Gil DeHuff

Equal Access to Justice Act often aids those who frustrate forest restoration

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“in most Western legal systems other than the United States, the prevailing norm is the English rule. The “English Rule for Attorney’s fees” is also known as “Loser Pays” which is contrasted to the “American Rule” where each party to the suit is responsible for it’s own fees. I’m not really interested in discussing the pros and cons of the two contrasting approaches to settling legal disputes. Inevitably such discussions end up in a fierce political fight about as desperate as a discussion of the existence of God between people on opposite sides of the fence.

What is interesting is that the article referred to in the title for this discussion thread points out that the 1980 Equal Access to Justice Act, or EAJA follows the English Rule if a small claimant or any non-profit claimant wins a case against the federal government but follows the American Rule if the claimant looses. This may not be news to many here but the article provides some interesting insights including:

1) “The act was passed in 1980 to help veterans with disabilities pursue claims against the federal government”

2) “Over the last five years the payments for legal challenges to the Forest Service have nearly doubled, costing the taxpayer over $38 million in 2015. EAJA is not benefiting average citizens as Congress had intended. Thirty-three-hundred lawsuits were filed by just 12 special interest groups from 2001 to 2011. During this time $37 million was awarded to special interest groups, including awards of attorney fees of $500-750 per hour, according to research by Wyoming attorney Karen Budd-Falen.” If I read that right the payments are rising exponentially with $37million paid out from 2001 through 2011 while 2015 alone cost $38million.

3) “No one counts the cost of jobs lost and families displaced after mills are forced to close due to lack of resources. Unfortunately, those folks do not have the same equal access to justice as these highly funded and financially motivated activist organizations.” I assume that the author is referring to the affected individuals not having the same access to the necessary up front money required to go to court on such a big issue as do the highly funded and financially motivated activist organizations.

4) “these EAJA payments come out of your Social Security Trust Fund”

The Impact of Sound Forest Management Practices on Wildfire Smoke and Human Health

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– Some would have us turn our forests back to a time before any of mankind inhabited North America.
– Some suggest that we should limit our management of forests to that done by native Americans pre European times.
– Some of us see a problem with limiting ourselves to these past practices because of the current population level.
– Some of us even see that properly validated forest science carried out in environmentally sound ways can improve the sustainability of our forest ecosystems and all of the species that depend on them for habitat, store carbon and reduce our dependence on the use of non-renewable, environmentally unfriendly resources which are being extracted from their long term, safe, natural storage underground.

This article (J. For. 115(●):000–000 http://dx.doi.org/10.5849/jof.16-042
Copyright © 2017 Society of American Foresters) “fire & fuels management Aligning Smoke Management with Ecological and Public Health Goals” seems to me to be a good starting point for a much neglected discussion on why mankind has to manage our federal forest better just from the point of protecting human health.

A) Motivation for the study comes from:
1) “mismatches between the scale of benefits and risks make it difficult to proactively manage wildland fires to promote both ecological and public health.”
2) “A recent update to wildfire smoke policy proposed by the US Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) recognized the need to restore and maintain more frequent fire regimes through intentional use of fire, while asserting that protecting human health remained the agency’s “highest priority” (Office of the Federal Register 2015). Therefore, addressing both forest restoration and air quality objectives remains a central challenge.”
3) “Hurteau et al. (2014) found that under a business-as-usual climate scenario, this escalation in fire potential is likely to increase wildfire emissions in California by 50% by the end of this century unless agencies take a more proactive approach to fire use.”
4) “… current policies have permitted regulators to curtail fires intentionally managed for resource objectives in response to nuisance complaints by a few individuals, despite the potential for such
fires to have long-term collective benefits (Engel 2013). Because the impact and likelihood of smoke increase the longer that fire is kept out of the system, extensive fire suppression can result in a vicious cycle that becomes more and more costly to escape until the system fails, as represented by extreme
wildfires (Calkin et al. 2015).”
5) “Smoke and wildfires can impact public health in ways other than particulate pollution, including ozone pollution, increased stress during and after wildfires, and strains on medical services and communication systems (Fowler 2003, Kumagai et al. 2004, Finlay et al. 2012). Despite these broader
considerations, public health regulations for smoke typically focus on a 24-hour average of PM2.5. Values that exceed 35ug/m3 are considered unhealthy for sensitive groups, which include pregnant women, young children, elderly individuals, smokers, and people with chronic respiratory problems such as asthma (Delfino et al. 2009, Kochi et al. 2010, Moeltner et al. 2013).”

