SOS Forests

Bringing Back the Dark Ages

There is a curious irony that may (or may not) have troubled you: given that the public lands are already communally-owed, that is, communized, why do the Communists wish to destroy said lands?

The Extreme Left is more than fashionably Socialist; they are Marxists, i.e. Communists. Of that there is no doubt. The most Extreme Leftists are Revolutionary Communists. Oh sure, you have your Marxist anarchists who are indeed dangerous crazies, but they are only “scum”, as Marx put it, not the “vanguard of scientific socialism”.

The “dangerous class”, the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue. — Karl Marx, in his famous Manifesto [here]

It’s not the dangerous scum anarchists who wish to destroy the public lands (street people couldn’t care less about forests); it is the vanguard of proletarian revolution, the scientific socialists.

Which is ironic. They won the class struggle, at least vis-à-vis public lands. In Oregon fully 60% of the land base, and possibly more, is communally-owned. Ditto many other Western states. Hurrah for Marxism!

But instead of holding up public lands as a shining example of the virtues of Communism, the vanguard of scientific socialism wish to destroy those lands in catastrophic megafires. They oppose any and all nurturing treatments that might mitigate against wholesale destruction, and instead advocate No Touch, Let It Burn, Watch it Rot across vast dehumanized tracts.

So what gives? Why is the vanguard so anxious to wipe out their own holdings?

The answer is: they don’t give a rap about forests or watersheds or whether the land is publicly-owned or not. What true Communists care about is fomenting violent revolutionary war.

more »

Ninth Circuit Court Thumbs Nose At the Supremes

Wednesday the United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, in the persons of William A. Fletcher and Johnnie B. Rawlinson, Circuit Judges, and Michael W. Mosman, District Judge sitting in, enjoined the Rat Creek Salvage Project.

In August and September of 2007, the Rat Creek Wildfire burned about 27,000 acres in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest in Montana. On July 1, 2009, almost two years later, the Chief Forester of the Forest Service made an Emergency Situation Determination for the Rat Creek Salvage Project (”the Project”).

The Project permits salvage logging of trees on approximately 1,652 of the 27,000 acres that were burned on thirty-five units of land ranging from 3 to 320 acres in size.

Appeals court halts logging in Rat Creek Salvage project

By MATT VOLZ, Helena IR, June 26, 2010 [here]

A federal appeals court has blocked the U.S. Forest Service from logging trees on more than 1,600 acres of burned forest in southwestern Montana, but the agency says most of the timber already has been harvested.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday ordered a preliminary injunction against the Rat Creek Salvage Project in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest. The injunction halts the project until a final decision is made in the case.

The project, about 15 miles west of Wisdom, calls for logging trees that have died or are likely to die as a result of a 2007 fire or due to insect attacks. It also calls for building seven miles of temporary roads that would be destroyed after the project, and reconditioning three miles of existing roads.

In a lawsuit filed last July, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Native Ecosystems Council said forest managers underestimated the environmental damage that could result from the logging project. …

Forest Service spokeswoman Leona Rodreik said spring weather had halted the project, and it was unclear when it had been planned to start up again.

She said her agency is disappointed in the appeals court’s decision but that 85 percent of the 1,652 acres have been logged already.

“Until an opinion is issued, there’s really not much we can say or do,” she said. …

The Opinion was issued July 28th [here]. The 9th Court ruled:

Alliance for the Wild Rockies (”AWR”) appeals the district court’s denial of its motion for a preliminary injunction. AWR seeks to enjoin a timber salvage sale proposed by the United States Forest Service. Citing Winter v. Natural Resources Defense Council, 129 S. Ct. 365 (2008), the district court held that AWR had not shown the requisite likelihood of irreparable injury and success on the merits. After hearing oral argument, we issued an order reversing the district court and directing it to issue the preliminary injunction. Alliance for Wild Rockies v. Cottrell, No. 09-35756, 2010 WL 2640287 (9th Cir. June 24, 2010).

more »

Squandering the Wisdom

Native Americans maintained American forests before the Europeans arrived and knew what they were doing.

Words and photos by Steven H. Rich, Range Magazine, Summer 2010 [here]

Selected excerpts:

The Danish forest ecologist sighed explosively, then spoke: “Your government’s wildfire and forest policy is a foolish and ignorant insult to the poor, and an insult to nature.” His voice was shaking, his tone illustrating the fact that grownups sigh when weeping seems out of place.

“Do you know the estimates of unused logging residues and dead wood rotting in your country are equivalent to 32 billion barrels of oil [more than four year’s supply for the whole nation]? When ecologists project a yearly total of the ecologically available logging waste [branches and tops] generated on private lands in the United States to all your forests, it makes 1.36 billion barrels [a good start on the 20 million barrels a day we use].

Do you know what that waste does to the price of fuel in poor countries? Every year you let another two- to six-million acres burn up! You do nothing effective to stop it and you do nothing with it!” …

The American public is not told that three times the CO emitted during any severe fire event continues to reach the atmosphere as the dead wood continues to degas and decompose. The environmentalists’ pro-wildfire/no-logging policy is a gigantic CO and other biogas factory, stacking up more and more “production units” in the form of billions of “sacred” dead trees which — due to lawsuits — no one is allowed to harvest. Frivolous fund-raising lawsuits that prevent sound use of forest biomass alternatives could end up as the single greatest cause of American fossil carbon releases, while hugely accelerating detructive fire emissions. …

The policy — letting disease-ridden too-dense forest structures continue and allowing fuel loads to build — kills forests. On average, they burn at least twice by the time the trees of the first fire decompose. The fire that burns the wind-fallen and/or rot-fallen fire-killed trees is vastly more destructive than the first.

In close contact with forest soils, the 1,700-degree Fahrenheit heat of 200 tons per acre of downed logs deeply sterilizes the forest floor. These intense blazes can last for many hours. Few biological potentials survive, nor does the wildlife that depends on these habitats.

Researchers Matthew Hurteau and Malcolm North modeled six prescriptions for mixed-conifer forest structure to study their potential for carbon sequestration. They came up with basically the same answers that Dr. Wallace Covington at Northern Arizona University reached in his work: Do it the way the Native Americans did.

