Vardaman Virtual Forestry Company
FRIDAY REPORT OF 08/18/06
The Most Direct, Frequent Link to Knowledge Workers in the Eastern Forest Economy
MORE FROM “THE END OF NATURE
by BILL MCKIBBEN”
Our quotes below are from this outstanding new book:
“…doubling the preindustrial concentration of carbon dioxide would raise temperatures 9 degrees. The new wave of concern that began with Revelle and Suess’s article and Keeling’s Mauna Loa data has led to the development of vastly complex computer models of the entire globe. In those models the globe is divided into thousands of boxes, and each box is divided vertically into a large number of layers, usually ten or more, representing the various layers of the atmosphere and then of the land or ocean. The computer program, a sort of meteorological spreadsheet, first solves for each box the fundamental conservation laws of physics, and then goes on to calculate the transfer of mass, energy, and momentum from one box to the next – it ‘runs’ the weather far into the future. You can change a variable – the amount of carbon dioxide in the air, for instance, - and watch the result…
“Perhaps the most famous of the computer programs is in the hands of James Hansen and his colleagues at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in, of all places, Manhattan. NASA used an early version of the model around 1970 to study the accuracy of predictions from satellite weather predictions; when the Godard weather group moved to Washington, Hansen, who was staying on in New York, decided he’d try the model on longer-term problems – on climate as opposed to weather. Over the years, he and his colleagues have fine-tuned the program, and even though it remains a rough simulation of the mightily complex real world, they have improved it to the point where they are willing to forecast not just the effects of a doubling of carbon dioxide but the incremental effects along the way – that is, the forecast not just for 2050 but for 2000.
“In Dallas, for instance, a doubled level of carbon dioxide, or the equivalent combination of carbon dioxide and other gases like methane, would increase the number of days a year with temperatures above 100 degrees from 19 to 78 each year, according to Hansen’s calculations. On 68 days, as opposed to the current 4, the temperature wouldn’t fall below 80 at night. One hundred and sixty-two days a year – half the year, essentially – the temperature would top 90 degrees. New York City would have 48 days a year above the 90-degree mark, up from 15 at present. And so on…
“A year after Hansen’s original testimony, in May of 1989, he returned to Capitol Hill to declare that his studies showed definite danger of future drought. The White House tried to alter his testimony, arguing that, in the words of presidential press secretary Marlin Fitzwater, ‘There are many points of view on the global warming issue.’ But he didn’t point to any studies undercutting Hansen’s work, and the next day another government scientist, Schneider of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, assured the assembled congressmen that ‘there is virtually no scientific controversy’ that more carbon dioxide means higher temperatures. ‘This is not,’ he said, ‘a speculative theory’…
“There is no question that the damage is increasing. Between1964 and 1979 half the mid- to high-elevation red spruce trees in Vermont died; in Sweden all bodies of fresh water are now acidic, roughly fifteen thousand of them too sour to support aquatic life; rainfall in southern China has grown more acidic than the badly damaged parts of the Atlantic seaboard; even in the American West the pH of rainfall has plummeted to the point where two-thirds of the region’s lakes now have ‘limited acid-neutralizing capacity.’ Central Europe, small and highly industrialized, has perhaps been hardest hit. When the Worldwatch Institute was working on its first State of the World Report in 1983, recalled director Lester Brown, and staff member Christopher Flavin, it ‘debated whether to report that a West German forest survey had found some eight percent of that nation’s forests showing signs of damage, possibly from air pollution and acid rain. That discovery, though disturbing, seemed little cause for international alarm.’ But by 1988 – that is, five years later – ‘over one-half of West Germany’s forests are damaged, and the link to air pollution is all but conclusive…
“But the scientists agree that we have already pumped enough gas into the air so that a significant rise in temperature and a subsequent shift in weather are inevitable.
“Just how inevitable we can see from the remedies that some scientists have proposed to save us – not the remedies, like cutting fossil fuel use and saving rain forests, that will keep things from being any worse than they need to be, but the solutions that might bring things back to ‘normal.’ The most natural method anyone has suggested involves growing enormous numbers of trees to take the carbon dioxide out of the air. Take, for argument’s sake, a new coal-fired electric generating station that produces a thousand megawatts and operates at 38 percent thermal efficiency and 70 percent availability. To counteract just the carbon dioxide generated by that plant, the surrounding area to a radius of 24.7 kilometers would need to be covered with American sycamore trees (a fast-growing species) and planted at four-foot intervals and ‘harvested’ every four years. It might be possible to achieve that sort of growth rate – a government forestries expert told the Senate that with genetic screening, spacing, thinning, pruning, weed control, fire and pest control, fertilization, and irrigation, net annual growth be ‘very much higher than at present.’ Even if it worked, though, would this tree plantation be nature? A walk through an endless glade of evenly spaced sycamores, with the weed-control chopper hovering overhead, and the irrigation pipes gurgling quietly below, represents a fundamental break with my idea of the wild world…
“There is no way to re-assemble nature – certainly not by following the suggestion of one researcher that, in order to increase the earth’s reflectivity and thus cool its temperature, we should cover most of the oceans with a floating layer of white Styrofoam chips…
“We draw our lessons from what we see and feel and hear around us. The nature that matters is not the whirling fuzziness of electrons and quarks and neutrinos, which will continue unchanged; it is not the vast and strange worlds and fields and fluxes that scientists can find with their telescopes. The nature that matters is the temperature, and the rain, and the leaves turning color on the maples, and the raccoons around the garbage can.”
Visit our partner Wiley.com to save 15% on How
to Make Money Growing Trees and their entire selection of Forestry and Agricultural titles. Your discount will be applied automatically
upon checkout. If you do you not see the discount being applied, please enter
code aff15 in the Promotion Code field and click the Apply Discount button.
|
