From the Field Museum
New study shows where carbon finance should — and shouldn’t — drive conservation efforts
The world’s forests are crucial to slowing climate change, but they’re often destroyed to make room for farms, mines, and other economic ventures. One possible solution to deforestation is carbon finance: giving companies and countries monetary incentives to reduce their climate change-causing carbon emissions from deforestation. But carbon finance isn’t in place on the large scale yet, and it’s unclear how effective it might be. A new study suggests that potential success for carbon finance varies widely–it can work under the right conditions, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution.
“Forests are one of the most important tools available to humanity for mitigating global climate change. This study tells us what the viable solutions might be in different areas,” explains the study’s lead author Ashwin Ravikumar, an environmental social scientist at The Field Museum in Chicago. “No one solution will work everywhere–we need to tailor solutions and funding streams to individual situations.”
In a paper published in Environmental Research Letters, Ravikumar, along with researchers from the Department of Forest Services in Finland and the Center for International Forestry Research in Peru, explores the potential benefits of carbon finance in various landscapes around the world. The team conducted a series of workshops in Indonesia, Peru, Mexico, and Tanzania, asking local farmers, politicians, NGO officers, and businesspeople to come up with their best guesses as to how business and farming might affect land use in the coming decades. The scientists then compared these hypothetical land uses to the current ones and determined how much money could be earned by countries working to conserve forests and reduce their carbon output. The results were hugely varied.
“We were shocked by how much income could be generated by carbon finance in some areas and how little it could bring in others,” says Ravikumar. “Conventional wisdom says that if you save a forest, you’ll make a big difference in carbon emissions, which would translate to a lot of money in the carbon market. But that’s not always what we saw. In the forests of southern Mexico and the interior of Tanzania, for example, there wasn’t a huge difference in carbon emissions between aggressive conservation and high deforestation scenarios. On the flip side, we were blown away by how critical the peat forests in Indonesia for reducing carbon emissions.”
One of the reasons behind these differences is carbon storage potential–the amount of potentially harmful carbon that’s safely stored in tree tissues.
“Forests lock carbon into their tissues and keep it out of the environment, but it’s a double-edged sword–when forests are destroyed, that stored carbon escapes into the atmosphere, making climate change worse,” explains Ravikumar.
Different kinds of forests are able to lock in different amounts of carbon–there’s more carbon stored in lush, tropical Amazon rainforests with leafy trees than in a dry Canadian forest populated with pines. Peat forests, whose soils contain lots of complex organic matter that isn’t readily broken down, are especially carbon-dense and important to maintaining the global climate. That means that in many cases, peat forests are great candidates for carbon finance–there’s a huge difference in the amount of carbon emissions in a region with a peat forest and a region without peat. That means that countries with peat forests could stand to reap big carbon finance rewards for conserving their peat forests.
“If you incentivized carbon storage, though, conserving environments like that peat forest could earn 3.5 billion dollars over the course of thirty years,” says Ravikumar. “Meanwhile, the model shows that conserving a dry forest in Zanzibar would net only about 38 million over the same time frame–much less than the peat forest.”
Ravikumar says that being able to accurately estimate the benefits–or lack of benefits–of carbon finance is crucial. “If you’re working with local people and telling them how preserving a forest could benefit them, you need to be able to give them realistic expectations. If you’re wrong, it undoes the legitimacy of the project and breaks down trust.”
And while the study works with models and estimates, Ravikumar stresses the value of this speculative work. “There are limitations to predicting the future,” he says, “but this paper is not the end of the story. It’s not a crystal ball, but if we don’t think about this stuff systematically, we’re flying blind.”
Ravikumar has hopes that this study will help to inform future policy decisions regarding conservation and carbon finance. “My hope is that policy-makers and NGOs will think critically about how carbon finance will work in their area. In places that we want to conserve, we shouldn’t put all our eggs in the carbon finance basket when those eggs might not hatch. But there are cases when carbon finance could have an enormous conservation impact, and studies like this one can help us to determine what those cases are.”
###
Could you please define the term carbon finance?
Sure, you say something negative about carbon and you get financed.
+1,000,000
An example of Carbon financing is paying logging companies to not cut their trees. The UNs disgracefully corrupt REDD program has been doing this for years, and selling the carbon stored in the trees to northern polluters for $$. What a convoluted scam. Lol!
corrupt REDD
============
REDD and REDD+. Stealing land from indigenous peoples in the name of “saving the world”.
A tax on the real world?