Allowing a tangled mass of stunted trees to grow does sequester (take out of the atmosphere) lots of carbon — until it catches fire. When fire is added to the model, it becomes clear that a forest of widely spaced big trees is much safer from fire and sequesters more carbon for much longer. …

The ecological, social and economic benefits vastly favor restoring the Native American forest-structure maintenance system. Every year, the stream flows will increase and stabilize, wildlife will increase and soils will grow richer. This is a grazeable woodland, very productive of biodiversity and progressively healthier. These are the landscapes from which dozens of Arizona trout streams once flowed down to broad, beautiful, lower-slope grasslands, which are now choked with alien Utah junipers and chaparral shrubs. …

Who would object to restoring paradise while aiding the cause of energy independence? Who objects to restoring rural economies, relieving taxpayers of the burden of supporting the Forest Service (which used to make money), and greatly enhancing our national security both through an ecologically positive boost in tax revenues and a huge drop in oil imports? …\

Long ago, Native Americans knew that the trees and shrubs grew too thickly choking out everything else and then catching fire, doing huge damage. They worked very hard and used cool-season fire to thin tree and shrub stands, release grasses and flowers from domination, make meadows, attract game and increase useful plants and animals. They also did it to protect their families from being burned to death. They greatly admired large trees and used small ones. They increased nut crops by decreasing competition from other trees. Their management plan greatly increased nuts, berries, bulbs, corms, basketry and cordage materials, grass-seed production, game and water. It created farming opportunities. It was intelligent, superbly adapted, highly sophisticated, and it created beauty.

The environmental movement must abandon the false belief that the America the European explorers found was “pristine” in any way. Almost every American landscape was what ethnologists and ethno-biologists call an anthropogenic (human-created) landscape. Doctrinaire environmentalists are trying to recreate a world that never existed. To deny the Native Americans’ role in the beauty and abundance Europeans found is to perpetuate the 15th-19th century assumption that they had no role. Rural Americans must firmly resist any plans which use nature unsustainably and result in diminished potentials.

New forest-products technologies make smaller trees profitable in making beautiful homes. We can now spare many of the forest giants to make a safer, more beautiful, more productive forest using the research-proven model that Native Americans created.

Steven H. Rich lives in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is president of Rangeland Restoration Academy [here]

The War on the West

There is a war going on right here in America, and I don’t mean the one at the border. Across the West certain powerful special interest groups want to incinerate America’s priceless, heritage forests, watersheds, towns, and cities in order to force the residents off the land.

Driving humanity like cattle is an old motivation, some of which is chronicled in the Bible. Ethnic-cleansing really got going, though, during the 20th Century when such lunatics as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, and Pol Pot took genocide to new levels. Those fellows murdered upwards of 100 million people for the purposes of personal political power tripping.

Here in North America we have not been immune to eruptions of genocide. For 500 years, Euro-centrics slaughtered the resident Native Americans, decimating their populations and stealing their land.

For roughly the last 100 years though, Native Americans have been pretty much wiped out and driven onto concentration camp reservations, while other non-Native folks have moved onto their former homelands.

The genocidal impulse is still alive however. The new target of the modern-day American Babylonians are the current, non-Native residents. If you live west of the Mississippi River, you are a target and victim of the new genociders.

No lessons were learned from the hemoclysms of the 20th Century. Forces out there still want to drive people like cattle.

War, by definition, is the takeover of territory by force or threat of force, usually by an armed militia.

Forces in America are currently waging war on the citizenry of the West (in some respects the same war that been going on for 500 years). One side is armed, organized, and as powerful as any empire that has ever existed. The other side are regular citizens, victimized by their own government.

It is an enormous tragedy and travesty. Genocide always is.

The genociders have dozens of excuses for their anti-human behaviors. One big one is the American Creation Myth, which falsely purports that God created the American Wilderness for the conquest of the Euros. It is therefore godly to re-purify the land by driving humanity off it. In fact, America was already occupied and not a wilderness when the Euros arrived, but facts get in the way of myths.

Another Big Lie proffered by the genociders is that wildlife will go extinct if they have to share the landscape with human beings. In fact, wildlife have been sharing the landscape with humanity for at least 13,500 years on this continent, and any extinctions that took place happened way back then. For millennia wildlife and people have co-existed just fine.

Another Big Lie is that human beings have altered the climates of the entire globe, and so we must go extinct to “save” the Earth. That Lie is waning, although the adherents have not given up on it yet. It is just too bizarre and irrational for sane people to swallow.

But the Big Lies are only window dressing. The real motivation is to inflict inhumane suffering on fellow human beings. Genocide is its own reward. The killers take their pleasures from the killing, not the authoritarian Utopia afterwards (which never takes place anyway).

Wilderness, roadlessness, wolf introductions, and the Wildlands Project [here] are all means to promote genocide (or ethnic cleansing, which is much the same thing). But the principal weapon of choice of the genociders is megafire. They love giant fires that destroy vegetation, wildlife, and homes. By scorching the Earth and leaving a moonscape behind, fires make the land uninhabitable (for all living things but especially people). There is no more efficient means of genocide than catastrophic holocaust.

Indeed, the word “holocaust” has come to mean both huge conflagration and genocide.

more »

Destroying Forests in NE Washington

by Ken Schlichte

An article in the Seattle Times this week begins:

Environmentalists, Loggers Push New Wilderness Deal in Northeast Washington

By Craig Welch, Seattle Times, July 27, 2010 [here]

The rolling highlands of Northeast Washington are home to grape ferns, lady slipper orchids, burnt-orange flameflowers - and scratch-dry ponderosa pine that timber companies really want to log.

The wild country from the Kettle Range to the Selkirk Mountains offers a corridor linking Washington’s elusive lynx with other carnivores in Montana. But it also offers uber-popular spots for riding dirt bikes, jeeps and all-terrain vehicles.

So after decades of lawsuits and arguments about this corner of the state, environmentalists and logging companies tried a different approach: They talked. And talked some more.

Eight years later they’re putting forward something new: proposals to set aside tens of thousands of acres as wilderness.

Conservation Northwest, a Bellingham-based environmental group run by former EarthFirst! tree-sitter Mitch Friedman, will unveil an initiative Wednesday to add more than 180,000 acres of wilderness to Colville National Forest. The plan also calls for designating areas of the forest for recreation - from mountain bikes to dirt bikes - and raising up to $2 million from donors to put 2,200 acres of private land east of Republic, Ferry County, into a forest-conservation program. And it largely has timber-industry support.