Please note that this study was not offered as a be all and end all study. In my opinion, the main objective was achieved. That objective being to give order of magnitude numbers to justify further research and further stimulate the process of rethinking current regulations and forest management policies.

B) Known Facts:
1) California: “The wildfire emissions in 2008 represented 68% of all PM2.5 emissions in the state, and they caused notable public health impacts (Wegesser et al. 2009, Preisler et al. 2015)”
2) “An important spatial mismatch results from the fact that large wildfires can create smoke impacts on distant urban populations. The risk to urban populations from regional-scale smoke impacts has increased as California became the most urbanized state in the United States, with 90% of its population residing within cities that have more than 50,000 people and another 5% living in smaller urban clusters (US Census Bureau 2015). Many of those urban areas are situated in valleys or basins that have poor air quality due to human activities as well as natural conditions that often trap pollutants (Ngo et al. 2010, Nakayama Wong et al. 2011). For example, the four metropolitan areas in the United States with the highest levels of particle pollution are all located in California’s Central Valley (American Lung Association 2015). Because many urban populations already experience poor air quality during the summer, they are particularly vulnerable to health impacts from wildfires (Delfino et al. 2009, Cisneros et al. 2014)”
3) “Within the study area, daily emissions from both prescribed burns and resource objective wildfires remained well below 500 tons PM2.5 , whereas the Rim Fire had 20 days exceeding that threshold (nearly half of its entire period of active fire growth) and peaked at nearly 11,000 tons PM2.5 /day on Aug. 26, 2013 (Figure 2). During the late summer, air quality is already problematic in downwind areas such as the Lake Tahoe Basin and San Joaquin Valley”
4) “Ground-level monitoring indicated that these large smoke plumes coincided with highly polluted days in Reno, which occurred on August 23–25 and again on August 28–29, when PM2.5 values exceeded the “unhealthy for all populations” standard (55.5ug/m3) (Figure 4F). Such high levels are such a serious health concern that people are advised to avoid going outdoors. Navarro et al. (2016) reported that very unhealthy and unhealthy days occurred at 10 air monitoring sites in the central Sierras, northern Sierras, and Nevada during the Rim Fire.”

C) Data – Smoke Plume data was used to “compare differences in smoke impacts between resource objective wildfires and full-suppression wildfires within the San Joaquin River watershed in California’s Sierra Nevada, the Sierras that burned between 2002 and 2013, including 10 resource objective wildfires (totaling 20,494 acres), 17 prescribed fires (totaling 6,636 acres), 4 small wildfires (totaling 12,025 acres), and the exceptionally large Rim Fire (257,314 acres). … the limited availability of smoke monitoring data, particularly before 2007, requires a focus on modeled emissions.”

