link for info
Bowman's Link
Vast majority of the US was fire-adapted before Europeans showed up, and all these years of fire suppression have really screwed things up.
But in the grand scheme of things...
In the amount of time that Yellowstone has had to recover from the fires of ‘88, I will have become a very old man, and those new forests in Yellowstone are still very young. We humans just don’t live long enough to appreciate Nature’s timetable.
I just hope that lives and livelihoods will be protected....
I’m going to start off here, at least, agreeing with drycreek. All that will do is kick the can down the road and set the stage for a truly massive conflagration. I don’t think that’s what we want.... Especially considering the fact that the current trends are expected to continue for quite some time, so how much worse are we willing to risk making them?
Where I’m going to disagree with drycreek, though, is on the “proof” of global warming and human activity.
1) It is easily demonstrated in a laboratory that an air sample which is artificially enriched with CO2 can absorb more heat and hold onto it longer than the same sample before the enrichment.
2) In the past few hundred years (especially), we humans have been extremely effective in extracting millions upon millions of years worth of carbon which had been stored well below the earth’s surface as hydrocarbons... And we have burned essentially all of it. And when you burn hydrocarbons, what do you get? CO2 and water. In the atmosphere. Soaking up Solar radiation, AKA heat.
3) Samples of air from pockets trapped thousands and thousands of years ago in places like Antarctica, deep under the ice, clearly demonstrate that CO2 levels in the modern day atmosphere are higher than they were at earlier times.
As if you need to know your starting balance to figure out that if you keep writing checks and make no deposits, your bank balance is going to end up lower than where you started.
I’m still waiting for a single, remotely credible answer to the question of how it is that those three very solid FACTS do not add up to the reasonable conclusion that all of our burning of fossil fuels must necessarily have contributed to rising global temperatures.
It makes about as much sense is telling a fat guy who goes out for a 4th of July run in a sauna suit that if he gets too hot, he should put on a nice, warm hat. And thicker socks.
Global warming due to humans ? Likely there is a human induced component, but far more is due to the natural and evolving process. We should use practical sense and science to improve what we can. Forget the socialist extremists such Greta Thunberg and Biden who blame the entire weather cycle on humans. It is not true.
Do I think man has influenced temperatures on earth? Yes I do. But, from the studies I’ve read and professionals I’ve met working on this topic, it’s such a small influence in comparison to what most people suggest and think. Less then one degree seems to be what most of those people agree on.
I blame it on cell phones.......
OK, so let’s accept that as fact. The trouble is that things clearly ARE changing, and the change is bringing about a great deal of hardship, what with all of the fires and floods and hurricanes… So the question is, why don’t we do something about the piece of the problem that we CAN do something about?
Not talking about tanking the economy or putting a lot of people out of work; just suggesting that if we can slow this train wreck down by moving people into new jobs (preferably which pay at least as much as they are making now) and if, in the process, we could preserve the places where we all love to go to Hunt and Fish and get away from all of that asphalt… What the hell is so objectionable about that?
Personally, I don’t really care if it cuts into the big oil companies’ profits, because I’ve never received so much as a thank you note (let alone a royalty check) for any of the oil that they’ve extracted from public land, so I’d rather have a place to hunt.
It’s not as if any of these oil tycoons have invited me to hunt on their private ranches, so it’s going to have to be public land for me. I don’t owe those characters anything.
Coupled with public land logging, etc. having been shut down in many places..... we see what has happened. Good land management practices,sectional logging, etc. as with good wildlife management can help mitigate a wide range of problems, from fires to beetle kill and disease, erosion after these massive fires, etc.
Hands off management that pretends man is not a part of the environment or has no place in it is fantasy land and may as well develop a unicorn introduction plan as well. Reality and facts..... many folks across the country seem to be having a tough time dealing with them and much prefer to willfully ignore them and deal instead with wishes, feelings and fantasy.....
In nature, massive loss and destruction.....to the point of mass extinction levels....have happened all throughout history. And eons of recovery are the blink of an eye in geologic terms. Just that man's concept of "history" (and pretty much everything else) and earth's reality of history aren't even close to the same scale, not even on the same planet, so to speak.....