The efforts still are being massaged, and all sides concede they’re just getting started. But few dispute something remarkable has happened. Former enemies are working so well together that they’re jointly trying to bring others along.

“The environmentalists here aren’t just in it for themselves,” said Russ Vaagen, of Vaagen Brothers Lumber in Colville, Stevens County. “They’re not trying to lock us out of the woods. They want us back in. But they’ve got things they want to achieve, too.”

Friedman, who helped raise $16.5 million from private donors to set aside the 25,000-acre Loomis Forest in 1999, said this “Columbia Highlands Initiative” is part of an effort to maintain lasting wildlife corridors that could link the Cascades to the Rockies.

Ranches are being subdivided and sold for housing, and climate change already is altering the ecology of this landscape. “We need these corridors for climate adaptation,” Friedman said. …

Environmentalist Mitch Friedman’s suggestion that climate change is altering the ecology of Northeast Washington forests is questionable because we have seen that annual temperatures in the Northwest have actually been trending downward for over 20 years.

The ecology of Northeast Washington forest stands is being significantly altered, however, by the lack of Native American landscape burning activities and the effectiveness of modern wildfire control activities that have allowed many of these forest stands to become overstocked and over-aged. These overstocked and over-aged forest stand conditions have increased the wildfire potential as well as decreasing forest vigor and increasing the potential for mountain pine beetle outbreaks and other forest health problems.

Mitch Friedman led the effort to set aside the 25,000-acre Loomis Natural Resource Conservation Areas in the Loomis State Forest managed by the Washington State Department of Natural Resources in 1999. The forests on this 25,000-acre set aside are primarily overstocked and over-aged stands with increasing mountain pine beetle outbreaks and increasing wildfire potential. As consequence, those forests will eventually be destroyed by the increasing mountain pine beetle outbreaks and/or wildfire because all forest management activities, including thinning and prescribed burning, have been prohibited.

Without forest management activities like thinning and prescribed burning, the forests on the more than 180,000 acres of wilderness now being added to the Colville National Forest will also eventually be destroyed by mountain pine beetle outbreaks and/or wildfire.

This Seattle Times article included the photo below that illustrates the general appearance of most Eastern Washington and Eastern Oregon ponderosa pine stands until the late 1800’s while Native American landscape burning activities regularly eliminated the natural regeneration and minimized overstocked forest stand conditions.

Without forest management activities, future photos of this Ferry County forest stand that are taken from the same location will illustrate the increasing natural regeneration that will eventually result in the overstocking, the increases in ladder fuels and the total fuel loading that will eventually destroy this stand with a mountain pine beetle outbreak and/or a wildfire.

Climate Change in Oregon Is Nil

If you are an AGW Kool Aid drinker in Oregon, please don’t read the following. It will blow your mind, and we don’t want that to happen.

Observed Climate Change and the Negligible Global Effect of Greenhouse-gas Emission Limits in the State of Oregon

Written by the Science and Public Policy Institute, 26 July 2010 [here]

Full text [here] (1.1 MB)

SUMMARY FOR POLICY MAKERS

In this report, we review the long-term climate history of Oregon and find little in the way of evidence that the greenhouse gas build-up in the atmosphere has done much to alter Oregon’s climate. While temperatures have generally appeared to have risen slightly across the state over the past 100 years, they have in fact fallen a bit during the past 20 years. The state’s precipitation and drought histories are marked by annual and decadal variability rather than long-term change. Variations in the state’s climate are significantly influenced by natural variations and cycles driven in part by decadal variations in the Pacific atmosphere/ocean system. Future sea level rise will be muted by Oregon’s geologic processes which generally act in opposition to rising oceans by raising the level of the state’s coastlines. Further, scares of increasing tropical diseases are easily shown to be misapplication of the true facts.

Along with the observed climate history of Oregon, we analyze what the future impacts on the climate will be if Oregon ceased all of its greenhouse gas emissions, now and forever. What we find is eye-opening. Even a complete cessation of greenhouse emissions from Oregon will likely slow the future rate of global warming by less than one thousandths (<0.001) of a ºC per century. The impact of sea level will be an equally meager one hundredths of an inch. These changes are scientifically and realistically meaningless.

What’s worse, is that greenhouse gas emissions are increasing so rapidly in China, that new emissions from that country will completely subsume the entirely of Oregon’s hypothetical emissions cessation in less than one month’s time! Clearly, any plan merely calling for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions will fare even poorer. There is simply no climatic gain to be had from emissions reductions in Oregon.

All told, Oregon has been little impacted by global “climate change” and regulations prescribing a reduction in the state’s greenhouse gas emissions will have no detectable effect on future climate change. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said about the impact of emissions regulations on the state’s economy, which have been projected to be large and negative. As such, state and/or federal plans aimed at limiting the state’s greenhouse gas emissions presents a perfect recipe for an all pain, no gain outcome for Oregon’s citizenry.

To the Oregonian: Thanks For Nothing

The following Editorial appeared in the Oregonian “news” paper last Friday:

On timber, thanks for nothing

by the Oregonian Editorial Board, July 23, 2010 [here]

After a year of study, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s crackerjack task force on western Oregon timber management has concluded that, gee, lots of people are frustrated and things are pretty tough out there.

We can’t wait for next year’s sequel in which the Obama task force is invited back to take another yearlong look and rediscovers that, believe it or not, lots of people remain frustrated and things are pretty tough out there.

This could go on forever. It would be laughable if the unemployment rate across much of rural Oregon wasn’t running at 12 to 15 percent, if timber towns weren’t trying desperately to hold together their basic public services such as police and libraries, if huge swaths of public forests weren’t overstocked with small trees one lightning strike or tossed cigarette away from going up in flames late this summer.

We made the mistake of taking the interior secretary at his word last year when the Obama administration abandoned the Western Oregon Plan Revision, or WOPR, which sought to increase logging on more than 2 million acres of public forests. Salazar promised that the task force would come up with a plan that would increase logging and thinning while complying with the Endangered Species Act.

