Tag: deforestation

Study: Earth is becoming GREENER, not BROWNER due to climate change

Guest essay by Dr. Patrick J. Michaels It’s hard to say how many punny posts we came up with using those words when Carol Browner was Bill Clinton’s EPA Administrator, but here we use it in the context of a recent Science paper by J-F.

Source: Study: Earth is becoming GREENER, not BROWNER due to climate change…

GLOBAL GREENING: Scientists Find ‘Lost’ Forests The Size Of Seven Texases

‘Carbon dioxide and global warming changed that’

Source: GLOBAL GREENING: Scientists Find ‘Lost’ Forests The Size Of Seven Texases…

PLANET EARTH COVERED IN MUCH MORE FOREST THAN THOUGHT

• PLANET EARTH COVERED IN MUCH MORE FOREST THAN THOUGHT

Date: 11/05/17

• • Andrew Lowe and Ben Sparrow, The Conversation

  A new global analysis of the distribution of forests and woodlands has “found” 467 million hectares of previously unreported forest – an area equivalent to 60% of the size of Australia. The discovery increases the known amount of global forest cover by around 9%, and will significantly boost estimates of how much carbon is stored in plants worldwide.

  The new forests were found by surveying “drylands” – so called because they receive much less water in precipitation than they lose through evaporation and plant transpiration. As we and our colleagues report today in the journal Science, these drylands contain 45% more forest than has been found in previous surveys.

  We found new dryland forest on all inhabited continents, but mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, around the Mediterranean, central India, coastal Australia, western South America, northeastern Brazil, northern Colombia and Venezuela, and northern parts of the boreal forests in Canada and Russia. In Africa, our study has doubled the amount of known dryland forest.

  

  The world’s drylands: forested areas shown in green; non-forested areas in yellow. Bastin et al., Science (2017)

  With current satellite imagery and mapping techniques, it might seem amazing that these forests have stayed hidden in plain sight for so long. But this type of forest was previously difficult to measure globally, because of the relatively low density of trees.

  What’s more, previous surveys were based on older, low-resolution satellite images that did not include ground validation. In contrast, our study used higher-resolution satellite imagery available through Google Earth Engine – including images of more than 210,000 dryland sites – and used a simple visual interpretation of tree number and density. A sample of these sites were compared with field information to assess accuracy.

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Climate scientist to Congress: Increased CO2 causing ‘remarkable greening of planet Earth’

Study: ‘Recent increase in tree growth that has been unprecedented since the year 1760’

In eastern Tibetan forest, signs of tree growth amid climate change

Researchers follow a lead from nomadic herders and find a forest getting nutrients and water from thawing permafrost

Date:

September 7, 2016

Source:

University of Oregon

Summary:

Word of mouth from nomadic herders led Lucas Silva into Tibetan forests and grasslands. What his team found was startling: rapid forest growth in tune with what scientists had been expecting from climatic changes triggered by rising levels of carbon dioxide.

On the eastern Tibetan Plateau — in an area where it was thought that “climatically induced ecological thresholds had not yet been crossed” — Silva’s team found that the increasing availability of soil nutrients and water from thawing permafrost is stimulating the chemistry of the wood in a species of fir trees (Abies faxoniana).

“Our results confirmed the reports of local herders and showed a recent increase in tree growth that has been unprecedented since the year 1760,” Silva said. “These result demonstrate that under a specific set of conditions, forests can respond positively to human-induced changes in climate.”

The findings were published Aug. 31 in Science Advances, an online, open-access publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Nomads had reported their observations to study co-author Geng Sun of China’s Chengdu Institute of Biology in Sichuan, China. The research team traveled to the region in eastern Tibet where they found old-growth forests, smaller patches of trees and trees isolated on the perimeter of the forests.