“”If you’re working with local people and telling them how preserving a forest could benefit them, you need to be able to give them”””…………
Lots of money…and then the money shows them how beneficial it is to believe in global warming
how beneficial it is to believe in global warming
================
if churches gave away money in the collection plate there would be a lot more seats filled come Sunday.
Never mind that, what in the hell is “harmfull carbon”.
No One Size Fits All? But of course there is!!
YOU MUST REPENT OF YOUR EVIL WAYS! AND YOU MUST PAY! AND PAY! AND PAY MORE!!!
OR ELSE YE SHALL ALL PERISH IN FIRE, YE EVILDOERS!!!
That’s all the “climate change” industry wants anymore.
Exactly what I was thinking, wws, except my version was much shorter:
“The world’s forests are crucial to slowing climate change”
Can you define “climate” and “change” and explain why its crucial that it be slowed?
Andrew
That implies they know how the climate works and how it will change if they make certain changes in it. What’s clear and damning for their claims is they have no evidence that they do know how the climate will change. Those pesky Coupled Non-Linear Chaotic Systems!!!!!! In the way of government control. 😛
It’s funny that you mention that. A month or so ago, Roger Pielke wrote an article about land-use and land-cover changes and how their influence on the climate is under-represented in climate change. Primarily because of the effects on rainfall.
Several “climate scientists” have the naive response, “forests have some carbon removal capabilities which is captured in the IPCC documents and climate models.”
The point being that climate is much more than just carbon dioxide, but climate scientists have trouble separating “climate” from “carbon dioxide”. They have developed this tunnel vision whereby “carbon dioxide” is a synonym for “climate change” (and the other aspect of this tunnel vision is that “climate” only means “temperature”.)
lorcanbonda,
You are right on identifying an aspect of the problem here. And it goes way deeper. Since climate is a statistical representation of the weather system, there’s no physical climate system to change that could affect anything. The only thing there is to change is the weather system.
Andrew
I’m pretty sure that none of the models include the fact that CO2 helps plants to grow bigger and in places they can’t currently grow.
I think the persuasion technique in all of this is to give people the impression there’s a mysterious thing out there (that only climate scientists can apprehend) called “climate” and we’re making it mad.
Nope. There’s just weather.
Andrew
no physical climate system to change
=========
The classic mathematical mistake in climate science is to assume that weather is “normally distributed”. From this it follows that we can calculate climate as a long term average of weather, the same way we can compute the long term average of a coin toss (1/2) or the long term average of a pair of dice (7).
However, there is ample evidence that weather is not “normally distributed”. Specifically, weather does not have a constant average and deviation, the way a coin or a pair of dice have. Instead, weather behaves more like fluid flows, or the stock market. Where the average and deviation are not constant.
In this case the average of weather (climate) will not converge to a long term constant value. Rather it will diverge unexpectedly, leading to unanticipated and unpredictable extremes. Which is exactly what we see in the long term record of climate. We get ice ages and interglacials, medieval warmings and little ice ages, largely unexplained by the forcings. For example, Milankovitch cycles, which on the face of it are insufficient to create ice ages and interglacials, when dealing with simple averages.
Thank you, fredburple,
for putting some mathematical meat on my philosophical bones.
Andrew
CO2 is not in any way coupled to climate.
Scientists also seem to have a problem recognizing the difference between carbon and carbon dioxide.
Hydrologists, like D. Koutsoyannis, discovered that extreme weather events, like rainfall, drought, etc. are not normally distributed, but follow a HURST distribution.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/02626660209492961
“..While investigating the discharge time series of the Nile River in the framework of the
design of the Aswan High Dam, Hurst (1951) discovered a special behaviour of
hydrological and other geophysical time series, which has become known as the “Hurst
phenomenon”. This behaviour is essentially the tendency of wet years to cluster into
wet periods, or of dry years to cluster into drought periods. The term “Joseph effect”
introduced by Mandelbrot (1977) has been used as an alternative for the same
behaviour. Since its discovery, the Hurst phenomenon has been verified in several
environmental quantities, such as wind power variations (Haslett & Raftery, 1989),
global mean temperatures (Bloomfield, 1992), flows of the River Nile (Eltahir, 1996)…”
But … but… surely a mature forest will be more or less in carbon equilibrium? Trees die, fall down, rot, release their sequestered carbon: other trees germinate, grow, take up atmospheric carbon. What am I missing here?
If you extend the area of forest, the amount of carbon locked up in the cycle you describe will increase…
If you cut down forest, the carbon that was in the forest is no longer locked in.