Instead, the task force issued a report Thursday that calls for a three- to five-year planning process and concludes what everybody already knows: Major obstacles such as distrust among competing interest groups and conflicting federal policies stand in the way of increasing logging on western Oregon’s public forests and creating more economic activity in rural communities.

Given all that rural Oregon is struggling with, this “plan to have a plan,” as Oregon’s Rep. Peter DeFazio described it Thursday, is inexcusable. There’s no urgency in the task force report, no acknowledgement of the economic emergency, no commitment to provide any leadership to help resolve the conflicts over management of the public forests. As Rep. Greg Walden said, “It’s doubly frustrating that while this report was being put together, timber sales dropped to historic lows. The sick forests and the economy in southern Oregon can’t wait any longer.” …

Let’s clear the air here. The Oregonian Editorial Board supported and endorsed Barky Obama for president, knowing full well that Barky expressed zero forest policy or agricultural policy during his campaign, and knowing full well that the most extreme anti-forest elements were affiliated with Barky.

Now the Oregonian Editorial Board claims they “made the mistake of taking the interior secretary at his word.” What about taking Barky at his word, or lack of words?

The Western Oregon Plan Revision was the result of years of planning, public meetings, and public involvement with an open, transparent process. Why did the Oregonian Editorial Board sit in mute dumbfoundedness when Salazar, acting on behalf of Barky and his radical minions, jerked the WOPR away illegally?

You see, it was an illegal act on Salazar’s part to TAMPER with a public process. Salazar also jerked the Northern Spotted Owl Recovery Plan, twenty years in the making, because, as Salazar claimed, the plans were potentially jeopardized by improper political influence.

So Salazar, acting on Barky’s orders, undertook the biggest political tampering action possible: he unilaterally and illegally threw both plans in the dumpster.

And the Oregonian Editorial Board was just fine with all that. They approved. Now, all of a sudden, they claim that they were somehow deceived.

It won’t wash, gentlemen. You were never deceived — you were the deceivers, then and now.

The Oregonian Editorial Board claims to be concerned about unemployment in rural Oregon, tinder box forests, and an unresponsive Federal Government.

Well guess what? That’s been the situation for SIXTEEN YEARS!!!!!

The 1994 Northwest Forest Plan had (has) four fundamental goals. It has failed spectacularly to meet any of them.

1. The NWFP has failed to protect northern spotted owls

By most estimations, the northern spotted owl population has fallen 40 to 60 percent since inception of the NWFP.

2. The NWFP has failed to protect spotted owl habitat

Since inception, millions of acres of spotted owl habitat have been catastrophically incinerated. Millions more acres are poised to burn.

3. The NWFP has failed to preserve habitat continuity throughout the range of the northern spotted owl

The dozens of huge and catastrophic forest fires have left giant gaps in the range. The Biscuit Burn alone is 50 miles long and 20 miles wide.

4. The NWFP has failed to protect the regional economy

Since inception of the NWFP, Oregon has experienced 16 long years of the worst economy in the U.S., with the highest rates of unemployment, bankruptcy, home foreclosure, and hunger of any state. These are not just statistics, but indicators of real human suffering. Over 40,000 workers lost their jobs, and the rural economy has been crippled ever since.

The plan to save the owls has not saved anything; not owls, not old-growth, not the economy. The cost for nothing? $100,000 per job per year x 40,000 jobs x 16 years = $64 billion. That’s what Northwesterners have paid, for nothing. And the bills continue to mount.

Sixteen years of gross Federal forest stupidity and the Oregonian Editorial Board hasn’t noticed until now?

But let’s not cast all the blame on those pathetic schmucks. Let’s look at the politicians they mentioned. Rep. Peter DeFazio has been in that office for 24 years, Sen. Ron Wyden has been in Congress for 20 years, 12 as senator, and Rep. Greg Walden has been in Congress for 12 years.

They all have done exactly nothing in all that time to address or amend the Northwest Forest Plan.

Now that is truly inexcusable.

We have re-elected and re-elected mendacious jingoists who every election season stand up on their hind legs and rail against the atrocious un-management of Oregon’s Federal forests, and then when re-elected go back their D.C. party life while doing jack s**t about Oregon’s perpetual forest crisis.

They all claim to “have a plan”. They all claim that they have a bill in their pants that will solve everything. But the bills somehow never get past first base, and any careful examination explains why: the proposed bills are poorly written, completely unworkable, and wouldn’t solve anything if they were passed, which they never will be because the sponsors are frauds and just jerking the electorate around.

They all pretend to be shocked and aghast at the condition of Federal forests in Oregon, and the ongoing misery in rural Oregon, as if it just occurred to them last week.

None of them spoke up in 1994 when the supremely crappy NWFP was jammed down our throats. None of them has done one damn thing about it since.

So blank you, Oregonian Editorial Board, and blank you, Oregon Congressoafs and Senaturds.

You all ARE the problem. You all have perpetuated and exacerbated Oregon’s forest crisis. Nobody is fooled when you cry crocodile tears and blame Barky and Ken. You wanted those guys, just like you want Oregon’s forests to burn in megafires and rural Oregonians to suffer deprivations and poverty.

Your feigned outrage doesn’t cut it anymore. You are all cads and bounders. A pox on all of you.

Bio Irony, Warmer Is Better Dept.

The new thing is biodiversity.

Globalists recognize the growing collapse of gloooobal waaaarming alarmism as a tool to advance One World Authoritarian government, so they have revived the U.N. Agenda 21 scare over allegedly declining biodiversity — to accomplish the same goal [here, here].

But, and here’s the irony, warmer climates have greater biodiversity. The warmer it is, the more biodiversity, and the cooler it is, the less.

Technically, biodiversity means the number of plant and animal species per unit area. In the tropics (warm climates) there are sometimes thousands of species per acre. In boreal and/or tundra regions (cold climates), there may be less than a dozen species per acre.

The definition is important. The U.N. defines “biodiversity” in a squishy fashion [here]:

Biodiversity is an all encompassing term to describe the variety of all life and natural processes on Earth.

The Convention on Biological Diversity defines biodiversity as “the variability among living organisms from all sources [...] this includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems” (Article 2, CBD).

But technically, biologists measure biodiversity using indices such as Simpson’s diversity index [here], the Shannon index [here], or species richness [here].

