Now that's an environmental issue I can support. The loss of the Amazon rainforest and deforestation in many other places in the world is a global tragedy. Poor land use and loss of sensitive habitats are far higher priorities than CO2 emissions.
Don't get me started on rapid human population growth in parts of the world that can least support it.

This is exactly what happened in eastern Africa. The trees hold the moisture in an area, creating humidity and hence rain. as you clear the trees, you lose the humidity and the area becomes a desert. Not today, not tomorrow, but it will happen if we continue to destroy the habitat.

Half the Amazon Rainforest to be Lost by 2030
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(NaturalNews) Due to the effects of global warming and deforestation, more than half of the Amazon rainforest may be destroyed or severely damaged by the year 2030, according to a report released by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

The report, "Amazon's Vicious Cycles: Drought and Fire," concludes that 55 percent of the world's largest rainforest stands to be severely damaged from agriculture, drought, fire, logging and livestock ranching in the next 22 years. Another 4 percent may be damaged by reduced rainfall caused by global warming. This is anticipated to destroy up to 80 percent of wildlife habitat in the region.

read more...

http://hernado-key.blogspot.com
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Just east of me used to be a huge Rainforest where the trees were so tall 70 men could hold hands around the base of the buttresses.

They cut it all down and for the next 100 years it became a highly productive dairy region. Now it carries rows and rows of macadamia trees, tea/coffee plantations and tropical fruit farms.

We've been engineering this planet for hundreds of years, the rolling hills of England were once forests with bears, lions and snakes. The forests of the US were all cut down to power the steam trains that opened the country to all comers.

Don't the Brazillians and the Indonesians have the same right to engineer their countries just as we did?

So what's next? A global coalition of governments which will supposedly reduce the deforestation of the Amazon, when they will be actually taking away all the wood they can to the indutrialised countries they come from? Give me a break!

This is a vexing problem indeed. Forests laid waste for the production of soy to turn into bio diesel to fuel our cars. Why? Because environmentalists say it's much better than oil. The EU thought so, and after a big push had to scale way back.

This also raises the question of who owns the Earth. The vast open spaces in Africa, and South America in particular. Who owns the elephants, the lions and the rain forests? The enlightened, world government types from the US and Europe, or the people who live there..... in those SOVEREIGN nations. Who tells them what they can, can not, must and must not do with their own land.

They have a term for this: Environmental Imperialism. We (the civilized) know much better what is best for them (the savage, uneducated, unenlightened, unwashed). WE have to move in and save them for their own good, and for ours.

All this of course hinges on the weather. It keeps cooling off and it's a moot point. Well, it's a moot point unless some world court for the enforcement of environmental laws gets established first. But seriously, can you imagine ANY nation handing over their sovereignty to a world court? Seriously? To be fined? To have national leaders subject to prosecution? Somehow, I'm thinking not.

Aaron

As I understand it, this is a real effect from Global Warming!
I mean global warming hysteria!
More demand of bio-fuel in EU countries means more plantations of sugar cane production in the Amazon rainforest.
More subsidies for bio-fuel in the US. The result, more corn is used for bio-fuel, less US corn is used in meat production.
This is compensated by more soya bean use in meat production. This lead to more soya bean production in new large plantations in the Amazon rainforest.
More eco-fundamentalism lead to more destruction of pristine rainforest in the Amazon.
Madness, the global temperature drops worldwide.

IS THERE SIGNS OF GOBAL WARMING

Clearing the rain forests, polluting the streams, rivers, and oceans: something immediately visible as 'man-made' and the results are also immediately visible....are the newspapers 'reporting' on this ad nauseam? No, its the little invisible trace gas that ironically make balloons float.....that gets the $$$ attention...

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/29/INLB14C70S.DTL

Excerpt:

When it comes to global warming, newspapers play up stories that reinforce the prevalent the-sky-is-falling belief that global warming is human-caused and catastrophic. But if a study or scientist does not portend the end of the world as we know it, it rarely rates as news.

In that spirit, many papers (including The Chronicle) have reported on a UC San Diego science historian who reviewed 928 abstracts of peer-reviewed articles on global warming published between 1993 and 2003, and concluded, "Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position."

Over 10 years, not one study challenged the orthodoxy - does that sound right to you? If that were true, it would strongly suggest that, despite conflicting evidence in this wide and changing world, no scientist dares challenge the politically correct position on the issue.

No wonder David Bellamy - an Australian botanist who was involved in some 400 TV productions, only to see his TV career go south after he questioned global warming orthodoxy - wrote in the Australian last week, "It's not even science any more; it's anti-science." Bellamy notes that official data show that "in every year since 1998, world temperatures have been getting colder, and in 2002, Arctic ice actually increased." Exhibit B: MIT Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences Richard S. Lindzen recently wrote, "There has been no warming since 1997 and no statistically significant warming since 1995."

Such findings rarely are reported, even though - as Marc Morano, communications director for the Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, told me - "Scientists keep coming out of the woodwork" to challenge the so-called consensus. "It's almost like a bandwagon effect."

The Global Warming Petition Project urges Washington to reject the Kyoto international global warming pact because there is "no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. So far, the Politico reports, more than 31,000 scientists have signed it.