You are reducing the number of balanced carbon units by removing a forest, yes?
If you cut down forest, the carbon that was in the forest is no longer locked in.
======
nature cuts down trees all the time, usually a few hundred years after they sprout.
It depends on what you do with the wood. Build housing and furniture, and the carbon remains sequestered. Grow a new forest where the old one was and lock away more CO2. Rinse and repeat.
If you cut down a tree, that tree is still a tree. It still contains 99%+ of the same ammount of carbon that it did standing. The Carbon doesn’t Fall out or Fall Off of it or outgas from it. You do lose the additional sinking that tree could have done but the vast majority of carbon remains in the tree (less the leaves which will begin to decompose and give up their carbon). The tree will hold it’s carbon a long time (until it is cut and burned that is)
Have you apologised to Dr. Crockford for lying about her professional qualifications yet, you noxious little creep?
you noxious little creep
Policy
Welcome to my home on the Internet. Everyone who visits here is welcome to post, but please treat your visit like you would a visit to a private home or office. Most people wouldn’t be rude, loud, or insulting in somebody’s home or office, I ask for the same level of civility and courtesy here.
personal attacks, name-calling may get deleted
Is that what goes on in your private home? Fair go.
“Is that what goes on in your private home?”
If the odious Griff ever entered it and abused me, my family and professionals like Dr. Susan Crockford as he has on here, very definitely. I have on more than one occasion been required to eject undesirables.
But that doesn’t matter to the likes of you, because she’s not singing from your Warmist hymn sheet, so in your twisted little world deserves all she gets, right?
Twisted being the operative word.
Can you cite the “abuse”? No, I didn’t think so. The abuse is coming from you my friend.
Mcleod, please do not refer to me as your friend, I find it insulting.
I do not consider those who take money from whoever it is that pays Griiff to lie about and deliberately damage the professional reputation of honest scientists, nor those who make excuses for them, fail to take them to task and protect them amongst my friends.
Very much the opposite, in fact.
You are missing that the whole thing is utterly pointless.
There’s a woodlot here…..200 acres from memory…..and they have made $300,000 over the past years (10? I’m not sure, but I heard it on the CBC……) by selling carbon credits to companies. I’d substitute “suckers” for “companies” but their money allows the woodlot owner to pay men to selectively cut trees, and NB is not a rich province.
Ian M
The first step in identifying a solution is making certain you have correctly identified the problem.
If Carbon is the problem the solution is to plant trees on your property and charge the government for CC&S credits.
All “solutions” to it are sc@ms.
ALL of them.
YASTANEP
Yet
Another
Solution
To
A
Non-
Existent
Problem
The climate-change … PROBLEM … is the problem. (^_^)
When we have found a ‘solution’ to ‘climate change’, how will we know?
The climate will stop changing…in short, there is no solution to climate change
I second that Janice.
I am baffled by the idea of “carbon finance”. It appears we are making monetary transfers toward non-economic goals. The return is entirely in the eye of the beholder in most instances. And there is just about no means of making a causal link between the expenditures and income producing benefits to the environment. If there is no way to produce a B/C ratio, how do we know if the expenditure produces net wealth or is an opportunity cost? I am all the more suspicious because the news of these studies contains no concrete examples of strategies involved.
Ten or more years ago some of my extended family were busy selling carbon credits. They agreed to never change their management of grasslands, in exchange for payment by firms that could then carry on an activity just as they had for years before. Nothing changed at all except for the modest, one-time transfer of money. A robbery would have accomplished the same thing.
I am baffled by the idea of “carbon finance”. It appears we are making monetary transfers toward non-economic goals. The return is entirely in the eye of the beholder in most instances. And there is just about no means of making a causal link between the expenditures and income producing benefits to the environment. If there is no way to produce a B/C ratio, how do we know if the expenditure produces net wealth or is an opportunity cost? I am all the more suspicious because the news of these studies contains no concrete examples of strategies involved.
Ten or more years ago some of my extended family were busy selling carbon credits. They agreed to never change their management of grasslands, in exchange for payment by firms that could then carry on an activity just as they had for years before. Nothing changed at all except for the modest, one-time transfer of money. A robbery would have accomplished the same thing.
Basing advanced financial instruments on non-existent entities? … baffling, you say ? Think debt, maybe. Don’t we base advanced financial instruments on people’s non-existent money to pay those whom they owe?