Those indices all express some variant of number of species per unit area. And measurements of biodiversity all indicate the same general condition: Equatorial latitudes have high biodiversity, and polar latitudes have low biodiversity (Antarctica has the lowest biodiversity on the planet).

A new study from Harvard hypothesizes that seasonality impacts biodiversity [here]. The authors note that during the Eocene (54.8-33.7 mya) [here], biodiversity was at its highest point in the history of the Earth. The authors conjecture that the onset of seasons, with wide temperature swings between summer and winter, were the primary cause of subsequent biodiversity loss.

But overall temperature appears to be a more important factor. Global temperatures reached their highest post-Cretaceous levels at about the Paleocene-Eocene transition, and they have been falling ever since. At least five major extinction events occurred in the Eocene alone:

The Lutetian-Bartonian event (41 mya)

The Bartonian-Priabonian event (37 mya)

The Late Priabonian event (35 mya)

The Terminal Eocene event (33.5 mya)

The Late Rupelian event (30.5 mya)

All these extinction events were associated with reductions in global temperature, thinning CO2, declining rainfall, and falling sea levels.

Seasonality has always been a phenomenon of our planet, and is due to the tilt of the Earth’s axis, also known as obliquity [here]. The tilt is nothing new. The Earth has been tilted for billions of years.

However, seasonality did become more pronounced as the Eocene gave way to the Oligocene (35.4-29.3 mya) [here] and even more so during the Miocene (29.3-6.7 mya). Then the Ices Ages ensued, and seasonality grew even stronger. But it was not the difference between the seasons that was so damaging to biodiversity — it was the fact that the climate across much of the globe dropped below freezing.

When the temperature is so cold that water turns to ice, life in general perishes. Living things are liquid water-based. We die if the water in our bodies turns to solid ice.

Some plants and animals have evolved defenses against sub-freezing temperatures, such as thick fur, internal body heat regulation, and dormancy. The Order of Mammals arose during the Eocene but really expanded as the climate grew colder. Deciduousness (winter dormancy in trees) also arose in the Eocene, first in response to six-month dark periods above the Arctic Circle. Trees that expressed winter dormancy migrated south during the Oligocene and Miocene, where their resilience to freezing conditions gave them competitive advantage.

The article about the Harvard paper states:

At the time [the Eocene] the McAbee fossils were created, Earth’s climate was far less seasonal at all latitudes, allowing tropical species, such as palm trees and crocodiles, to live in what is now the high Arctic.

But as must be obvious to everyone, lack of seasonality was not the thing that allowed crocodiles to bask under palm trees in the Arctic. Warmth was. Crocodiles and palm trees today live where seasons come and go, but they do not live where it’s cold.

The article continues:

When the Arctic was warm in the past, like the rest of the planet, it had a high degree of biodiversity, like the tropics do today.

That statement is more acceptable. Note that it says nothing about seasons.

When the earth was warmer than today, such as in the Eocene, Oligocene, and Miocene, there was much greater biodiversity.

If significant global warming occurs in the future (which is very doubtful), it will be good for biodiversity.

The U.N. is working at cross-purposes with itself. It wants to chill the planet but also wishes to increase biodiversity. Those are mutually exclusive goals.

The U.N. also desires One World Authoritarian government, but as must be obvious to everyone, One World Authoritarian government would not improve anything. We would still have nutzo leaders who work at cross-purposes with themselves, much to the detriment of humanity as well as to the environment.

One Worlders are not your friends. Nor are they friends of the environment. But that is restating the obvious.

Regarding the Logic of Cause and Effect

The rad, bad pseudos are having another illogical cow.

Study: Yellowstone-area whitebark toll 1M acres

By MEAD GRUVER, AP, Washington Post, July 21st, 2010 [here]

A researcher says aerial photographs and maps document 1 million acres of whitebark forest dead or dying from mountain pine beetles and an invasive fungus in the Yellowstone area, with another 1 million acres considered at risk.

The Natural Resources Defense Council released a report Wednesday on the dead and dying high-elevation forests in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana. Report author Wally Macfarlane says the toll is approaching and could far exceed the acreage of all trees that burned in the region’s infamous 1988 wildfires.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plans to decide next year on the group’s petition to list the pine as endangered. The group says climate change is primarily responsible by causing the beetle outbreak.

That’s interesting because the National Climate Data Center [here] reports that Wyoming winter temperatures have been trending downward at negative 2.00 degF per decade for the last fifteen years.

Climate At A Glance: Winter (Dec-Feb) Temperature, Wyoming, 1995 - 2010 Trend = -2.00 degF / Decade

and Wyoming summer temperatures have been trending downward at negative 1.09 degF per decade for the last ten years.

Climate At A Glance: Summer (Jun-Aug) Temperature, Wyoming, 1999 - 2009 Trend = -1.09 degF / Decade

Here’s some logic. See if you can follow the argument. If you propose that Cause A results in Outcome B, but Cause A does not exist in the real world, then Outcome B cannot have been caused by Cause A, since Cause A is a BIG HONKING LIE.

An example: let’s say you have a bad case of toe fungus, and you say the toe fungus is due to your frequent abductions by space aliens and the experiments they have performed on you. Any competent doctor or other logical person will doubt you. They will say, “First prove you have been abducted by aliens.” And since you cannot do so, they will assume that your toe fungus has a different causal agent.

Similarly, if radical nutzoid sue-happy pro-holocaust anti-human groups claim that glooobal waaarming has caused bark beetle outbreaks, then it is incumbent on them to demonstrate with solid evidence that glooobal waaaarming has indeed occurred. But since the people who measure temperatures say that temperatures have declined, there is no such evidence.

Logically, the radical nutzoid sue-happy pro-holocaust anti-human groups have their collective head up their collective…

I know, I know. You have been pepper-sprayed by a propaganda onslaught to where you are now convinced that the globe has warmed, with all sorts of repercussions like bark beetle outbreaks. But the globe has not warmed. The bark beetle outbreaks have a different causal agent.

Logic is painful, especially when $billions have been spent to convince you of an illogical proposition. It’s easier just to go along with the radical nutzoid sue-happy pro-holocaust anti-human groups than to question their veracity or other moral characteristics.

