions.  You might guess that an oil company that pressured the California Air Resources Board to fold, but it was in fact a Tucson-based environmental lobby, the “Center for Biological Diversity” (CBD).

“We commend the Air Resources Board for its commitment to addressing the critical environmental questions related to forest carbon credits,” crowed a CBD spokesperson. “It’s crucial that the state not give incentives to business-as-usual clearcutting and other destructive logging practices that hurt our forests and do nothing to address the immediate impacts of climate change.”

It’s a case of the wrongheaded politically spinning a regulator, who should know better. Once again, spin consumes science, and those putatively for a healthy environment have obfuscated for their own gains. “Crisis, real or not, is a commodity,” Tom Knudson wrote in his 2001 series, Environment, Inc., “And slogans and sound bites masquerade as scientific fact.”

For California to be part of the climate change solution, it must remove the “Do Not Disturb” sign currently on its forests. When we don’t cut here, we cut “over there,” contributing to deforestation and environmental degradation elsewhere while also increasing greenhouse emissions. (For more, see “The Illusion of Preservation.”) And it isn’t just foresters like me who think this way. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recommends that we cut more wood, and use wood in place of concrete, steel, and other wood substitutes. By cutting forests, our forests, not someone else’s forest, we can contribute to saving the world.

For many of us the climate change debate borders on incomprehensible. I’m not saying I understand it all; but some context might be helpful for discerning how forests relate to global warming.

In 1895, Svante August Arrhenius, presented a paper to the Stockholm Physical Society titled, “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground.” In it, he argued that thermal radiation from the sun warmed the earth’s surface during the day and as the surface cooler at night, certain gases which included CO2 and water vapor, acted as a blanket retarding the escape of heat. The idea of plates of glass in a greenhouse allowing sunlight in and trapping the heat inside worked as a metaphor for the process, hence the ‘greenhouse effect.’

The worry now is that through our use of coal, oil, gas, and other fossil fuels; we have added too much CO2 as a result could the earth may be over-heating.

In 1988, the United Nations created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to assess scientific information concerning human-induced climate change and the options for adaptation and minimizing its effects. In 1997, representatives from around the world met in Kyoto. They passed the Kyoto Protocol which sets binding targets for 63 industrialized countries to create five per cent less of their 1990 greenhouse gas (water vapor, methane, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and ozone) emissions.

In 2006, California passed a law similar to Kyoto, pegging our CO2 output to 1990 levels. Now I am skeptical that reducing our CO2 output will have any meaningful results. I think planting trees in urban settings and painting roads and rooftops white are better uses for our taxes. And we need to reduce tropical deforestation by cutting more trees in temperate forests such as California. All of these actions increase the albedo, the reflectivity of objects, which is part of the models used to predict global warming.

Nevertheless, because trees soak up CO2, the California Air Resources Board adopted a program that included allowing forest management activities for which CO2 emitters could buy carbon credits. The Center for Biological Diversity contends logging practices hurt our forests and do nothing to slow climate change. As I said before, the United Nations’ IPCC disagrees.

The IPCC says deforestation and severely degrading forests accounts for 20-25% of greenhouse gas emissions (IPCC is not talking about timber harvesting regarding deforestation and degradation). It also says the best strategies to prevent degradation and deforestation are: 1) “carbon conservation,” which includes both preventing forest conversion to agricultural uses, subdivisions or other non-forest uses, as well as controlling major fires; 2) “carbon sequestration and storage,” which means expanding forest area and/or biomass of natural and plantation forests; and 3) “carbon substitution,” which broadly means using wood products instead of non-wood products, all of which require more fossil fuel-based energy and materials. According to the IPCC, carbon substitution (wood products over cement, steel, aluminum, plastic, to name a few) has “the greatest mitigation potential in the long term.”

I’m a subject matter expert on growing wood; frankly it’s my passion. The growth and yield of forests is what forestry revolves around. Our California forests have the capacity to produce all the wood we need and export some as well, yet we import 75% of our wood. You can bet the wood we import wasn’t harvested under restrictions as comprehensive as those within California’s Forest Practice Rules requiring Timber Harvesting Plans that consider water, wildlife, and other concerns.

We need to stop trying to preserve everything and pretending that it doesn’t cause a mess elsewhere just because we can’t see it. The “not in my backyard” (Nimby) mentality outsources the mess: to Brazil, to Siberia, to countries not willing to enforce environmental regulations the way California can and will.