Why NOT make similar instruments in the name of non-existent “Carbon” problems ? Bubba didn’t meet his goal of reducing the CO2 in his factory, and so we are going to take Bubba’s CO2 excess and sell it to somebody, who will apply it to THEIR efforts as an offset to get credit for reducing their own CO2, which then makes them eligible for a subsidy based on the size of their CO2 reduction, and the subsidy amounts to more than the cost of buying Bubba’s CO2 debt. … There’s profit in them thar delusions. Thank you, Bubba for your “carbon” polluting ways that will make somebody richer.
A financial person can render a much better sarcastic scenario than moi, but that’s all I got based on my puny (perhaps mistaken) grasp of that field.
This silly argument will only be settled when people realise that heat and radiated energy are not the same thing, Radiated energy penetrates the surface of the ocean 24/7. Heat itself can not penetrate the ocean’s surface because of the force called surface tension.
Testing this is dead simple. Get hold of a source of heat in which the radiator is buried and the surface of the water is protected from radiation. I used a heat gun Fire the gun at the surface and you will find the heat is rejected. This makes absolute sense because if heat could penetrate the surface of water the temperature in say the water off the Philippines would be 30 to 35degs. cyclones are triggered at 26.5degs
AGW does not exist
CO2
is NOT a
Problem
but disolved in water, it is a solution
And with some yeast and some flavoring added, it is an even better solution.
“One of the reasons behind these differences is carbon storage potential–the amount of potentially HARMFUL carbon that’s safely stored in tree tissues.”
They continuously make the assumption of “harmful” whenever these kind of studies are done. It is a given without any scientific validity. Believe us on faith is the MO.
Enhanced CO2 will keep trees and all plants thriving… at no additional cost to us. GK
“Ashwin Ravikumar, an environmental social scientist” If there is anything more useless than a social scientist it is an environmental social scientist.
The government of Northern Ireland has fallen due to a failed green energy scheme. Worth a look.
That the scheme was green is irrelevant… the failure was in proper evaluation/costing/oversight
Excellent job at missing the point as usual Griff. There would be no scheme without the great renewable energy scam.
Which is a comprehensive list of the problems so many green schemes involve.
That the scheme is a scheme is highly relevant
Very simple solution to “climate change”, one size fits all:
– ignore anything CO2 related until there is over 500 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere(2050-2100-or later?)
– concentrate on real development and not wasting money on ‘renewable’
– don’t cut old trees to store carbon! 🙁
– don’t waste money on ‘climate research’
– reduce real pollutants
– gather proper ‘unadjusted’ data
If it ever comes to that level of CO2, then check if there have been any bad results
– count the improvement in the biosphere & celebrate
=> think if there is any need to do anything
Lars,
You need a “1” ==> 1,500 ppm.
CO₂ is a problem if there is too little of it. The World needs a reserve because it was getting very low.
Hear hear John.
“The World needs a reserve because it was getting very low.”
I agree on that and suppose most reasonable people should come to this conclusion once they get to see real data.
Unfortunately there are no statistics how it looked like with 200 ppm or 280 ppm CO2.
Basically the increase from 280 ppm to current 400 ppm is probably an increase of 15-25 % in plant growth, probably food for 1-2 billion people out of the current 7.1 billion, an inconvenient truth to paraphrase the alarmists…
http://www.co2science.org/data/plant_growth/plantgrowth.php
In reality we do not talk only about plants, but all the biosphere, as plants are at the basis of the food pyramid.
My point was that even a 90-100 ppm increase is a good enough time frame to debunk alarmists claims and prove the CO2 realities as plant food.
I doubt that humanity ever makes it above 600 ppm with all our “efforts” 🙂
For quantities above 1000 ppm I don’t know how well/easy would humans tolerate it, considering all the variations that CO2 has around the mean value (for instance in an office/home one has easily +500 ppm and more) . For “the world” as “Gaya” it would be a boon 😉
The solution to preserving the world’s rain forests is simple. One size does indeed fit all.
Insist that governments stop doing what they are doing, especially when “Saving The World”
Case 1: Cane Sugar
Late 1970s, the US imposes import quotas and tariffs on cane sugar. One senator, in particular, paints a picture of struggling “family farmers” growing sugar beets who will be saved (400 of them!) by the legislation. The agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) quietly but firmly supports the action.
Results: The sugar cane based economies of the Caribbean Island countries are devastated when they are cut off from their one large export market (the US). Cane farmers are thrown into poverty and destitution. The agri-giant ADM makes a killing selling high-fructose corn syrup as a substitute for the now expensive cane sugar.