You could ask a forester instead, somebody with some actual expertise in trees, bark beetles, etc. The forester will tell you that bark beetle outbreaks are common in dense, thicket forests where trees are stressed by competition. The forester will tell you that bark beetle outbreaks are nothing new, that bark beetle outbreaks have been quelled by judicious thinning, and that there is a 100-year history of such thinnings averting bark beetle infestations.

But that would be too much truth, and we all know that truth causes toe fungus. Maybe if the space aliens stopped abducting the radical nutzoids and experimenting on them, we could all sleep easier at night.

No Trend In Southern Sierra Snowfall Since 1916

A recent study shows that snowfall in the southern Sierra Nevada has not trended up or down since snow measurements began in 1916.

The study is:

John R. Christy and Justin J. Hnilo. 2010. Changes in Snowfall in the Southern Sierra Nevada of California Since 1916. Energy & Environment, Vol. 21, No. 3, 2010

and the full text is [here]. A quote from the Conclusions:

With the available data from six mid-elevation stations in the Southern Sierra region of California we reconstructed annual snowfall totals for 36 missing years of the Huntington Lake record to complete the time series (1916–2009). The standard error of the missing years is calculated to be ±36 cm, or 6% of the 94-year annual mean of 624 cm in the most robust estimation method (though we utilized the average of six methods which reduces the standard error further.)

The results of both the annual and spring snowfall time series indicate no remarkable changes for the 1916–2009 period in the basins drained by the Merced, San Joaquin, Kings and Kaweah Rivers. In the six reconstructions the range of trend results varied only slightly from -0.3% to +0.6 % decade-1. With a consensus trend of only +0.5 cm (+0.08%) decade-1 ±13.1 cm decade-1 there is high confidence in the “no-significant-trend” result. The corroborating information on temperature trends (Christy et al. 2006), stream flow, precipitation and shorter period snow water equivalent trends presented here are consistent with “no-significant-trend” in So. Sierra snowfall near 2000m elevation since 1916.

Kudos to Christy and Hnilo. Well done.

I have, however, a great temptation to say “been there, done that.” In 2008 I did a study [here] of maximum winter snowpack in the Snake River watershed, which drains 108,000 square miles in parts of six U.S. states.

Christy and Hnilo examined the snowfall records for stations in the southern Sierras from Mariposa County in the north to Kern County in the south, a much smaller area.

They used six snotel stations that met “a minimal set of standards (consistent observations for at least 35 years)”. I used the 20 longest, continuously measured snotel records from 3 US Army Corps of Engineers databases containing 745 snotel records from the Snake River watershed. Of those 20 selected, the shortest record was 75 years long. I did not “reconstruct” any records.

But we found the same thing: no significant trend in snowpack or snowfall (not exactly the same things, but pretty close).

Christy and Hnilo got their researched published in a peer-reviewed journal. I did not even make the attempt, but instead self-published online at W.I.S.E. [here]. They probably got paid to do their research. I did not.

But none of that is important. What matters is that the information is finally coming out. No trend in snow.

Snow alarmists are requested to please stop ringing the alarm bells; there is nothing to get panicked about.

Karl Marx Despised Private Property

As does our very own U.S. Congress. No matter what those silly Founders thought, the new “progressive” notion is that private property is bad for America.

Witness HR 3534 [here] now wending it’s way through the “process” (in quotes because the Congressional process has been perverted almost beyond recognition by our esteemed Senators and Representatives).

HR 3534 is the Consolidated Land, Energy, and Aquatic Resources Act of 2009. The ostensible purpose of the Bill is to transfer the Minerals Management Service and the Oil and Gas Management program to a brand new sub-secretariat in the Department of the Interior: the new and progressive Office of Federal Energy and Minerals Leasing.

As if shuffling the bureaucracy will prevent oil well blow-outs.

But tacked onto HR 3534 is an amendment to the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act which would make $900 million available from the Fund each fiscal year without further appropriation for the next 30 years!

For those who don’t wish to do the math themselves, that’s $27 billion for federal bureaucracies to purchase private properties and absorb them into the bloated Federal Estate.

How bloated is it, you ask? Here are some stats:

* Total acres owned by the federal government in the United States: 653,299,090 acres

* Total land base of United States: 2.27 billion acres

* 29% of all U.S. land is owned by the federal government

Where federal land is located, by region:

West: 54.1%
Alaska & Hawaii: 38.8%
North Central: 2.8%
South Central: 2.4%
South Atlantic & DC: 1.7%
Northeast: 0.24%

In five states the federal government owns the majority of land within the state border. In these states, the federal government has control over more land than the Governor or the legislature of the state. These “non-sovereign” states are:

Nevada: 84.5%
Alaska: 69.1%
Utah: 57.5%
Oregon: 53.1%
Idaho: 50.2%

In seven states the federal government owns more than one-fourth of all land within the state border. These “semi-sovereign” states are:

Arizona: 48.1%
California: 45.3%
Wyoming: 42.3%
New Mexico: 41.8%
Colorado: 36.6%
Washington: 30.3%
Montana: 29.9%

Of course, once the Fed’s take control of the private property, their practice is to burn it to ashes in catastrophic megafires, converting forests, watersheds, etc. to scorched earth wastelands.

Isn’t Marxism great?

For more on this subject, please see:

The CLEAR Act of Another Federal Land Grab

By Cassandra Anderson, MORPHcity, July 21, 2010 [here]

U.S. Representative Louie Gohmert (R-TX) addressed Congress on July 15th to report the Natural Resources Committee’s passage of HR 3534, the Consolidated Land, Energy and Aquatic Resources Act (CLEAR Act) of 2009. Congressman Gohmert said that the bill was to “deal with the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico” but it contains plans for the federal government to acquire land and was introduced in 2009. …

Congressman Gohmert pointed out that a portion of the CLEAR Act contains a provision for the federal government to spend $900 million a year to purchase private land over the next 30 years, for a grand total of $27 billion dollars over 3 decades. …

Gohmert was incredulous that the federal government intends to raise its purchasing allocations to $900 million a year for the next 30 years and questioned “how in the world does that make sense”? …

Wyden Guzzles the AGW Kool Aid

It is not surprising. Our New York based Oregon Senator Ron Wyden is a full-blown AGW (anthropogenic global warming) alarmist.