D) Findings: Reasonable Expectations from the use of increased forest management to reduce the impact on human health of catastrophic wildfires include:
1) “Our results indicate that the 257,314-acre Rim Fire of 2013 probably resulted in 7 million person-days of smoke impact across California and Nevada, which was greater than 5 times the impact per burned unit area than two earlier wildfires, Grouse and Harden of 2009, that were intentionally managed for resource objectives within the same airshed.”
2) “The combination of a warming climate and accumulation of forest fuels ensures a future with more large fires and smoke in dry western US forests. We have outlined framework to more directly account for regional-scale smoke impacts from these events using surface monitoring and satellite observations of smoke. Managing large fires for resource objectives can shift the release of inevitable emissions to conditions that minimize large-scale smoke impacts, by controlling fire spread based on available dispersion and monitored impacts and creating anchors for containing future hazardous fires. When well supported by firefighting, air quality monitoring and modeling, and public communications resources, this approach can overcome existing disincentives for achieving ecological and public health goals.”
3) “August 31 … Altogether, medium- and high-density HMS smoke from the Rim Fire on that day covered a large area (251,691 mi2) with a population of 2.8 million people, more than 2 million of whom resided below high-density smoke … In contrast, the Grouse and Harden Fires burned slowly over the early summer of 2009, with very modest emissions until the last week of June … Our analysis of HMS maps indicated that there were only 2 days when medium-density plumes overlaid substantial populations in California and Nevada, amounting to 25,000 person-days”
4) “the Rim Fire burned 55 times more area (257,213 acres) than the combined footprint of the Grouse and Harden Fires (4,695 acres), but our analysis suggests that it had at least 275 times greater impact in terms of persondays, or 5.5 times greater impact relative to area burned.”
5) “Our analyses help to illustrate and begin to quantify many of the potential benefits of resource objective wildfires compared with those of extreme fires:
– 1. Reduced fuels and reduced consumption. … We accounted for this effect within the 10,385 acres of the Rim Fire’s footprint that had experienced prescribed fires or resource objective wildfires since 2002 by changing “typical” fuel loads to “light,” which reduced estimated emissions in those areas by 53%.
– 2. More favorable dispersion and potential for less ozone. As maintenance burns reduce fuel levels over time, managers may be able to burn more safely earlier in the summer and or later in the fall, when dispersion is often more favorable and ozone concentrations are lower (Jaffe et al. 2013). Fires managed for resource objectives are less likely to result in the greater lofting and concentrations of smoke reported from extreme fires, which often deliver pollution to distant, large urban populations in lower-elevation valleys (Colarco et al. 2004, Peterson et al. 2015).
– 3. Greater ability to regulate fire spread. Because wildfires would be managed for resource objectives when weather and fire behavior conditions are more moderate than under extreme wildfires, their slower fire spread can curb daily emissions. In addition, managers can employ the push-pull tactics burn described for the Grouse Fire to regulate daily emissions based on monitored concentrations fire will become increasingly important for reducing the likelihood and extent of large-scale, extreme fires like the Rim Fire (Westerling et al. 2015).”

Region 1 – A Years Worth of Harvests Tied Up In Litigation

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How many times on this site have we heard that acreage and timber volume tied up in litigation is insignificant? This would seem to indicate otherwise:

“Covering Idaho, Montana and portions of the Dakotas, Region 1 of the U.S. Forest Service has reached a grim milestone.

Over 35,000 acres of forest projects on Region 1 National Forests are stymied by litigation. The amount of timber tied up in lawsuits (355 million board feet) is now more than region’s entire timber harvest of 321 million board feet”

Humans sparked 84 percent of US wildfires, increased fire season over two decades

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How should we deal with the new math on forest fires?

If this article published in the February Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is not a fluke then it would seem to me that our expanding population dictates the need for more forest management not less. The less desireable alternative would be to severely restrict access to our federal forests. The main conclusion of the article is that humans sparked 84 percent of US wildfires and caused nearly half of the acreage lost to wildfire. This number excludes intentionally set controlled burns.

From the above, I would deduce that human initiated fires caused proportionally less acreage loss because they were closer to civilization and to forest access points and therefore closer to and more easily accessed by suppression resources. The fact that nearly half of the wildfire acres lost occur in these areas suggests that we would get more bang for our tax dollars if we increased and focused federal sustainable forest management around high traffic areas easily accessible to humans.

Knowing that humans who cause wildfires are, by definition, either careless or malicious, we might deduce that they are generally not inclined to put great effort into getting to their ignition set points. This would lead us to consider that human caused fires might prove to be in less difficult terrain areas with high human traffic. Fires like the Rim fire being the exception. That, if true, would suggest that forest management for risk reduction on these sites could be done at lower costs per acre than other less accessible forest acreage. Focusing forest management efforts on these high benefit to cost areas would have the biggest bang per tax dollar expended in order to lower the total cost of federal wildfire control. If my thinking is correct, this should play a large part in setting the priorities as to where we should: 1) apply controlled burns to reduce ground and other low fuels, 2) utilize commercial thinnings to reduce ladder and proximity fuels or 3) use commercial regeneration harvests to create greater variation in tree heights between stands in order to provide fire breaks for crown fires when appropriate for the site and species. The net effect would be positive for all species including endangered and threatened species. There would still be plenty of lightning caused wildfire, controlled burn hotspots/breakouts and a significantly reduced acreage of human caused fires to satisfy those who don’t mind national ashtrays. Reducing the number and size of human caused fires would also free resources to attack lightning fires earlier and harder when allowing the fire to burn was not an option.