The aftermath: Many islands try to recover their agricultural base by mowing down their rain forests and putting in banana plantations. Many plantations are on steep hillsides, as that is the only land available. When hurricanes come through, the torrential rains cause huge and hugely damaging mudslides all over the island where the rain forest was disturbed.
Case 2: Palm Oil
All over the world, huge swaths of virgin rain forest are cut down to make way for palm oil plantations. The palm oil is destined to become Clean, Green, Sustainable, BioFuels!
Nothing more to say.
You Can’t Cure Stupid
One more thing to say: cane sugar has, in the view of many, led directly to the crises of obesity, Type 2 diabetes and cardio-vascular disease among humans.
Very true, indeed.
Others, very plausibly, blame more complex carbohydrates (like bread and similar).
Still others blame the vast increase in the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup.
Indeed, I have seen some people who advocate for the cane sugar theory as you describe. When pressed to name offending products, they sometimes name products which have corn syrup on the ingredient list, and not cane sugar at all. Of course this type of mis-identification just serves to muddy the waters all around.
All told, perhaps nutrition science is as big a mess as climate science is.
No Peter, it is the overuse of cane sugar that causes problems.
Cane syrup has great flavour. Corn syrup is just sweet.
We need to sequester all the carbon we possibly can in forests so that when there’s a new Little Ice Age and atmospheric CO2 levels drop precipitously, thereby causing crop yields to ditto, were can burn all the forests to get some of that carbon back again. Rather like putting money in the bank for a rainy day.
I’m not against forests but we can just dig up coal.
In Canada they leave their enormous Boreal forest out of the national carbon emissions calculations. I wonder why they do that?
(I’ll wager it has something to do with hockey or beer)
Hmm…or the combination of both hockey and beer, which I’m being told, is not unusual,
Nah! It is very simple really. Those decisions are made during winter when our brains are frozen.
KLEM – we in Canada (and Russia) wanted them counting but we were told no. The answer is actually very simple. WTO and IPCC declared that Boreal Forests are not net sinks and don’t count. Based on OCO2, they MAY (note the may) be correct. The highest yearly average CO2 on the planet was measured over Boreal forests – AND tropical forests. So much for the forests being a net sink. Anyone seen recent “adjusted” OCO2 plots?
“There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to climate change”
Yes there is, simply do nothing.
My hope is that policy decision makers will go away.
The problem surrounding “climate change” are the solutions.
Got Ethanol?
“Conventional wisdom says that if you save a forest, you’ll make a big difference in carbon emissions, which would translate to a lot of money in the carbon market.”
Hmmm…funny. Despite setting out to describe convential wisdom, that sentence didn’t seem to convey much at all. In fact, it gets rather foolish towards the end. Maybe if the word “wisdom” were to be substituted with the word “folly” it would make more sense?
Conventional wisdom says
=============
if you cut a forest down you can get a whole lot of money, and 100 years later you will again have a forest to cut down once again.
if you don’t cut down the forest 100 years later you will still have a forest, but you won’t have the use of the money you would otherwise get 100 years earlier. There won’t be a bid difference in carbon, because mature forests are largely steady state, where carbon is released at a similar rate to being stored.
So, the only real difference is the money you don’t get if you don’t cut down the trees.
Yep, not to mention all the wonderful building materials that won’t be extracted from the forests to build housing, furniture, flooring, tools etc. Worth much more for society than mere money.
“If you incentivized carbon storage, though, conserving environments like that peat forest could earn 3.5 billion dollars over the course of thirty years,” For all the other BS in this report, that statement made me a little nauseated. But that was only after being sickened at the thought of the Grant Writer at the Field Museum successfully getting a multi-million dollar grant, to produce something which is worth absolutely nothing. Forget all the wrong statements and assumptions in it. There is NEVER going to be a global “incentivized carbon storage” system/protocol. The concept is so anti-human nature and common sense, it’s stupid. Paying people to NOT do something has never worked. You pay them, and they STILL DO IT! AND where’s the money going to come from? Please don’t say it – – – that’s what makes me sick…
I have not yet sorted out why so many of the articles posted in WUWT here appear to accept implicitly that increasing CO2 amounts in the atmosphere are harmful. I’d always thought that “our” viewpoint was that CO2 was a neutral or advantageous component, whose effects, if any, could be safely neglected for all practical purposes. Yet this and other articles seem to be directed towards explaining why they cannot be ignored.
Have I missed something vital?