Ron thinks, no he is positive, that human beings impact the global climate, and that Americans should be saddled with punishing taxes designed to strangle our economy in order to “fix” the “problem”.

In actual fact, global warming is not happening. The globe has been cooling steadily for the last 12 years or so, and cooling unsteadily for the last 6,000 years. There is no causal connection between atmospheric CO2 and global temperatures. Therefore humanity cannot be blamed for global warming, nor can we do anything about it, nor should we since global warming would be a good thing if it were to happen, which it is not.

All of that logic is wasted on Ron Wyden, who is New York based and completely out of touch with reality on oh so many levels. He supports Cap-N’-Taxilla and the crushing demise of our economy.

I know it sounds crazy, and it is, but here you go:

Subject: Response from Senator Ron Wyden to your e-mail
From: Senator Ron Wyden
To: Dr. Gordon Fulks, Ph.D.
Date: Fri, 23 Jul 2010

Dear Dr. Fulks:

Thank you for contacting me to share your concerns about climate change legislation. I appreciate hearing from you on this issue.

As you know, on June 26, 2009, the House of Representatives passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (H.R. 2454), comprehensive legislation to address climate change. The Senate is currently considering similar legislation, the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act (S. 1733).

I respect the right of everyone to form their own opinion about global climate change. As a U.S. Senator, however, it is also my job to make decisions based on the best scientific evidence available — the overwhelming majority of which suggests human actions do impact the world’s climate. While I am concerned about recent revelations of potential data misuse by a university in the United Kingdom, decades of peer-reviewed research has consistently shown that climate change is real and is a critical threat to our planet. Underscoring this point, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded with 90 percent certainty that human activities are significantly responsible for climate change. This report is among the latest evidence to confirm the likelihood of global warming, and it lists hotter weather, droughts, and stronger hurricanes as foreseeable consequences of our continued actions. We have also had testimony before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, of which I am a member, that climate change is likely increasing the environmental stress on our forests and contributing to a growing threat of catastrophic forest fires. Accordingly, I believe the time has come to act on this critical environmental challenge in a way that will not undermine our economy.

That is why I have supported bipartisan legislation that would implement climate solutions on a gradual basis. For example, the Lieberman-Warner bill I supported in the 110th Congress would have gradually reduced America’s greenhouse gas emissions from factories and power plants by the year 2050. The bill did not regulate emissions from the agricultural and timber sectors, but those sectors could contribute to reducing emissions of green houses gases, on a voluntary basis. It would have also established a market-driven system of tradable credits, which has been successful elsewhere in limiting emissions without placing an undue burden on businesses.

Please know that while I support action to address climate change, I will only support fair legislation that protects Oregon’s farming, ranching, and timber industries and recognizes the tough economic times that Oregonians are facing. Although we may disagree on this issue, I am sure there others on which we do agree. Again, thank you for keeping me apprised of your interest in this issue. If I may be of further assistance in the future, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Sincerely,

Ron Wyden
United States Senator

Schultz Fire Aftermath: Deadly Mudflows

The Schultz Fire claimed its first victim this week, a 12-year-old girl.

Mudflows below the Schultz fire inundate houses, block roads, clog culverts

by CYNDY COLE and JOE FERGUSON, Arizona Daily Sun , July 21, 2010 [here]

Shaelyn Wilson, 12, died Tuesday afternoon after falling into a flooded wash south of the old White Vulcan pumice mine near her neighborhood.

She had been watching the floodwaters with her sister after the thunderstorm.

Her sister ran home, where her father called 911 at 2:18 p.m., then immediately went to search for his missing daughter.

A water rescue crew and an air crew with the Arizona Department of Public Safety were deployed to find the girl.

Coconino County Sheriff’s Office deputies said floodwaters pushed the girl through a culvert and under North Highway 89.

Her body was found by the girl’s father downstream about a third of a mile from the highway.

She was taken to Flagstaff Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead.

A cloudburst over the San Francisco Peaks fell on the area burned last month in the 15,000-acre Schultz fire, moving boulders into roads and pushing sheds across yards.

Residents said the approaching water and ash sounded like an avalanche, a jet engine, or a loud truck as it came off the mountains into Timberline, flooding some homes and leaving many others with mostly mud in the yard. …

For more about the Schultz Fire see [here, here, here, here, here]

Schultz Fire Aftermath: Placing Blame

The sue-happy Center for Biological Disaster has attempted (unsuccessfully) to deflect criticism after the Schultz Fire [here, here]. The community is well-aware, however, that the the multi-million dollar, super-litigious, anti-forest, pro-holocaust “activist” group headquartered in Tucson has thrown legal monkey wrench after legal monkey wrench into any and all stewardship efforts in and around Flagstaff.

The CBD does it for the money. The Feds pay CBD tens of $millions every year to sue the USFS, USFWS, and other agencies via something called the Equal Access to Justice Act [here]. The EAJA is an endless gravy train of our money that is poured into the coffers of radical (Maoist) pro-holocaust groups whose original goal was violent Communist revolution but now is corrupt scam and profit.

It is abundantly clear that the CBD has zero ecological goals. That myth is a cruel joke, but nobody is laughing.

The Arizona Daily Sun ran this guest column Wednesday by Jim Wheeler, Deputy Fire Chief and Fire Marshal of the Flagstaff Fire Department:

Coconino Voices: Use collaboration, not obstructionism,on forest thinning

by Jim Wheeler, Guest Column, Arizona Daily Sun, July 21, 2010 [here]

I take issue with the recent op-ed piece by the Center for Biological Diversity (”Schultz fire: Setting the record straight,” July 11) that seeks to divert personal responsibility for wildfire damage because of “the market” and “untested practices.” As a founding member of the Greater Flagstaff Forests Partnership, I can attest that this smokescreen could not be further from reality.

The federal government does not have the money to thin forests to the level necessary to protect communities and forests and taxpayers do not have to bear the burden to fund projects. Thinning is done by contractors, who either get paid by tax dollars or make a small amount of money on the wood they remove. When controversy arises, contractors go elsewhere.