There has been a concerted effort to restrict logging by many environmental groups, from the Sierra Club to the Center for Biological Diversity. If green organizations truly cared about reducing CO2, they would embrace forest management in California. They would promote using California forests for the wood products that store carbon. They would demand that the national forests begin harvesting timber in greater quantities. And they would insist that we begin using wood instead of concrete, aluminum, steel, and other wood substitutes.

What can you do? Start buying sustainable California wood. At least, buy wood certified by the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) or the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). Write congress and tell them to push for harvesting in the national forests, rather than letting wildfires send more CO2 into the air (the California wildfires of 2001 – 2007 reportedly equaled 30 million cars on the road for a year).

Let’s stop pretending wood comes from the lumberyard.

Sources:

Berlik, Mary M., David B. Kittredge, and David R. Foster. “The illusion of preservation: a global environmental argument for the local production of natural resources.” Journal of Biogeography, 29, 1557–1568

Center for Biological Diversity Media Release, “California Withdraws Harmful ‘Carbon Credits for Clearcuts’ Forest Policy.” (http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/press_releases/2010/logging-credits-02-25-2010.html accessed 14 March, 2010)

Dekker-Robertson, Donna L. and William J. Libby. “American Forest Policy: Some Global Ethical Tradeoffs.” BioScience, Volume 48 No. 6

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,  Technical Paper I: Forest Sector (http://www.gcrio.org/ipcc/techrepI/forest.html accessed 14 March, 2010)

McKillop, William. George Goldman, and Susanna Laaksonen-Craig. “Forestry, Forest Industry, and Forest Products Consumption in California.” UC Berkeley, Publication 8070  (http://anrcatalog.ucdavis.edu/Forestry/8070.aspx accessed 14 March, 2010)

NASA, Earth Observatory Biography. Svante Arrhenius (http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Arrhenius/ accessed 14 March, 2010)

Clearcutting, Climate Change, and the Center for Biological Diversity

“A clearcut is about as beneficial to the climate as a new coal-fired power plant.”

– spokesman for the Center for Biological Diversity

Spin consumes science

Such a sound bite is ‘spin;’ and we should not confuse such political posturing with fact. Perception trumps truth and the California Air Resources Board has caved to political pressure from CBD and its ilk, reversing its earlier decisions on carbon protocols. We should not be skipping and shouting yippee! The result runs counter to the goals and the scientific truths CBD professes to hold.

The Science of Carbon Sequestration

In the section on the Forest Sector the IPCC uses peer-reviewed science to back its priorities for using trees to reduce the affect of carbon-based fuels. These methods are:

1) carbon conservation,

2) carbon sequestration and storage,

3) carbon substitution.

Carbon conservation practices include preventing the conversion of forests to other land uses e.g., agricultural uses or subdivisions; and controlling major fires and pest outbreaks.

Carbon sequestration and storage practices include expanding forest area and/or biomass of natural and plantation forests.

Carbon substitution in general means substituting wood products for non-wood building materials, i.e., cement-based and metal-based products, rather than using fossil fuel-based energy and products.

Because forests are “renewable resources,” displacing fossil fuels for low energy-intensive wood products has, according to the IPCC, “the greatest mitigation potential in the long term.”

Clearcutting is not the bogyman

If the CBD and other green organizations cared about human-caused global warming they would embrace forest management, including even-aged. They would promote using California forests for the wood products that store carbon. They would demand that the national forests begin harvesting timber in greater quantities. Our California forests have the capacity to produce all the wood we need and export some as well, yet we import 75% of our wood. You can bet the wood we import wasn’t harvested under restrictions as comprehensive as those within California’s Forest Practices Act. Did any of the harvests have a Timber Harvesting Plan that took water and wildlife into consideration?

Logging in California does not equal deforestation. As a forester, I have seen the before-and-after of tree cutting and I have watched forests over decades. I support conserving trees. I also support harvesting trees responsibly. We need to grow more trees.

We must use the wood we grow as a substitute for metal, concrete, and plastics wherever possible. As Greenpeace co-founder and another environmental heretic, Patrick Moore, points out, “Wood is the most renewable and sustainable of the major building materials. On all measures comparing the environmental effects of common building materials, wood has the least impact on total energy use, greenhouse gases, air and water pollution, solid waste and ecological resource use.” Don’t believe him or me? Read this peer-reviewed paper “Carbon dioxide balance of wood substitution: comparing concrete- and wood-framed buildings,” by Leif Gustavsson, Kim Pingoud, and Roger Sathre. Their research indicates “wood-framed construction requires less energy, and emits less CO2 to the atmosphere, than concrete-framed construction.”