I wonder how the wood chip biofuel businesses would be taxed. In the UK we are currently paying hundreds of millions to US loggers to chop down trees in N.C. and elsewhere who export wood chips to the UK where they are burnt as a substitute for coal in large power stations. No I am not inventive enough to make this up.
“Have I missed something vital?” Yes!
Perhaps you could look under your hat.
Dear Mr. Edwards,
These are probably things you have already considered, but, I’ve been troubled by the same thing for a long time, now, so, I’m sharing my thoughts here:
1. Perhaps, Anthony is worried about a potential socialist (i.e., Democrat and RINO)-sponsored UNCONSTITUTIONAL infringement on our first amendment freedom of speech via resurrecting the now defunct “Fairness Doctrine.” He may be trying to create an unnecessary-but-understandable “fair and balanced” publication to prevent being “taken off the air” for not presenting opposing viewpoints. This bogeyman is raised over and over, even up to this year.
E.g., here, in 1993
(Source: http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/1993/10/em368-why-the-fairness-doctrine-is-anything-but-fair )
Comment:
Anthony is running a private blog. It is not a publicly owned forum. Moreover, his First Amendment rights trump any restrictions of this nature.
That said, practically speaking, fighting for one’s rights (say, if an AGWer managed to get an injunction as part of a court action against WUWT) is a pain — expensive and time consuming and gut-wrenchingly wearying. Also, WUWT would be “off the air” until a U.S. Constitution honoring court overturned that injunction on appeal.
Even so, publishing articles which subtly (or not so subtly) promote AGW, is NOT the way to handle this worry. If Anthony wants to do this “fair and balanced” deal for his peace of mind (in view of the pragmatic purposes mentioned — NOT because he really must under the highest law of the land), it would be better to do it EXPLICITLY. That is, publish junk like the above and all the many AGW-promoting articles with a bold disclaimer at the top: This article is junk science, but, I am publishing it so that the “other side” is given a say, here.
A blog is RIGHT to have a point of view. It gives it backbone. Otherwise, the blog collapses into a squishy pile and becomes part of the murky swamp, enlightening no one.
********************************************
2. This possibility is one I glance at and quickly look away — I WILL NOT believe this until there is proof that the apparently wishy-washy stance on human CO2 of WUWT (since about 1.5 years ago) is because Anthony wants it that way, as opposed to reluctantly doing what he feels is pragmatic.
That said, here is the quick glance: Anthony may have some motive for keeping the CO2 controversy going AND/OR a motive for creating the impression that human CO2 emissions are a problem to deal with.
I will not believe that Anthony is another ristvan (Rud Istvan — “stored energy” (think car batteries….) impresario) who touts “peak oil” and pushes the idea that human CO2 is concerning (just enough to invoke the precautionary principle as all the AGW enviroprofiteers do, e.g., M0sher, do <– his profit is from, IIRC, dataset selling and other climate-related consulting).
*********************************************
3.The reason I am going with:
I consider Anthony to be on the whole, a pro-individual liberty and private property rights and free market, anti-CAGWer (I put the “C” in there, for he would, I think, want that there), a man of integrity, who is only publishing junk/pro-AGW stuff to provide the basis for discussion and refutation. And the sometimes inaccurate (vis a vis human CO2) headlines of WUWT are, as another commenter said, “click bait” for the brainwashed, to, hopefully, get them to read the comments in the thread and learn. (I don’t agree with that tactic, by the way — fighting deception with deception is, first of all, imo, morally wrong, and second, it can easily come back to bite you in the end).
I’m glad you said something about this, Mr. Edwards. This is an elephant in the room. A healthy group talks about it.
And, GO, WUWT! The best blog on the internet!!!
I hope all is well with you, over there across the sea.
Your WUWT Ally for Science Realism AND FREE SPEECH,
Janice
They are posted so you know what the opposition is saying, and can have fun shooting them down.
Robin: They are there so we can feel superior to those dimwits who believe CAGW. We are the elite!!
(That was self-parody, a form of humour that some people don’t quite get)
Does anyone know exactly what de-forestation does to global T?
Yes, but why should I show you my work if you just want to find problems with it?
your work is useless anyway of you wont show it to anyone.
my work shows that deforestation causes a drop in minimum T (e.g. Tandil, ARG) whilst forestation/greening causes an entrapment of heat (e.g. Las Vegas, USA) and hence an increase in minimum T
You’re new here, aren’t you.