Appeals by the Center for Biological Diversity that attempt to force arbitrary diameter limits on thinning projects affects the market.” Contractors cannot make money here in Flagstaff when arbitrary diameter limits are placed on projects because the small-diameter utilization industry is not here at this time. While we are all working to bring sufficient industry to our area, we cannot wait to thin the forests. We must work with what we have now! Waiting invites disaster — just like the recent Schultz Fire.

The market is also affected by the fact that an appeal has been filed. Why would any contractor pursue a project that is engrossed in an appeal? The fact than an appeal is in place affects the viability of any project, which in turn tells contractors that there is no guarantee of a supply; thus again affecting “the market.”

The CBD affected the market of the Jack Smith/Schultz Project and then attempts to hide behind “the market” in order to deflect accountability. The Center for Biological Diversity is an outside gunslinger from Tucson negatively affecting the local Flagstaff condition. Just take a look at the east side of the Peaks to see the results of their actions.

On the subject of “untried practices,” the public should know that the Jack Smith/ Schultz project was the last of 10 or so projects fostered by the Greater Flagstaff Forests Partnership (GFFP).

GFFP is one of the most highly successful collaborative ecological restoration and wildfire reduction initiatives in the United States. Having the CBD contend in their appeal that the Forest Service is using “untried practices” flies in the face of the broad collaborative of the GFFP Partners that have worked so hard with the Forest Service since 1997 to thin from Freidlein Prairie Road northwest of town, Woody Mountain, Kachina Village, Mountainaire and East Flagstaff, using the same or similar thinning treatments that were proposed on Schultz Pass.

How sad that other local conservation groups such as the Grand Canyon Trust and the Nature Conservancy, who have collaborated on this initiative, have now been trumped by those who prefer to obstruct rather than collaborate.

Our local practices have used the best available science from the NAU Ecological Restoration Institute and the collective efforts of other professionals and conservation groups who were willing to collaborate instead of obstruct local fire risk reduction efforts. Adaptive management has also “tweaked” projects to improve them based on past projects.

Our “practices” are some of the leading practices of restoration and wildfire reduction in the nation and we have been using them since 1997. To say they are “untried” is ludicrous and untrue. Forest treatments work to allow firefighters to be effective and to protect values such as homes and the surrounding forest itself.

How sad that the GFFP’s efforts have now been usurped by a catastrophic wildfire that will continue to wreak havoc on our community and landscape for years to come. Arguments over thinning around communities must stop! No one is going to cut old-growth trees. No one is going to clearcut anything. Wildfire reduction and forest restoration efforts go hand-in-hand in maintaining and improving the ecosystem and our collective quality of life. Obstructionism does the exact opposite.

Taunting Ecologists

A few decades ago, in the dim and murky past, I attended the UC Forestry Summer Camp at Meadow Valley in the Sierras. All UC forestry students were required to spend 8 weeks taking intensive courses “in the field”. It was a wonderful experience where professors and students forged bonds, and we all absorbed heaping piles of forestry education.

The Camp had (still has) cabins, a mess hall, and some lecture rooms. My term included some 90 students. The Teaching Assistants would call us to class and meals with a battery-operated megaphone, which was necessary due to the size of the student body and our dispersed living arrangements. Still, the megaphone message system was annoying, being somewhat reminiscent of boot camp or a prisoner-of-war facility.

One evening a student (Fred P.) stole the megaphone from a TA (Ron W.). Fred then took off into the woods and began taunting Ron, using the megaphone with volume at full blast.

“Zere vil be no escapes.” “You are under our control.” “Ve have ways of bending you our vil.” “Ha ha ha ha ha!” Etc.

Fred was an athletic guy, a college gymnast, and quick. Ron was a little bit portly even then, and he couldn’t catch him. Fred played with that megaphone for hours. He darted around in the woods from one side of the camp to the other, hooting at Ron, who gamely tried to catch him, with no success. It was a delightful show.

I was reminded of this incident by an old friend and erstwhile Summer Camp historian, who sent me the following news clipping:

Ecologists shun the urban jungle

Only one in six papers tackles inhabited areas

by Zoë Corbyn, Nature.com, 16 July 2010 [here]

The world’s top ecologists are failing to study the landscapes that most need work, and they risk delaying conservation efforts and making their subject irrelevant.

That is the stark message from US researchers who have quantified the extent to which ecologists devote themselves to pristine wilderness at the expense of inhabited regions. The bias is a major problem for both the field and the environment, they say, because it is areas used by humans — which take up most of the Earth’s land-mass — that are in most need of conservation.

The researchers will present their work at next month’s Ecological Society of America meeting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

“Right now our backyards are black boxes,” says Laura Martin, an ecology graduate student at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who was inspired to pursue the analysis after she read a feature published in Nature last year (see ‘Ecology: Ragamuffin Earth’). “There are suburbs, villages and agricultural lands that are being completely left out of the picture as far as ecological processes go,” she says. The tendency to gravitate towards the wilderness for fieldwork has long been recognized among ecologists, but has never before been quantified.

Martin and her colleagues reviewed each of the 8,040 papers that had been published in the top ten ecology journals worldwide over the last five years, homing in on the 2,573 studies that were conducted on land and categorizing them according to the authors’ descriptions of the sites examined.

They found that in only around one in six papers had the ecologists deliberately set out to study regions used by humans. …

The article perhaps inadvertently reveals a sad truth: ecologists in general are clueless regarding ecosystems. It’s not just that currently inhabited regions are not studied; it is that so-called “pristine wilderness” doesn’t exist!

No (terrestrial) locale studied by modern ecologists has been “uninhabited” over the last 10,000+ years. Human beings have lived everywhere and had significant impact and influence on plant and animal distributions and populations. People have been a key component of ecosystems for millennia. We have not been remote from nature — we have been an integral part of it.

Ecologists are blundering into study areas with blinders on. They seek to study “pristine” nature without human influence, a condition which does not exist and has not existed for the longest time. Ecologists have no idea what they’re looking at, and no idea how to look at it. They are trapped in a bubble (of their own making) where they contemplate illusion, not reality.

What fools!

The notion behind SOS Forests is to emulate Fred. We have a bully megaphone and we taunt the fools at full volume.

“Everything you know is wrong.” “You couldn’t find your backsides in a snowstorm.” “Ecologists have their heads buried in sand.” Etc.

We owe it all to Fred. He showed us the way.

And a tip of the hardhat to Al for spurring the recollections.