Originally Posted by faithful_servant

Deforestation??? Wait a minute... The most powerful greenhouse gas there is is water vapor. Deforestation would DECREASE the amount of water vapor, not increase it, negating the greenhouse effect. Water pollution?? Just what exactly is it about water pollution that contributes to the greenhouse effect?? Fewer plants? Nope sorry. Fewer animals?? About the only thing that animals do that impacts greenhouse gases is help plants grow by natural pruning and produce gas. Less animals would reduce these. Ya gotta stop and think about this stuff.

If you truly think that deforestation is a problem, would you support measures that take away the financial incentive to use destructive forestry practices??? My guess is that you would. Right now, the best thing we could possibly do to impact this is allow professional foresters to manage our forests instead of activist judges. If we went back to harvest levels that were in place 30 years ago, we'd see American/Canadian produced timber flooding the int'l market. We use incredibly good logging practices because our timber cos. take a long view of the forest. More 3rd world countries (who are leading the way in deforestation) have forestry practices that are horrific to sya the least. We could put them out of business in a matter of years by making destroying great stands of timber unprofitable for them. Look at when the 3rd world countries really started in on the massive deforestation. It was right about the time the eco-nuts started suing to stop every timber sale they possibly could. Our timber cos. use forestry practises that are hands-down, far and away better than anyone else - when they have the available timber to use the best practices. Take away the number of sales and you force the timber cos. to use poorer practices in order to stay in business. Increase the number of sales and you allow for much better forestry practices. Take a look at the prevalence of forest fires over the last decade. In the past, our forest were harvested into a healthy patchwork of mixed age stands, which were kept healthy with intelligent thinning and harvest. Now, they're overgrown, disease ridden expanses of dead and dieing trees. Prime for destructive fires that provide no finacial benefit, no environmental benefit that intelligent harvesting techniques can't easily replace and they cost this country BILLIONS of dollars. If you want a huge source of CO2, take look at an unhelathy stand of timber. It's a potential fire hazard, producing CO2 like nobodies business and the rotting wood on teh ground is just as bad, just spread out over years instead of days. If you want to truly stop the production of a whole lot of CO2, support professional foresters instead of idiotic eco-nuts. Get our forests healthy and consuming CO2, instead of sick and producing CO2. Create tens of thousands of new jobs. Improve our ability to fight fires. Here's a freebie for you: Did you know that every federal timber sale has a clause in the contract that states that if a fire breaks out, the Feds can basically draft your crew to fight the fire??? When the forests were actively being managed, this meant that there were pros immeadiately available with great equipment and expertise to stop the fire. These guys ate fires for lunch. They also built great road systems that allowed for the fire crews to get to the fires MUCH faster than they do now. Now, there are few of these crews around and the fires get BIG, really fast, due in large part because of the delay in bringing pros to the job and knocking the fire down before it gets out of control.

Originally Posted by saltwn

Whoa, there! We are talking apples and oranges here in the details. I said I had a hunch climate change might be more related to deforestation and pollutants than global warming.
I didn't say anything about CO2. Your alarmed reaction shows you've defended yourself against some radical ideas and I can understand that.
Deforestation has taken place. And pollution is rampant. Look at the houses and concrete all the way up either coast and from the southern coasts through the middle of the US.
Every time I go to California I get eye irritation, and my husband gets bad headaches. People who live there are immune to the pollution there, I guess.
Sometimes the air smells burnt even when there aren't any fires going.

There aren't many places we will drink water out of the tap while traveling. It makes us sick.
Sometimes when it rains the rain doesn't feel clean anymore but yucky. Not everywhere, but in densely populated areas mostly.
I think the rain and the snow were meant to cleans things to an extent as well as to moisturize.
If there is a climate change it may be about cleansing. Maybe it's a set cycle. I don't know.
I think the scientists are onto something. They may be looking at the wrong reasons.

In Georgia, they still have a forest industry, but they rotate what they cut and leave woods along the highway to beautify. There doesn't seem to be a lot of activism to save their forests from logging as logging has maintained a balance. But maybe it's just the mind set, because there doesn't seem to be any activism against irresponsible mass house building either. And I think that's where the real tragedy is. I mean look at the housing market and there are still shack tracks going up every day places. Will they sell them? Eventually I guess. Some won't and the land they cleared will be forever changed. And we all know it doesn't rain as much in the desert as in the forest. Because like they taught us in school, there has to be moisture to evaporate into the clouds. Then the clouds rain down again. Sometimes the wind blows the rain to another area, but where there aren't many sources to pull from-if the rivers have been diverted and ponds are dried up due to over building and rerouting of the natural water-you'll have a different climate than you started with. That's what has happened in Florida in a way. There were never so many fires as today. But when you divert a swamp and build a subdivision, there's going to be a little cause and affect gong on there. When you do that over an entire region--you get rampant wildfire summers in what used to be a subtropical climate.

Originally Posted by fxashun

I was actually mistaken. If Canada ends up like Florida, much of Florida will probably be underwater.

Originally Posted by mlurp

I knew you would figure it out... Sea levels differences. lol

Originally Posted by faithful_servant

In Georgia, you have mostly private timber and that's pretty much immune to the eco-nuts crusade of stopping all logging. It's also almost 100% 2nd growth, very little old growth and very tightly managed stands. It's some nice timber, well managed and out of the gun-sights of the eco-nuts. I've seen whole timber sales (1000+ acres) stopped because of one small spot (maybe a whole 5 sq/ft) where rainwater stood longer than the rest of it. The eco-nuts got that spot declared a wetland and stopped the whole sale. 5 years later, it burned to ash. I used to have the privilege of driving through one of the most beautiful roads ever made - the Santiam Pass in Oregon. Today, most of the most beautiful part of it is a burned out waste (do a little research on the B&B Complex fire). For the last 15 or so years, the timber professionals have been telling the Forest Service that that area needed to be logged or it was going to be lost to fire. After repeated infestations of spruce bud worms, Western Pine beetles and some damn moth, the area was 30%-80% dead and dying. Had it been logged as the pros asked for, it would be a healthy, vibrant forest instead of thousands of acres of burned snags. It's crap like this and the grossly huge holes in the GW theory that have caused me to think that most eco-nuts are either the stupidest people ever to breathe or are intentionally trying to destroy this place.

Originally Posted by fxashun

Yeah, that hit me after a minute. If Canada turns into Florida, there's gonna be some serious problems worldwide. A LOT of people are gonna need a new pace to live. Especially with so much population near the coasts.

Originally Posted by aaronssongs

That's a riot. I was going to say that the people who dispute the certainty of global warming would be the stupidest people, and deserve what's coming to them....tornadoes from Minnesota to New York City, bigger and badder hurricanes, droughts to rival 1930's dust bowl, flooding "anywhere", the gradual elimination of Spring and Fall, the end of winter sports and tourism, Nature gone amok, more wildfires over broader areas, further reduction in farm lands, soil erosion, increased vulcanism, especially in the Northwest and Mexico, famine, scarcity of fresh water, and on and on and on....so much crow to eat, so little time.