CBD and their ilk promote Kabuki environmentalism with the “zero-cut” illusion of preservation, getting wood from countries with lax environmental enforcement. It’s unadulterated NIMBYism.

Governor Schwarzenegger, AB 32, and Global Warming: Code Redd

“When the search for truth is confused with political advocacy, the pursuit of knowledge is reduced to the quest for power.“- Alston Chase, author of “Playing God in Yellowstone.”

‘Redd’ is another ort in the acronym soup of climate-speak from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); it stands for “Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation.” I’ll get into the particulars shortly on how Redd relates to Assembly Bill 32, the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006; Governor Schwarzenegger’s Executive Order S-13-08 directing state agencies to plan for sea level rise and climate impacts; and the attempt by the California Air Resources Board (Carb) to implement both. But first, the historical underpinnings of the global warming debate and why the hang-up on carbon dioxide.

The Genesis of the Greenhouse Effect

In 1895, Swedish chemist Svante August Arrhenius presented a paper to the Stockholm Physical Society titled, “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground.” Building on previous experiments by Tyndall (certain gases absorb radiation) and others, he argued that thermal radiation from the sun warmed the earth’s surface during the day; and at night, as the surface radiated that energy back into the sky, certain gases and water vapor acted as a blanket to retard the escape of heat. Thus, carbonic acid (carbon dioxide) influenced Earth’s climate, so its abundance or scarcity explained warm periods and ice ages.

About ten years later, he published “Worlds in the Making,” in which he described his “hot-house theory” in layman’s terms. The analogy of glass plates of a greenhouse allowing sunlight through and trapping heat inside was a convenient way to describe the process; hence the ‘greenhouse effect.’ Arrhenius felt that man’s contribution of CO2 to the atmosphere was beneficial because it warded off the return of an ice age.

The earth continued to warm and some thought Arrhenius might be on to something. Others continued to theorize on human-caused CO2’s affect on climate, most notably Guy Callendar and Gilbert Plass. In the 1950s, Plass calculated CO2 absorption of infrared radiation, predicting that doubling earth’s CO2 would produce a 3.6 degrees Celsius warming. Yet, scientific consensus discounted human’s contribution to the greenhouse effect, contending that natural forces exerted far greater influence. Until the 1980s, most scientists believed we were on the verge of another ice age.

The IPCC

Yet, temperatures began steadily rising in the late 1970s. In 1988, the United Nations created the IPCC to assess scientific information concerning human-induced climate change and the options for adaptation and mitigation. The IPCC has now published its fourth assessment (2007) showing that temperature has increased about one degree Celsius over the previous 100 years and a sea level rise of nearly 0.2 meters (0.56 feet). Though if the earth’s average temperature increases 3-5 degrees Celsius, as it has in previous epochs, then we might see a sea level rise of 16 feet.[i]

California Dreamin’: All the leaves are brown

Governor Schwarzenegger and California’s legislature apparently believe, along with much of the rest of the world, the appropriate response is to lower our CO2 emissions. So, about a century after Arrhenius penned his paper, Governor Schwarzenegger signed Executive Order S-13-08 directing all state agencies to develop CO2 strategies to deal with the human-caused portion of global warming. He told a crowd of dignitaries that due to ongoing climate change, “We have to adapt the way we work and plan [to] make sure the state is prepared when heavy rains cause flooding and the potential for sea level rise increases in future years.”

I am skeptical of lowering carbon is the best way to meet these potential threats, preferring direct methods such as effective flood control planning and diking to indirect methods. Nonetheless, due to the Global Warming Solutions Act (AB32), Governor Schwarzenegger made Carb responsible for overseeing reductions of greenhouse gas (GhG) emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, now less than 10 years off.

This is where Redd comes in (remember Redd? “Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation”). Trees do a good job of soaking up CO2 (“sequestering carbon” in IPCC jargon). So, in 2007, Carb embraced the California Climate Action Registry protocols for determining the climate benefits of forest carbon sequestration as part of a Cap-and-Trade system. The only hitch being that those protocols allowed timber harvesting and worse (in the view of some), they seemed to not expressly prohibit—gasp—clearcutting. This upset a number of environmental groups, including the Tucson-based “Center for Biological Diversity” (CBD).