“We wanted to take a long term view of changes in tree growth across this gradient,” Silva said. “To do so, we combined tree-ring measurements with laboratory analyses to look for changes in growth as well as chemical signals of climatic change.”…

New Study: Guns and Tractors Threaten Biodiversity More Than Global Warming

Guns and Tractors Threaten Biodiversity More Than Global Warming

http://sunshinehours.net/2016/08/11/guns-and-tractors-threaten-biodiversity-more-than-global-warming

Finally … and so blindingly obvious to those not blinded by the AGW propaganda. The main driver of wildlife extinction is not climate change, but humanity’s harvesting of species and our ever-expanding agricultural footprint. This is according to a new study of nearly 9,000 ‘threatened’ or ‘near-threatened’ species. While scientists acknowledge climate change is a threat, they found that three-quarters are being over-exploited for commerce, recreation or subsistence. Demand for meat and body parts, for example, have driven the Western gorilla and Chinese pangolin to near extinction, and pushed the Sumatran rhinoceros – prized in China for bogus medicines made from its horn – over the edge. And more than half of the 8,688 species of animals and plants evaluated are suffering due to the conversion of their natural habitats into industrial farms and plantations, mainly to raise livestock and grow commodity crops for fuel or food. By comparison, only 19 per cent of these species are currently affected by climate change, they reported in a study published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature. Conservation budgets, the researchers argued, must reflect this reality. And then some of the usual BS ‘There is no need to see tradeoffs among different conservation priorities – we need them all,’ Peter MacIntyre, an expert on the ecology of fresh-water systems at the University of Wisconsin, told AFP. Translation: The AGW cult wants all the money.

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‘Selfish vegans are ruining the environment’ – ‘Vegan diet wastes available land that could otherwise feed more people’

. “When applied to an entire global population, the vegan diet wastes available land that could otherwise feed more people,”
http://nypost.com/2016/08/04/selfish-vegans-are-ruining-the-environment/

If you’ve ever suspected nothing is more annoying than prissy, sanctimonious vegans, it turns out you have company: Nature wants to punch them in the face, too.
As is often the case with virtue-signaling lifestyles, number-crunching doesn’t quite justify the supposed benefits of granola-crunching. “When applied to an entire global population, the vegan diet wastes available land that could otherwise feed more people,” concluded news site Quartz in a review of a scientific study published in the journal Elementa that compares the sustainability of various eating patterns.
Just as global-warming hysteria leads to draconian restrictions and taxes that devastate the poor in order to provide conscience relief to progressives, totalitarian eating habits aren’t as sustainable as more moderate ones. For instance, trying to grow crops on land best suited for use as grazing land for cattle means wasting resources.
Considering 10 different kinds of diet patterns, the study concluded that veganism rated only in the middle of the pack, as the fifth-most sustainable. Two kinds of omnivore scenarios did better, as did “dairy-friendly vegetarian,” which came in first, and “egg-and-dairy-friendly vegetarian,” which placed second.
As for the omnivores, the highest-rated (third overall) in terms of sustainability was the scenario in which nobody is a vegetarian, but everybody cuts back on meat modestly (13 percent). Red meat, poultry and fish would continue to be the leading protein sources, as they are now.…

GROUP CLONES CALIFORNIA GIANT TREES TO COMBAT ‘CLIMATE CHANGE’

CAMP NELSON, Calif. (AP) — At the foot of a giant sequoia in California’s Sierra Nevada, two arborists stepped into harnesses then inched up ropes more than 20 stories into the dizzying canopy of a tree that survived thousands of years, enduring drought, wildfire and disease.

There, the arborists clipped off tips of young branches to be hand-delivered across the country, cloned in a lab and eventually planted in a forest in some other part of the world.

The two are part of a cadre of modern day Johnny Appleseeds who believe California’s giant sequoias and coastal redwoods are blessed with some of the heartiest genetics of any trees on Earth – and that propagating them will help reverse climate change, at least in a small way.

“It’s a biological miracle,” said tree climber Jim Clark, firmly back on the ground and holding a green sprig to his lips as if to kiss it. “This piece of tissue … can be rooted, and we have a miniature 3,000-year-old…

Ban plants! ‘Plants may be responsible for up to 30% of the world’s methane’

Ban plants!

http://climatechangepredictions.org/uncategorized/6518

The surprising discovery that plants may be responsible for up to 30 per cent of the world’s methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, is no reason to stop planting forests, a scientist has warned. A team led by Frank Keppler, of Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Germany, found that living plants emit 10 to 1000 times more of the gas than decaying matter. And plants increase their methane emissions when warmed by the sun, it was found. Plants have long been seen as weapons against global warming because they absorb another greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide. It’s a surprise, said David Etheridge of the CSIRO’s Marine and Atmospheric Research division. “You think you know everything.” Sydney Morning Herald, 13 Jan 2006

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‘Going solar isn’t green if you cut down tons of trees’: Six Flags ‘to level 66 acres of trees’ to make room for solar panels