They’re actually increasing in size. I blame global warming. Or George Bush (is there a statute of limitations on being able to blame things on George Bush?).
Of course, the new growth doesn’t necessarily preserve the species that were being lost in the original cutting, but it’s unclear what, if anything, had actually gone extinct.
One of the interesting things about rainforest species is that they often have very, very small ranges — you find a species of insect, and go on a hundred yards in any direction and there aren’t any more of that insect at all, but instead there are others. Probably many of these microspecies have gone extinct.
But the other thing that’s interesting about the rainforest is that this phenomenon is also found in, for instance, the rainforest around the ruins of Tikal in Guatemala, which were all farmland a few centuries ago. This means the rainforest has re-established itself over the course of a thousand years or less, AND all of these tiny-footprint species have, apparently, come into existence during that time. Unless you want to argue that species were holed up somewhere and spread into the new rainforest, but only into one specific piece of it, which seems hard to believe.
Are we losing species? Probably — but if nature produces rainforest species so prolifically, does it really matter?
Yes, you may blame Bush until Obama is out of office…
I’m sitting here at the public library listening to a kid go on about how it’s all Bush’s fault.
Goebbels would be proud…
http://www.psywarrior.com/Goebbels.html
What is the tard saying is Bush’s fault now?
Mark, I wonder if it’s anything like the phenomenon of the northern spotted owl, which allegedly can only nest and breed in old-growth temperate rain forest in the Pacific Northwest. And also, apparently, in a Kmart sign in the middle of a city.
I remain astonished that Kmart has been allowed to close even one store in the spotted owl’s range.
Of course you can blame Bush. You can still blame Herbert Hoover if you are a Dem and running for office in an even numbered year, and why should Chimpy be any different?
microscpecies
If you applied the same standards to mammals that they apply to bugs, there would be thousands of “microspecies” of cats, cattle, dogs and even humans.
As for extinction, it is apart of nature. Deal with it.
If they can cross with another microspecies and produce viable offspring, then its just a Elkhound screwing a Doberman as far as I am concerned.
I don’t know about scientists, but it seems that most lay people misunderstand the environmental issues around destruction of the rain forests. The primary issues are biodiversity and habitat loss, not carbon sequestration. If you own an acre of mature forest and you don’t cut it down, you’re doing nothing to help the CO2 levels in the atmosphere. The ecosystem is in balance and the forest is absorbing just as much CO2 as it is releasing. If you cut it down, you STILL DON’T add any CO2 to the atmosphere unless you burn the wood or let it rot. If you use it to build houses and furniture the carbon is still sequestered.
The only way you can actually use your acre of forest to reduce atmospheric CO2 is to cut it down and REPLANT IT. As long as you don’t let the carbon in the timber re-enter the ecosystem you’ve actually caused a net increase in carbon sequestration. For some years I have humorously suggested to friends that they can do their part for the environment by subscribing to a newspaper and throwing it away every day. If the paper goes into a modern sanitary landfill its carbon content will be removed from the ecosystem for centuries. Paper will hardly decay at all under the conditions of a properly designed and operated landfill. A clay liner and a clay cap keep groundwater from entering. Without water or oxygen very little decay takes place.
The phenomenon mentioned in the New York Times article is also happening in the U.S. In rural East Texas, where my grandparents were born and raised, wholesale reforestation is occurring. This part of Texas, and indeed the entire southeastern U.S., was one big pine forest before it was clear cut for farm land in the 19th century. The major crop was cotton. In the 1930’s the bottom fell out of the cotton market and many farms in the area were converted to ranches. (Some of my cousins still raise cattle in the area.) At the same time a long trend of depopulation began as the children of farmers, such as my grandfather, moved to the cities for jobs. These days it is almost impossible to make money in the cattle business and the depopulation trend continues. Much of the land is being purchased by timber companies who – get this – replant it in pine trees. These trees are harvested for pulp and lumber. The land is replanted and the cycle continues. CO2 that was pumped into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels winds up in houses, furniture and landfilled newspapers. Everybody wins. It’s enough to make Al Gore weepy.
Everybody wins , Bill Hensley, except the biosphere which is denied the stuff of life itself. Extra CO2 is already proving beneficial to plant growth.
Over the scale of hundreds of millions of years CO2 levels are at near record lows. I give it 20 million years or so before atmospheric CO2 is used up by life. We won’t have to worry about the sun’s red giant phase.
BTW there’s no equilibrium in nature. It just looks that way on the human lifetime scale. There’s no balance, no plan, no “natural order of things”. Things just are and things just happen.
Every living thing simply seeks maximum reproductive opportunities and uses whatever resources are available to it to achieve this. That’s how evolution works.
Until us, recently, as we commit species suicide.
Where’s the the dollar slot for my carbon credits? I mean, the Goracle PROMISED!!!
Mike Borgelt, I give it a few hundred million years. You’re ignoring grasses. They are far more efficient at processing CO2. My take is that they’ll thrive in the lower CO2 world. The real problem remains excessive solar output. Eventually Earth will grow too hot to support life.
And the stability of a system has nothing to do with how it was created or whether it is sentient. The Earth biosphere is stable in the sense of dynamics. That is if the parameters deviate too much, there are restorative processes that bring those parameters back into “normal” range.
Normal here includes glacial and interglacial phases.