They and their friends dislike timber harvesting in general and clearcutting in particular. You might recall that CBD and others brought suits against Cal-Fire for allowing Sierra Products Industries to practice even-aged management on the SPI forests saying, “A clearcut is about as beneficial to the climate as a new coal-fired power plant.” It turns out CBD and its friends have now persuaded Carb to reverse its earlier decisions.

Politics is Power

Regardless of whether you buy the argument that reducing CO2 will make any difference[i], if you care about reducing our reliance on carbon-based fuels, Carb’s reversal on the accounting protocols is counter-productive.

Tomorrow: Why.

[i] Carbon Dioxide’s Role in Climate Change Calculations

While few dispute CO2 being a ‘greenhouse gas’ (GhG), it’s CO2’s role in climate change that is debated.

The “Warmers” frame the argument this way: since we have seen a increased CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels coupled with a warming trend in the earth’s mean temperature. QED, the cause must be CO2 and therefore lowering CO2 will begin reversing global warming.

The “Skeptics” say that the argument misapplies cause-and-effect. They ask ‘what accounts for the Minoan, Roman, and Medieval Warm periods and the facts that the earth has plunged into ice ages when CO2 has been ten times greater than today? Something else forces major climate changes.’

Environmental Story Trends to Watch: Climate Change

“Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.”

– Danish physicist, Neils Bohr

A few posts ago I attempted to list the top environmental stories of the last decade: the Doha development agenda stall, the 2008 economic downturn, Al Gore’s Nobel prize, and others, ending with the Credit Card Reform Act of 2009. This month we’ll consider the future environmental topics in this column even though forecasting is iffy.

Climate Change

Say Og, I'm just thinking out loud here, but you know what my be good? Fire. Global warming be hanged, you hear what I'm saying? We could use fire.

Look for responses to curb global warming to fall short of targets. After all, some folks like Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute call for cutting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions 80% by 2020. Park your car now. Walk everywhere. No open fires.

As the shortfall looms larger, we should see more discussions revolving around geo-engineering, mammoth engineering projects to counteract changes in our atmosphere’s chemistry such as afforestation of the Sahara; and adapting to changes brought about by warmer climate, such as diking against higher sea levels. Current plans center on limiting GHG emissions through carbon taxes, a tax assessed on how much carbon a fuel contains; or cap and trade systems, or a payment system for forestation or forest retention, or other carbon-limiting schemes.

Our earth’s climate has been significantly higher (medieval warm period) and significantly lower (little ice age) than present within just the past 1000 years. Prior to man’s influence on the planet, climate has been much warmer and much cooler and CO2 levels increased and decreased accordingly. “Past climate changes, sea-level changes and catastrophes are written in stone,” writes geologist, Ian Plimer. Plimer, who has some 60 academic papers to his name, continues, “The [United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] process is related to environmental activism, politics and opportunism.” In his estimation, we are “currently in an ice age.”

The Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) would be good to remember the words of philosophy professor Alston Chase,

“When the search for truth is confused with political advocacy, the pursuit of knowledge is reduced to the quest for power.”

Update (5 Apr 2010): Greenpeace seems to be getting frustrated and some want to kick some energy-wastrel butt.

If you’re one of those who have spent their lives undermining progressive climate legislation, bankrolling junk science, fueling spurious debates around false solutions, and cattle-prodding democratically-elected governments into submission, then hear this:

We know who you are. We know where you live. We know where you work.

Come, let us reason together…Now where did I put my tire iron?

Michael Crichton’s techno-fable, State of Fear, is looking pretty prophetic.

IPCC 4th Assessment Report doesn’t agree with the Center for Biological Diversity

Apparently, the Center for Biological Diversity doesn’t agree with the Mitigation Working Group Report [PDF] in IPCC’s 4th Assessment as to the best strategy for mitigating CO2.


Photo from south island on New Zealand.

“Biomass clearing and site preparation prior to afforestation [i.e. planting] may lead to short-term carbon losses on that site… Accumulation of carbon in biomass after [planting ] varies greatly by tree species and site, and ranges globally between 1 and 35 t CO2/ha.yr (Richards and Stokes, 2004).” — Forestry. In Climate Change 2007: Mitigation. Contribution of Working Group III to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (page 550)