Pertinent Quotes:

  1. “After analyzing two decades’ worth of U.S. government agency wildfire records spanning 1992-2012, the researchers found that human-ignited wildfires accounted for 84 percent of all wildfires, tripling the length of the average fire season and accounting for nearly half of the total acreage burned.” Italics added
  2. “”These findings do not discount the ongoing role of climate change, but instead suggest we should be most concerned about where it overlaps with human impact,” said Balch. “Climate change is making our fields, forests and grasslands drier and hotter for longer periods, creating a greater window of opportunity for human-related ignitions to start wildfires.”” Italics added
  3. “”Not all fire is bad, but humans are intentionally and unintentionally adding ignitions to the landscape in areas and seasons when natural ignitions are sparse,” … “We can’t easily control how dry fuels get, or lightning, but we do have some control over human started ignitions.””

IN SEARCH OF COMMON GROUND

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It seems like an exercise in futility for the “New Century of Forest Planning” group to be discussing and cussing forest planning &/ policy when we haven’t even agreed to the scientific fundamentals that serve as the cornerstone and foundation for any such discussions.

Below, I have developed a tentative outline of the high level fundamentals which any Forest Plan or Policy must incorporate in order to have a reasonable chance of meeting the desired goals. Until we can come up with a version of these “Forestry Fundamentals” that we generally agree to, we are pushing on a rope and wasting each other’s time unless our objective here is simply to snap our suspenders and vent on each other.

In your comments, please note the outline Item that you are responding to. Maybe we can revise my initial effort and come to some common ground. In doing so we would perform a service and make a step forward that would be useful outside of this circle instead of just chasing our tails. Coming to such an agreement would be a step towards developing a priority hierarchy and eliminating the internal conflicts which make current federal forest policy and law ambiguous and self-contradictory. Until we reach common ground, the current obviously unworkable policies will continue to doom our forests to poor health and consequentially increase the risk of catastrophic loss of those forests and the species that depend on them for survival.

– FORESTRY FUNDAMENTALS – 1st Draft 12/15/16

ESTABLISHED SCIENCE WHICH MUST BE INCORPORATED IN PLANNING FOR

THE SUSTAINABILITY OF FOREST DEPENDENT SPECIES

I) The Fundamental Laws of Forest Science which have been repeatedly validated over time, location, and species. They include:
— A) plant physiology dictating the impact of competition on plant health,
— B) fire science dictating the physics of ignition and spread of fire and
— C) insects and pathogens and their propensity to target based on proximity and their probability of success being inversely proportional to the health of the target.

— D) Species suitability for a specific site is based on the interaction between the following items, those listed above and others not mentioned:

— — 1) hydrology, the underlying geology and availability of nutrients in the soil.

— — 2) latitude, longitude, elevation, aspect and adjacent geography.

— — 3) weather including local &/ global pattern changes.

 

II) The Fundamental Laws controlling the success of endangered, threatened and other species dependent on niche forest types (ecosystems):

— A) Nesting habitat availability.

— B) Foraging habitat availability.

— C) Competition management.

— D) Sustainability depends on maintaining a fairly uniform continuum of the necessary niches which, in turn, requires a balanced mix of age classes within each forest type to avoid species extinguishing gaps.

— E) Risk of catastrophic loss must be reduced where possible in order to minimize the chance of creating species extinguishing gaps in the stages of succession.

 

III) The role of Economics:

— A) Growing existing markets and developing new markets in order to provide revenue to more efficiently maintain healthy forests and thence their dependent species.

— B) Wise investment in the resources necessary to accomplish the goals.

— C) Efficient allocation of existing resources.

 

IV) The role of Forest Management:

— A) Convert the desires/goals of the controlling parties into objectives and thence into the actionable plans necessary to achieve the desired objectives.

— B) Properly execute the plans in accordance with the intent of: governing laws/regulations and best management practices considering any economies.