Henry, so we don’t leave you hanging. Mark’s comment was sarcasm as it relates to the “climate emails” (aka Climategate). But your response was exactly right “your work is useless”. I cannot explain to you every aspect, it is a big subject but when you have time to read it, check out this analysis and where you will find the “you just might find problems with it” comment.
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/reprint/climategate_analysis.pdf
I normally have a degree of sympathy for Griff as he gets such a panning on WUWT and sort of admire his persistence. But he is wrong to say that the political row in Northern Ireland has nothing to do with Green issues in the sense that it is yet another example of the stunning self-serving, useless or corruption practices that seem to be an endemic part of Green energy schemes. Griff could easily find lots of other Green energy schemes, like the UEA failed “boilers” which never worked and wasted a cool million or so. In the wider world we have the outrageous misallocation of now trillions on AGW agenda/green energy which has failed to do any good other than line the pockets of the unscrupulously well off but deprived funds and programmes to tackle humanities real problems like disease, poverty and progress in the parts of the world that need real help. Meanwhile the evidence that the climate is only marginally influenced by CO2 just gets stronger.
Yes.
#(:))
(since your entire quote is just above for context, I went ahead and did that because…. IT WAS FUN! — and accurate)
There’s also the solar power array that was powered at night by flood lights powered by diesel generators.
Spen (above) refers to massive, industrial-scale deforestation (there are vid-clips elsewhere) to create wood pellets as coal-substitute in UK power stations.
Yup!!!! ….. destroying forests to make power!
Yup!!!! ….. Lewis Carrol cdn’t invent this!
In a different context, the people who are not bothered by such a crazy policy would be chaining themselves in front of the bulldozers in order to save the “precious” forest from the “greed” of the logger.
If we must burn hydrocarbons as fuel for power plants, we are better off burning hydrocarbons that we cannot use for other purposes and especially those that also are grown for the human food chain.
Of course all of this falls apart should some type of nuclear power become available that is both safe and inexpensive. I am confident that greens will opposed it, and we will finally be able to demonstrate that greens are far more about suppressing our prosperity than they are about the health of our biosphere.
see: CNN Covers Brilliant Light Power’s SunCell (Video)
http://www.e-catworld.com/2017/01/01/cnn-covers-brilliant-light-powers-suncell-video/
Beware, Brilliant Light Power is a long running scam. (It used to be known as Black Light Power) It is totally at odds with all of known physics.
Let’s Play Science Fiction:
1) The hydrino is real. It is a lower energy form of the normal Hydrogen atom
2) Useful energy can be obtained from the conversion of hydrogen to the hydrino
3) The hydrino is, in fact, the long hypothesized Dark Matter.
Does anybody here believe for an instant that Greenpeace, Friends of Earth, et al, would allow the industrial scale production of Dark Matter on planet Earth? Didn’t think so.
It worries me that trees are regarded as CO2 storage units instead of being regarded as living organisms. And to add insult to injury, it is published in an ecology journal, which is supposed to study the relationships among living organisms and the effects of increasing CO2 levels on living organisms, trees included. A note for them: increasing CO2 levels is beneficial for tree growth and, as an extension, for the biosphere.
“the amount of potentially harmful carbon”
What a totally bizarre point of view to have on a planet where absolutely 100% of all life forms are carbon based. One might idly speculate that the authors are some new breed of “Social Justice Ecologists” who have not the foggiest notion of how Earth borne biochemistry works.
This research is part of CIFOR’s Global Comparative Study on REDD+ (www.cifor.org/gcs). The funding partners that have supported this research include the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad), the International Climate Initiative (IKI) of the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety (BMUB), and the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (CRP-FTA) with financial support from the donors to the CGIAR Fund. Well that certainly explains a lot… 🙂
Didn’t anyone notice judge Preston Bailey issued a stinging rebuke to EPA and mannish Gina McCarthy on Wednesday 12 January? (Worthy of a WUWT story!)
Gina said EPA needed 2 years to count the job losses caused by EPA coal policy, and dah judge said “No, you don’t. Get moving!” or words to that effect:
Bailey wrote:
“EPA does not get to decide whether compliance with (the law) is good policy, or would lead to too many difficulties for the agency. It is time for the EPA to recognize that Congress makes the law, and EPA must not only enforce the law, it must obey it.”
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/01/federal-judge-denounces-epa-as-rogue-agency.php
Er, that’s Judge John Preston Bailey.
The correct approach is quite simple. First you fine them $1,000 and schedule a review for the next day. If they haven’t complied yet, fine them $2,000 and schedule another review for the next day. If compliance hasn’t been achieved yet, fine them $4,000, etc. Doubling each day for non-compliance.