Bill Hensley, until apparently sometime in the past decade, deforestation contributed heavily to carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere (mostly because they were burning the vegetations on the spot). If as claimed, reforestation is occurring now, these forests will be carbon sinks (for a few decades) as growing tropical forests absorb carbon from the atmosphere.
Further the scale of the deforestation was huge, accounting for perhaps half of human generated CO2 for a number of years in the 80’s and 90’s, according to one estimate I read. So it is possible, depending on the speed of reforestation, that we could see a substantial drop in CO2 increases (or even a few years of CO2 decreases) as this land becomes reforested.
Also, this should aid conservation efforts. If considerable portions of land are returning to jungle then there is less incentive to go after old growth forest. That is, why go after remote old growth when there’s going to be a huge area of land, closer, more convenient, and better developed, that is accumulating plant material at a remarkable rate?
You’re right, of course, Karl. I was merely lamenting that there is a distinct lack of clarity in the popular press about how forests affect the carbon balance. When rain forests are being clear cut as part of slash and burn agriculture, all that carbon goes straight into the atmosphere. Logging in the U.S., where the wood is not all burned and the land is immediately replanted in trees, has a distinctly different impact.
Mike Borgelt, you might want to get your sarcasm meter checked. I don’t actually think Al Gore is getting weepy about U.S. timber companies. It’s a joke, man!
This phenomenon illustrates one aspect of the whole energy business that tends to have me whacking my head on the wall in stunned amazement at the blindness of man.
We fret like crazy over our energy “problems,” and yet facts like these suggest it’s all nonsense. When you live in atmosphere that is 20% O2, and amidst a biosphere that reduces gigantic amounts of CO2 yearly, the obvious intelligent power source is combustion of hydrocarbons. You’re tapping into a beautiful, sustainable, closed cycle — the existence and utility of which is demonstrated by the fact that every living system on the planet has used it for the past 3 billion years. Now that’s sustainability.
All you need to do is balance your inputs and outputs. Burn all the hydrocarbons you want, and plant enough green things to recover the CO2. Ideally, you want to get your hydrocarbons direct from the green things, too, so you don’t have to wait around for geological processes to make the conversion. Which is not hard, if you put your biotech and chemistry people to serious work on it.
But, no, it’s time to hare off after the “hydrogen economy” and other such fluff. Learning how to build a simple closed cycle, weeds to methanol (say) to CO2 to weeds again is just too….what? Obvious? Unsexy? No money in it for Democratic Party donors? What’s the problem?
Another thing to blame on Bush: measured by growth in carbon emissions, his tenure was the best since the 1970’s. Why? Because 9/11 and the Iraq invasion inflated oil prices.
I mentioned this to a number of my friends from my snelac (small New England liberal arts college). They are all certain that Obama will bring lots of “change” from the “worst president we’ve ever had,” they all are certain that a vote for a third party is a wasted vote, and they are all certain that we are destroying the Earth and need to stop it right away.
You could hear crickets chirp. Not a one even responded.
This I find quite amusing. I do not claim to know for a certainty if climate change is afoot, the cause or what if anything can be done about it. However in the last few years the pro-human caused Global Warming crowd has taken some scientific data and assumed a great deal of other data and disregarded yet more data to come up with a theory of climate disaster. Their masterful promotion of this Idea has garnered great wealth and power for them. They have exaggerated and distorted facts in order to scare people into capitulation.
However the house of cards that one builds with these tactics although impressive ultimately leads to collapse. Any good done or promoted by the cause will be overpowered by the scorn heaped on the promoters. This is because those who believed and promoted what was said are made to look like fools. They are embarrassed that they were taken in so easily.
Historically every public scare has a lifetime. It begins small with a group that for whatever reason thinks that it is possible. Ultimately a politician finds that funding from a group can be secured if they champion the cause and then the Media take it on and promote it. In it’s peek it is accepted as common knowledge and any doubters are labeled stupid or paid off by the evil deniers. Much power is amassed and shady businesses despoil people of their livelihood. Then people begin to tire of the constant state of emergency and the facts start to overtake the hype and the derisive jokes start. Soon the whole thing has collapsed into nothing and waiting in the wings is the next theory to be exploited.
Left in it’s wake are people who’s lives have been destroyed and at times entire economies left a shambles.
Just one example is the spotted owl scare. The claim was made that the spotted owl could only nest in old growth forest. The problem they claimed was logging was destroying habitat. This story got legs and destroyed the logging industry in Oregon. Entire towns went vacant and peoples lives were destroyed. Then a spotted owl was filmed nesting in a Kmart sign. In the end it was admitted that the plight of the owl was over stated in order to stop logging. That is why you no longer hear about the spotted owl.
It is my contention that we are at or near the point where global warming is slipping into disrepute. There is a phenomenon that is called the Al Gore Effect. It seems that for the last couple of years global warming summits have been being cancelled due to record cold and snow fall. 2008 was colder than average and this trend is expected to last for about ten years. In fact the the alarm ringers are recycling the one they sounded in the 70’s, “Global Cooling”. Others are now calling it “Global Climate Change” so that whatever happens they can say : “See we told you!”
Now it is certain there are problems with the environment. Much pollution has been heaped upon this Earth. Many things man has done to fix the problems have in turn caused more problems. It is my contention that man has damaged his home in many ways and lacks the ability to identify the problems or the solutions.
Our responsibility is to be as good to the Earth as we reasonably can. We must be careful not to get sucked in by these “Carpet Baggers” who are crafty at manipulating facts and figures to benefit their cause at our expense.