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Mk
Joined: 22 Jul 2007
Posts: 18
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 Posted: Tue Jul 31, 2007 12:20 pm Post subject: Deforestation? |
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On a lot of these topics that have an environmentalist/political spin on them, you can find a side quite unheard or believed by many. What have you heard or thought on deforestation's existence or negative impact?
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Essan
Joined: 30 Jul 2007
Posts: 11
Location: Evesham, Worcs
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| Posted: Tue Jul 31, 2007 3:29 pm Post subject: |
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Tropical rain forests help create their own local climate - during the morning, evapotranspiration occurs, with moisture rising into the air from the dense vegetation. This forms into clouds which, as convection develops, become big thunderstorms - that produce the torrential afternoon rains.
As well as presumably having some role to play in the global atmospheric energy balance, this big clouds also help cool the earth because they help reflect solar radiation back into space.
Remove the rain forest and this system collapses...... Burn down enough of Amazonia and the rest will die off as the rains start to fail....
http://rainforests.mongabay.com/0902.htm
Some studies have also suggested that removal of tropical rain forests have more than just regional effects on rainfall.
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/godda...story/2005/deforest_rainfall.html
This is what I call one of the 'Really Inconvenient Truths' about climate change - something the likes of Al Gore prefer to conveniently ignore in their tiresome tirade against carbon emissions.
Of course, deforestation does also enters the carbon emission debate: Indonesia is now the 3rd largest producer of CO2 after the USA and China - and it's mostly due to rain forest destruction. These rain forests are burnt down in order to grown palm oil that can be used for biofuels to (supposedly) help cut carbon emissions .....
http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSJAK26206220070604
Put another way - if Indonesia stopped burning its forests, we'd probably achieve the same sort of reduction in global CO2 emissions as we would if the rest of the world stopped driving cars* .... Which makes more sense?
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Manager Ukweatherworld
When faced by two opposing extremes
the truth oft times lies hidden inbetween ... |
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Baywax
Joined: 23 Jul 2007
Posts: 113
Location: Pacific West Coast
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| Posted: Tue Jul 31, 2007 6:09 pm Post subject: Re: Deforestation? |
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| Mk wrote: | | On a lot of these topics that have an environmentalist/political spin on them, you can find a side quite unheard or believed by many. What have you heard or thought on deforestation's existence or negative impact? |
Deforestation in the Pacific Northwest has long been a concern that has been voiced by people in the region and by people from around the world.
I've personally experienced the decline of the rainforests here since I enjoy getting away from the grid as often as possible. If you travel to the western most reaches of Canada you'll come to Vancouver Island where now there are only pockets of conserved forests surrounded by some of the most damaging clear-cut areas anyone could imagine.
Aside from the impact on evaporation, cooling and oxygen generation,
| Quote: | | ...the simultaneous decline of numerous taxa in basins not afflicted with dams or diversions suggests that cumulative damage to aquatic habitats caused by logging, grazing, urbanization, and other land uses plays a major role in icthyofaunal impoverishment. |
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/....1046/j.1523-1739.1993.07020342.x
Every year we see major declines in the returning Salmon runs. This is due in part to over-fishing and disease spread by open water, penned fish farms. But the stability of spawning grounds plays a deciding factor in how many salmonids survive to make it to the ocean.
From a socioeconomic perspective
| Quote: | DEFORESTATION AND FOREST LAND USE: THEORY, EVIDENCE, AND POLICY IMPLICATIONS
William F. Hyde, Gregory S. Amacher and William Magrath
The topic of deforestation is seldom examined from the perspective of prices and responses to resource scarcity. This omission creates important errors in policy. Resource scarcity induces investments in both commercial and subsistence uses of the forest once prices overcome the costs of establishing property rights, forest management, and the returns from alternative agricultural uses of the land. Therefore deforestation will induce price increases and investments in forestry well before deforestation attains its physical limit. These prices and costs will alter the boundaries among several important classes of forest land: sustainable private forestry, the forested commons, unsustainable open-access forests, and unused residual forest. The greatest impact on the world's forests will come from refocusing the policy dialogue on the cost factors that determine these boundaries, including agricultural support policies, local concentrations of nonmarket environmental resources, and policy failures that distort incentives to invest in forestry. In locations where reforestation induces large price changes, policymakers must remain attuned to the likelihood that deforestation-induced changes in the prices of forest products and forest policies may cause significant shifts in the activities of the poorest people. |
http://wbro.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/11/2/223
Was
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Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory. Leonardo Da Vinci
Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.
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scpg02
Joined: 22 Jul 2007
Posts: 221
Location: Sacramento
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| Posted: Wed Aug 01, 2007 4:51 am Post subject: |
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My friend wrote a book on conservation management. Here is the information he has on forestry complete with wonderfull before and after pictures. The whole web site and book are worth reading.
Here is another good picture example by the same guy.
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