Now, being a government department complicates things because it isn’t their money. So you would need to modify it by jailing them for 1 day (doubling each day of non-compliance). That should get the attention of any public servant.
A gentle reminder that modern mining affects trivial quantities of trees and other vegetation and is not a bogey man.
Miners are people, many of whom innately want to preserve what is good in Nature. One of my past employers was nationally large in both mining and forestry. For mining, we showed our obligations by state of art post-mining rehabilitation so that decades later, now it is near impossible to tell where was mined. Not always, but that was an aim. For forestry, we planted more than we harvested each year, by a big margin – and managed forests gave better yields, a double benefit.
Our motivation was no more complex than this: It was clearly the right way, the least harmful way, to satisfy the clearly expressed needs of society. There was a huge excess of rules and regs laid on us, but this was of little more help than showing who had the biggest dick, an exercise that seems more fun for those who put their foreskins in the game with no attendentvrisk or accountability.
This fantasy of social costs of carbon, money redistributions based on fraud and poor science are not the products of the extractive industries so much as unwise constructs by self-seeking pressure groups and bureaucrats too thick to care or know of reality.
The world will be a better place when the green carpet baggers are recognised for what they are – leeches – then marginalized and ignored. They have no need to exist.
Geoff.
About 5-7 % of soil carbon increased originally by woods, do not recycle back into the atmosphere. This is the only real carbon sink of the forests. The environmentalists say that you should not cut a single tree but you should hug them. If people can cultivate forests in the right way, they can produce more and more wood for sales. This is the situation in Finland. We have been living from forests for 200 centuries. And despite of this, we have more woods in our forests than ever. Now European Union wants to stop cutting our trees, because we are destroying the valuable carbon sink of Europe. Almost all other nations of EU have destroyed their forests and now they say that you have to transform your forests into natural parks.
We need a carbon Tax! And we need it NOW!
Climate changes. Humans can not stop that. Humans do not cause that. As for forests, these same “climate scientists” claim that new growth trees absorb more CO2 than old growth, then spin around and claim we can’t cut down old growth because,,,,,,, CO2blahblahblahblahblah. At this point everything the say is a lie, no one who actually lives out in the world believes any of it.
There is an assumption that CO2 causes climate change or global warming or what ever they want to call it. The assumption is not a fact. It has not been proven. It is at best a hypothesis that needs some solid research to make it a theory. So far the research looking for the proof that the assumption is incorrect seems to be more true than not. Spending large amounts of money (other peoples) is improper if the scientific basis is not there. We will continue going downhill until we begin to show that the assumption is false rather than that it is true.
So, “One possible solution to deforestation is carbon finance: giving companies and countries monetary incentives to reduce their climate change-causing carbon emissions from deforestation.” is a false solution to a non-problem.
Also, we need to quit using normal statistics for these analyses because climate is not a normally distributed random variable.
Ofhand, I’d say there IS a “one-size-fits-all” solution. Learn to live with it.
Nun seit bestehen der Menschheit hat er eingegriffen in seine Umwelt und hat sie verändert zu seinem Schaden. Leider wird er es wohl nie lernen. Doch sehr sehr bedenklich ist sein welweit angesammeltes Kriegsmaterial wie Atom-, Bio-, Chemiewaffenpotencial, sowie
UMWELTVERSCHMUTZUNG DURCH INDUSTRIEABFÄLLE, ATOMMÜLL,VERSCHMUTZUNG DER WELTMEERE DURCH FREMDSTOFFE ÖLVERSCHMUTZUNG ETC. Nun der Mensch bringt sich auf lange Sicht selbst um. Doch dürfen wir die Hoffnung auf Besserung nicht aufgeben. Jeden sei Dank hier sich für unsere gesunde Umwelt einzusetzen!
Brandenburg Gate is nice. I prefer Nuremberg Trials. Apply THAT standard to “climate scientists” and see how fast they change their tune.
“Meanwhile, the model shows that conserving a dry forest in Zanzibar would net only about 38 million over the same time frame–much less than the peat forest.”
I swear what my people swears:
No Tanzanian will pay for the realization of Tanzanian conserving model.
His “hope is that policy-makers and NGOs will think critically about how carbon finance will work in their area. In places that we want to conserve, we shouldn’t put all our eggs in the carbon finance basket when those eggs might not hatch.”
OK – that NGOs won’t pay from their own pockets. / Owls to Athens. /