— C) Acquire independent third party audits and make adjustments in management practices where dictated in order to provide continuous improvement in the means used to achieve goals.

— D) Adjust plans as required by changes: in the goals, as required by the forces of nature and as indicated by on the ground results.

— E) Use GIS software to maintain the spatial and associated temporal data necessary for Scheduling software to find and project feasible alternatives and recommend the “best” alternative to meet the goals set by the controlling parties.

What did I miss, what is wrong, what is right, what would improve this list of Forest Fundamentals?

What’s Up with the Lack of a Link Between CO2 and Global Temperatures

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How does all of this affect current forest policy?

Here are two worthwhile reads regarding the role of forests in global warming / carbon sequestration. In addition, item “C)” raises and supports the question: ‘if there is no long term correlation between temperatures and CO2 then how can CO2 be the largest factor contributing to Global Warming?’. Everything we do is predicated on that one big “IF” yet, most refuse to acknowledge the lack of a direct correlation.

A) Pacific Northwest forests: Carbon sink or carbon source?

“Active forest management in dry forest ecosystems plays a critical role in reducing fuel loads, conserving functionality and biodiversity, and returning forests to a natural, resilient condition that is capable of responding to wildfire in a more socially desirable and ecologically beneficial way”

IMHO regardless of whatever role CO2 plays, healthy forests require, at a minimum, forest management as needed for the safety of society. The above quote simply illustrates that a “hands off” policy does not fit the needs of all forest ecosystems nor does it fit at all times within the need to maintain a specific forest ecosystem in order to support species dependent on the sustainability of a particular forest ecosystem niche. This in turn leads to the need for landscape level forest planning for all federal forest holdings.

B) Carbon storage in WA state forests is too small and too risky to play a serious role as a climate change mitigation tool

– 1) “the single biggest contributor to climate change is CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion. Indeed, global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel emissions in recent years have been roughly ten times higher than emissions from the next largest global source, land use change, including deforestation”
—> See “C” below about the “inconvenient truth” that there is no proven long term relationship between CO2 levels and global temperatures. This does not rule out the possibility that, as yet, undetermined interactions with other variables could have an impact on the role of CO2 in global warming.

– 2) “there are many excellent reasons to support planting trees in WA state … However, mitigating the threat of climate change is not among those reasons, based on the available science.”

– 3) “Thus, the management of forests to accumulate carbon must not delay or dilute the phasing-out fossil fuel use.”

—> agree – but not because of CO2 emissions:

—- a) Health – pollution dictates a reduction in the use of hydrocarbons and an increase in the use of alternative fuels to replace the extraction of below ground hydrocarbons and an increase in the use of sound, sustainable forest management to reduce the risk of Catastrophic fires.

—- b) Geologic ramifications of hydrocarbon extraction and hydraulic pumping include surface subsidence and earthquakes.

C) The Question as to the pertinence of CO2 to Global Warming

We must consider the inconvenient truth that ice cores from Greenland and Vostok, Russia show that over the last ~ 100,000 years, temps have been significantly higher than today by more than 2 degrees centigrade when CO2 was 2/3rds of what it is now. So is CO2 really the cause of global warming?

Greenland Data – Mankind has lived in significantly warmer climates than current temps over the last 11,000 years with CO2 levels at 2/3rds of the present levels (current CO2 levels corroborates their extrapolation of CO2 levels to the present).

Global Mean Temperature Anomaly – 1880 – Present – Note 2000 – 2016 only shows a 0.3 degree centigrade increase versus the Greenland and Vostok Data and corroborates their extrapolations to 2000.

Vostok Data – Mankind has lived in significantly warmer climates than current temps over the last 140,000 years.

 

So the question is: how does all of this affect current forest policy?

Fixing Water By Fixing (Managing) Forests

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Preserving Drinking Water is just one of the many reasons that Landscape Level Sound Sustainable Forest Management Is Needed everywhere including our National Forests. This doesn’t preclude hands off management nor does it preclude tailored management to provide for the desires of society when it fits within acceptable parameters as dictated by:

  • The safety of society and the assets of the populace.
  • Landscape level long range planning providing for forest succession in order to insure sustainable habitat niches for the species of interest which depend on the availability of a continuum over time of forest types at all stages of type succession within the landscape.