As for the snowfall records and low temperatures cited by Booker, Schmidt chalked them up to "cherry picking" data. He added, "Far more important are the long-term trends."

Now honest mistakes happen - even in high-powered, well-funded research facilities. Just last year, again thanks to the vigilance of Watts and McIntyre, Goddard had to reconfigure its findings and recognize 1934 - not 1998, as it had figured - as the hottest year on record in American history.....

I wonder how the Amazon burning compares to the periodic wildfires that occur in other parts of the globe?

Note that many native cultures extensively burned forests long before eurpoean settlers arrived. North America is an excellent example of this. European settlement actually reforested North America. Did this cause the little ice age?

Was there a period of global warming when Native Americans colonized North America? Oh, of course! They burnt down the forests and ended the last ice age. Al Gore needs to hear this!

Did the burning of the european forests cause the medieval warm period? How unfortunate that the hockeystick graph removes the inconvenient MWP and LIA!

What burning caused the Holocene Maximum? Note that every historical warm period has been great for human civilization. Collectively, why do we not want it to be warmer? Because we hate humanity?

Every human society has done better with more people. Technology advances faster than the population growth, so we can access more resources per capita. The earth is very resource rich and our solar system is incredibly resource rich. There is more than enough for everyone to have much more than they do now. Poverty is a result of restricted societies and government control of resources, not a lack of resources.

Note that a warmer world must be a wetter world, since there is more ocean evaporation, more clouds, and higher rainfall on land. This means more water for crops. Also, crops do much better with higher CO2 levels. We evolved from the jungle, so we are ideally suited to a worldwide jungle climate.

Emiliano: Of course. Did you know that the Amazon, holds more carbon in it(carbon sink)than any other land mass. Less sinks, more CO2 in the atmosphere. Equals global warming.
D. Caldwell:Don't you see that hurting an ecosystem means allowing more CO2 into the atmosphere as well. No CO2, no photosynthesis. Why is it so hard to think that we cannot alter the atmosphere by sending up huge quantities of
CO2 and that it will cause warming. The political mumbo jumbo, has nothing to do with the scientific facts. KIPP

"The political mumbo jumbo, has nothing to do with the scientific facts." KIPP

???

Kipp, would you be so kind as to indicate the part of my post the above statement refers to?

janama,emiliano.aaron and per strandberg--you guys are all right on the money

steve thanks for opening the door for me to go off post just a little as posted here before by a blogger i cant remember but in this day and age of "AGW" THE ALL TIME RECORD HIGHS OF THE PLANET STILL HAVE NOT BEEN TAKEN OUT. the all time high of 136 atel aziz, libya on 9-13-22 and the 134 at death valley 7-10-13 still hold as the all time highs-next i looked at the all time highs for the 50 states to my amazement 24 out of 50 states had their all time highs in the decade of the 30s after reading your post on 1934 i went back and broke it down 1930-4/1931-2
1934-3/1936-14/1937-1 from 1990 til the present
6 states have made new highs four of them in late june of 1994 probably from the same system-im sure many of those that occurred in the 30s were also system related but there was more of a spread of dates.

as ironic as it might be there were 10 states having all time lows in the 30s while there were 7 states with all time lows in the 90s. to date there have been no new lows in the 2000s and there was 1 new high in the 2000s-for those intereste so dakota at 120 on 7-15-06

make of this what you will and i hope this was of interest to you

Wisconsinite | December 2, 2008 2:10 PM --- The Holocene Climatic Optimum (so called) was due to orbital forcing, just as were all previous interlacial peaks in temperature.

The Medieval Warm Period might well have been caused by humans cutting down (not neceassarilty burning) forests. It was largely a northern hemisphere warming; none to be found in Patagonia and certainly not Antarctica. Books about this include W.F. Ruddiman's popular "Plow, Plagues and Petroleum" and also a couple of more recent books on just MWP.

By the way, the so-called hockeystick of Mann et al. does have both MWP and LIA (which was global) showing up in proper proportion.

I mean, this comes as no surprise to me. Non-governmental organisations just keep coming to Argentina, to tell US how to use OUR resources, because we're "illiterate, evil," blah, blah. I guess they haven't heard we're a SOVEREIGN nation. I'd tolerate them if they had honest intentions: protecting the environment. But they hide behind the threat of GW or anything else to impose their own interests (economical, of course). Ever heard of what Douglas Tompkins is doing with drinkable water in Northeastern Argentina? Seriously, it's pretty clear the interests of globalism are behind this. I just hope Obama is not one of these fellows. Well, Al Gore is a "friend" of him, so who knows?

Emiliano | December 4, 2008 4:01 AM --- I skimmed/read the climate change impact report for Argentina, prepared by Argentinian scientists. I concerntrated on studying the section on Patagonia.

From just that, I suggest that southern Argentina is going to (mostly) have very serious problems with lack of water. Also probably no or poorer ski areas.

Its your country, not mine. I suggest adaptation measures, but do as you find best.

Regards, David

David,

Thanks for the advice. We also have internet access here and scientist and we DO know what's up with the climate. Still, I think you did not get my point. And I was talking about the Amazon Jungle (a bit to the North).

Emi