Climate Changes

Trees are a renewable resource in most places but for places like the rain forest, they should take more care with it.

I think it has to do with magnetic north shifting.
They say the US / Canada border is moving it's way to the equator

We have a lot of aspen up here and the loggers do a lot of clear cutting up in that type of tree. The nice thing about aspen is it's a "weed tree". Within a year any place that's been clear cut is filling back in and it naturally thins itself out. My father-in-law was in logging for many years. When I started driving truck for them, we were hauling out of places he'd cut years before. Another thing the state does up here is to make critter habitats. They'll select places the loggers cut and have them go in and pile the branches to make hidey holes for them. Then they follow in after and toss in some grass seed or clover. *smile* Ok, I'll get down beside you before we both fall.

My opinion is that I don't think the question is whether or not the overall climate of the earth is getting warmer because it is for reasons already stated plus the fact that only about 15,000 years ago (a short time on a geological scale) glaciers covered quite a bit of N. America and other parts of the earth. Now there are few glaciers. All existing glaciers are presently receding. Therefore, it is warmer now that it was 15,000 yrs ago.

However, the real question is, what is causing the warming? How much of the warming is due to human activity? Can something be done about it? Should we do something, and if so, what?

I think the earth is going in cycles...
first it was warm when we had dinosaurs (what killed them? the heat maybe? a meteor? maybe some alien life form killed them off to make room for more intelligent life?...who knows) ... then the ice age came, and mamals came... and then things got warmer, and will get warmer still... then it'll probably get cold again and freeze up, and just keep going in cycles.

now it's getting warm again.
It's like the earth has a fever. It has to run it's coarse before it can "repair" itself. Or it's just killing everything off slowly so it can start all over again.

There has to be a connection of some kind to all the pollution humans have caused. But, scientist also agree that the Earth's various climate's are cyclic.

When I was growing up out here in Oregon in the 1960's, It rained from October through June, and always poured on July Fourth. For the last 25 or 30 years, we have been dry for the most part into November, some slight rain January though maybe March, then spotty rain through May.

I think we are are experiencing a bit of both a return to a more normal pattern (in Oregon) and some warming.

But the everyone blames the US and South America for logging and driving the earth to destuction. I've got news for you. China aint helping matters much! They have one or two more folks than we do, and they are much more lax on environmental issues than we are. They don't give two hoots what enviros say either. Africa, the middle east, eastern Europe, they don't have must respect for environmental concerns either.


On logging, I work in a wood There are a couple common mis-conceptions about loggers and the logging industry.

1. They want to cut down ALL the old growth timber.

This is BS. There is one mill in Oregon equiped to cut old growth into lumber. And they are a specialty mill that does it more as a nessessity. It is cheaper and more profitable nowdays to mill smaller logs. Fir trees now only take a few years to become viable timber.

2. Loggers don't care about the environment, they won't stop till they cut down all the trees.

C'mon, logger minus trees = no job. Loggers today call it sustained yield harvesting, loggers of old called it tree farming.

There are without a doubt bad apples amongst the loggers. There are in every group. Like the brilliant folks from ELF (Earth Liberation Front) that emptied 25 gallons of engine oil from a customer's log loader onto the ground on forest service land. So they could fill the engine with water to ruin it! DUH! Where did the dirty oil go!!!

Ah crap, my soapbox broke!! Damn plastic soap box!

Here in central Alberta, we usually have a solid snow-cover for almost 5 months of the year, from early November to the end of March. It's now late January, and we still have only a trace of snow on the ground -- this has NEVER happened here in more than 100 years of weather records. And I've got to say, 5 months of winter is too long. If climate change is going to shorten that, that is okay with me. If I were living in a hot climate, maybe I would look at things differently, so there is definitely some personal-perspective to climate change.

To put it into a rock tumbling perspective, I bust up my rough rocks in the backyard, so I normally stop this from the end of October to early April, as busted rocks tend to fly away and get swallowed by the snow. But today I was able to get out and crack some rough in the backyard, something I never dreamed I would be doing in late January, ever. So climate change can be a good thing for my rock tumbling activities. On the other hand, I rely on good ice formation on the river to bulldoze the sediments each winter, exposing fresh material for my next summer search. I guess there are two sides to every coin.

Hey, I'm all for the hemp!

Ron

Dont forget the cotton industry. And the pesticide industry.