The following are quotes from various synopses of related articles:

A) Fixing Water By Fixing Forests

  1. “Moreover, healthy forests reduce the amount of funds cities need to treat their water to ensure it’s safe to drink. According to the report, seven US cities saved between $725,000 and $300 million in annual water treatment through investments in nature.“
  2. “Denver’s program, which involves a partnership with the US Forest Service, has resulted in nearly 40,000 acres treated to reduce wildfire risk and restore burned acres in critical watersheds. And the programs that followed in other cities are modeled after Denver’s and involve the same network of practitioners.”
  3. “Plus, the private sector appears to be stepping up – albeit slowly. Ecosystem Marketplace’s report from 2014 on watershed investments found companies such as Coca Cola and SAB Miller going the extra mile to protect their water supply by engaging with other users in a watershed and using it sustainably.”

B) U.S. Cities Go to the Source to Protect Drinking Water

  1. “In 2002, a catastrophic wildfire that burned 138,000 acres of forest made Denver’s drinking water supply run black with ash and soil. Cleanup of infrastructure damage, debris and erosion cost more than $25 million, while the fire-ravaged landscape caused increased flooding that wreaked havoc on water infrastructure and roads for years.“
  2. “To lessen wildfire risks, Denver Water and the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) started a watershed investment program to improve management of source water forests, together dedicating a total of $32 million to forest restoration over five years. Starting in 2011, Denver Water has invested in forest restoration and improved forest management to reduce the risk of wildfires, and USFS shares costs and implements those restoration activities.”

C) Forest Trends: “State of Watershed Investment 2014”

  1. “Last year, governments and companies invested $12.3 billion (B) in initiatives implementing nature-based solutions to sustain the world’s clean water supplies. According to a new report from Forest Trends’ Ecosystem Marketplace, this funding – which supports healthy watersheds that naturally filter water, absorb storm surge, and perform other critical functions – flowed to more than seven million households and restored and protected a total of 365 million hectares (ha) of land, an area larger than India. Up from $8.2B in investment tracked in 2011,”

D) Report: Protecting Drinking Water At Its Source

  1. THE SOURCE DOCUMENT = 140 pages of maps, graphs and details

What Actions Should Be Taken To Counter Global Warming and What Are The Consequences?

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We have just had a warm dispute about Global Warming. We discussed whether or not mankind has lived through much worse global warming than the present, contradictions in data and interpretation of the data as well as the validity of man made global warming and projections of the same.

Many feel that we have sufficient science to dictate that there is a very strong urgency to do something right now and others think that there are too many contradictions and differences of opinion to leap before we have more science because of the unintended consequences of acting on bad data. So let’s leave further discussion of what is the truth and what isn’t to the post linked to in the first sentence of this post.

LET US NOW ASSUME THAT GLOBAL WARMING IS AN INCONTESTABLE SCIENTIFIC FACT AND THAT THERE IS NO QUESTION THAT IT IS DIRECTLY RELATED TO EMISSIONS OF CO2 AND OTHER GREENHOUSE GASSES. Let us assume that global temperatures will warm 4.8 degrees centigrade over the present with no action per the Copenhagen Accord. That is significantly higher than the previous high temperatures over the last 11,000 years in the Samarian and Iron ages. Let us also assume that the change will occur over a shorter time period due to the modern man made influences causing the change to be complete by 2100 as stated in the Copenhagen Accord.

LET US CONSIDER THE ACTIONS NECESSARY TO KEEP GLOBAL TEMPERATURES FROM CLIMBING ANY MORE THAN 2.0 degrees centigrade per the target in the Copenhagen Accord. LET US CONSIDER THE CONSEQUENCES OF THOSE ACTIONS.

Let’s consider things like:

Do we move people into large cities and revert to bicycles? Does that increase the spread of infectious diseases?

Are we going to permanently clear National Forest ridges on the Pacific coast and load those ridges up with wind farms to increase our sourcing from wind farms to a significant level from the current 4% supplied to the grid. There are already groups complaining about their placement in the desert and their impact on endangered species. What are the consequences?

Are we going to excavate large newly found rare mineral deposits in Minnesota (or wherever they are) that many are already lining up to oppose in order to make the large solar farms and battery storage necessary to produce more than the 0.2% percent that solar panels currently supply to the grid. Or are we going to continue to rely on China for those rare earth minerals. What are the consequences?

What industries do we cut out? What are the consequences? What do we do with those who won’t have a job?

How long can we print money before the world devalues our currency? There is plenty of talk about that already and when interest rates go up we will end up with our whole budget going to repay debt or devalue our own currency. Actions are already being taken to cut Social Security and Medicare. How are we going to add more people to the dole? Who is going to subsidize the scaling up of this new technology and remove all of the environmental impacts?

Do we really expect the 110 countries to keep these commitments made on the basis of a wing and a prayer? Are the commitments glibly made by politicians who want to look good. Is it kind of like “We’ll have to pass it to find out what’s in it”? If we don’t impose and control this on a global scale will our US improvements make any significant difference?

Are we going to control the exponential growth in population in order to avoid the exponential increase in co2 emissions. Talk about consequences – think death panels and Obama Care. Are we going to put a cap on how old people can be to get medicine or surgery? Some expectations are that population growth will slow but we have already gone from 2 billion to 7 billion in my 68 years on earth.

Methane Gas is the second most prevalent green house gas. Are we going to triple the price of milk by requiring that all bovines be equipped with leak proof methane gas capturing devices?

Please add to the list. Talk is cheap so we all can chip in. 🙂 I plead ignorance. I only have questions. Shouldn’t we be asking these questions?

Finally, who will have the say as to what is done and how it is done. Won’t any such efforts be even more controversial and ineffective than our current policies regarding the managing our national forests? If we can’t agree on the long term consequences of current forest and endangered species policies, how are we going to agree on policies to limit global warming and the consequences? Will legal and analysis paralysis combined with everyone demanding their way or the highway only hamstring good intentions by trying to manage by an all inclusive committee? Lives will be much more impacted by global warming control measures than they are by forest policy. Will we see all of the states break off from the nation to protect the interest of their people? Uncle Sam won’t be able to do anything to stop it – no war, no nothing just everyone withdrawing in mass. Will D.C. muster an army to keep all of the other states in line?

Do we really know enough to make all of these decisions ASAP as some insist we must? Let’s classify the proposed actions as to 1) Quick and Easy, 2) Obama Care Tough and 3) Dismembering the Union.

Does George Carlin ring true on anything? At least it is a sad laugh.

SUPPOSITION OR SCIENCE – GLOBAL WARMING

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A Linked-in contact posted this VERY INTERESTING testimony of John R. Christy from the University of Alabama in Huntsville to the Subcommittee on Environment Committee on Science, Space and Technology on 11December 2013 titled “A Factual Look at the Relationship Between Climate and Weather”

Please note: The author does not claim to prove or disprove global warming. He is merely pointing out the Faux Science behind many of the claims and demands for immediate action. Excellent data graphs are included to illustrate the points. Many of these points have been made elsewhere on this blog based on other references. This author is well credentialed and is not just some outlier. Some quotes include:

Page 1:

– “As the global temperature failed to warm over the past 15 years, it became popular to draw attention to the occurrence of extreme weather events as worrisome consequences of postulated climate change due to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases.”

– DROUGHT – “… we know our nation experienced droughts in the 12th century, the so-called mega-droughts, which were much worse than any we’ve seen in the past century. Thus, droughts of the past 50 years are not unusual and obviously not “unprecedented” as shown …”

Page 2:

– “A 500-year history of moisture in the upper Colorado River basin (below) indicates the past century was quite moist while major multi-decadal droughts occurred in all four prior centuries … These and other evidences point to the real probability that water supply in the West will see declines simply as a matter of the natural variability of climate.”

– “In the Great Plains, the period from 3000 to 1500 years ago saw a drier and warmer climate during which a significant parabolic sand dune ecosystem developed, especially in western Nebraska and NE Colorado”

Page 3:

– AVG. DAILY TEMPS – “It is true that the number of records in 2012 was quite high, thanks to a very warm March and a hot Mid-Western summer. However in comparison to the heat waves of the 1930s, the summer was not the “worst” for heat. 2012 finished in 8th place on the list, …” going back to 1895

– TORNADOS – “NOAA indicates we are in a very low tornado period in our country – in fact the current year (right, black line) is the lowest year-to-date (Nov.) value in the 60 year history. … It is simply a recognition that the number of tornadoes can vary significantly from year to year and there is no long term trend”

– WILDFIRES & SNOWFALL – 2013, “The current year has included the huge Rim Fire in the central Sierra Nevada of California, but, on the whole, the year is well below average as shown … A related metric is total snowfall in the Sierra of California which has also shown no trend since the Southern Pacific Railroad Company began measuring snowfall in 1878”

Page 4:

– ANTARCTIC – this warming trend is not unique. More dramatic isotopic warming (and cooling) trends occurred in the mid-nineteenth and eighteenth centuries suggesting that at present, the effect of anthropogenic climate drivers at this location has not exceeded the natural range of climate variability in the context of the past ~300 years

Page 7:

– MODELS – “the IPCC relies on climate models to distinguish “natural” from “human” caused climate change because instruments can’t. However, as demonstrated, these same models on average fail by a significant amount to reproduce the climate of the past 35 years”

Page 8:

– “Now, it is true that in the models, most of the warming in the past 50 years is due to greenhouse gases, but since the model-based warming did not occur in reality (by a significant amount), how can one claim that reality was driven by greenhouse gas warming?”

Page 9:

– HISTORY OF GLOBAL WARMING FORECASTING – “The current record is now twice as long as was available when I testified in 1996 and the models are more complicated, expensive and numerous, representing an industry unto itself. The comparison shows that the very latest climate models’ tropical response to CO2, on average, is still 2 to 5 times greater than reality, just as it was in 1996”

– “Unfortunately, as demonstrated here and discussed in the literature, climate models have not demonstrated acceptable skill in terms of depicting even very fundamental, large-scale climate variations, and thus are unable to identify natural versus human-influenced events on regional scales.”

 

So where do I (Gil) stand – This paper has only enforced what I already believed – We just don’t know what we are talking about as of yet. GLOBAL CHANGE IN UNDENIABLE but predicting where it is headed other than up and down and about the same over undetermined time periods is pure speculation until we gather the facts, quit playing Chicken Little, and approach this based on the scientific method as opposed to the same kind of elite group think that has resulted in a net negative by messing up our national forest ecosystems without accomplishing the objective of saving the NSO. The difference between this and the NSO fiasco is that the consequences are much greater.

More on Wildfire and Sound Forest Management

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These links are from a USFS Quarterly List of Recent Forestry Related Publications

FUEL REDUCTION EFFECTIVENESS:

– “Fuel Treatments and Fire Severity: A Meta-Analysis” – “Thinning treatments have demonstrated the greatest reductions in wildfire severity, but only by those treatments that produce substantial changes to canopy fuels, shift the diameter distribution towards larger trees, and are followed by broadcast burning or other means of removal. Until the residual activity fuels are disposed, they will largely offset much of the hazard reduction benefit achieved from opening the canopy. … Modifications in fire behavior achieved within a single treated stand, however significant, are unlikely to change the total area burned by a large wildfire, aid fire control efforts, or impact the distribution of severities across a landscape (Finney and others 2003). Fuel treatment effectiveness ultimately depends on the cumulative impact of a treatment regime applied across landscapes and maintained through time.”

–> Note: This cessation of treatments is what resulted from the 80-90% reduction in NF harvest levels. This cessation is a primary factor in the increase in wildfire (documented repeatedly in other posts on NCFP) acres burned since the harvest reduction policy was instituted after 1990 at the behest of those opposed to sound forest management – it’s called shooting yourself in the intestines.
–> Note: This is a combined statistical analysis of various controlled experiments wherein the model referred to is the normal statistical model used to test a hypothesis for significance of the independent variables.

INCIDENT LEVEL WILDFIRE DECISION MAKING PROCESS:

– USFS – “Decision Making for Wildfires: A Guide for Applying a Risk Management Process at the Incident Level”