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This is absolutely false! The US old growth forests are at 10% of what they were at the turn of the 19th century. Most of the trees that are replanted are varieties that are scientifically altered thru gene reconstruction/manipulation that maximize growth. These newer breeds, mainly the Planter Pine, are very suseptable to disease and moths...the population of both have exploded and are now threatening entire forests of old-growth.
Also, the harvest cycle of these new planters is 25 years avg, which SOUNDS good to us, but the truth is that it takes the forest at least 80-100 years to completly heal from clear-cutting. 4 harvests per century hardly helps the eco-system any.

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To me there are very few options as far as a pollution turn-around goes...short of a mass-human die-off of 3 billion, we are doomed.

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We are made of this earth. In a sense, it is that which is our creator. It is what gives us life. Maybe some respect is in order?

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What are you scared of FarmerBob?
Did you make your money in a non enviromentaly friendly way?
Or is common sense just to 'up in the air' for you?

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Some micro-pollutants are conclusively established to do real harm. When such harms are reliably identified, their sources should be contained.
However, we reject the casual presumption of guilt before innocence in the micro-environmental realm. Most of the time, pursuits of the extra part per billion prove to be more wasteful that the pollution itself. Most consume more energy, material, time, endanger more lives, generate more real pollution, dissipate more value, than the thing pursued. Chasing after the micro threat should have a clear stopping point where fears begin to outweigh scientific evidence of harm. As a geberal rule, we are far better off putting our money and efforts to uses where clear environmental returns can be directly realized. How much more environmental good could have been done by buying up green spaces, riverbanks, watersheds, and forests with the tens of billions that were poured into the bureaucracy of superfund?
Better to direct environmental spending away from the trans-scientific pursuit of micro-environmental phantasms and toward the conservation of wilderness.

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The first quarrels arise from the underlying facts of the issues. One might suppose that rigorous scientific investigation and disciplined economics would settle any such disagreements, but they don't and won't, and here is why:

Let us begin with Soft Green science. In a classic 1972 essay, nuclear physicist Alvin Weinberg used the term "trans-science" to describe the study of phenomena too large, rare, diffuse, or long term to be resolved by scientific means. Those means used by chemists, physicists, engineers, et al. that revolve around rigorous testing and controlled experimentation under the strict principles of the Scientific Method. The phenomena of trans-science are epistemologically "scientific", and yet, for strictly practical reasons, unanswerable by science.

One of his examples would be that it would take eight billion mice to perform a statistically significant test of radiation at levels the EPA deems "safe" using traditional, accepted scientific methodology. The computer model used instead to set that official threshold may by exactly right, or it may be way off in either direction. The only certainty is that no billion mice experiment will ever be conducted. Even if it did, countless other critical components of the model would remain unverified.

For example, both hard and soft green agree that pollutants in well-defined populations, where exposures are high, and effects strong and quick are certainly bad things in need of immediate remedy. The tough part comes when we attempt to scale out and down from that scenario. From high exposure to low. From short time frames to long, from small, highly exposed populations to huge ones that are hardly exposed at all. Infinite scope and zero effect can be multiplied out to quite a bit or nothing at all. It all comes down to the model.

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Rats, bine weed and algae.
Not many compaired to the ones that have died out. 1000's a year.

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All you need to do is dig some soil, plant some seeds then water.

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If your a writer you might also get some insperation. You know what they say: The garden is the closed place you'll get to God.
What kind of things do you write?

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About you growing some food. I write on here, grow food on my alotment, work as a tree surgeon and gardener, keep up to date with current affairs, make sweet love to the women, catch up with my friends, cook some good food, help out my family, walk the dog, do a work out and my chores all in a day, so why can't you?

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How big is an English allotment?

What is the cost per acre to grow vegetables vs buying from a farmers market?

What vegetables can be grown in the UK?

What is the growing season?

Fertilizers or compost?

Greenhouse would make sense for the climate.

Lots of variables to include.

I don't think they use arable land in the UK for this purpose...I believe its leftover from WWII when gardens prevented starvation.

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Do you have any idea just how many there are? You talk like you might also know the ratio between those that have died over the last 100 years and those that have thrived. If you do. Will you tell me.

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You also seem like the kind of person that would'nt care less if all there was in life was you and your cat.
Thats not life. Diversity is life.
Can you not remember being a kid?
The wonder of life?
How sad would it have been if the only life that you saw was a human or a rat?

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Sure we can live without it. But do you really want the kids to?

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Anyway. Good for you for having a garden wilderness. Not many people have gardens like that. They have lawns and slabs and decking. So they would be the ones who I was talking to. You should'nt take things so personal. Especialy when someones not talking to you.

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I was'nt talking to you about growing your own food. That was said in a reply to MasterOfAll. It's also something that I've kept on bringing up over the past 10 months. (Maybe Miles, you could get an old metal drum and grow some potatoes?)

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You talk of now and then, but not of the future. Tell me some environmental facts about the future. Especially as thats what the threads about.

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I have written thousands of words in this thread giving you the data and the sources, as well as the reasoning

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It's up to you whether or not you choose to believe what the scientists, government bodies and environmental groups say

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There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production - with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas - parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia - where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.

The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree - a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars' worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.

To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world's weather. The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth's climate seems to be cooling down. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. "A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale," warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, "because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century."

A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972.

To the layman, the relatively small changes in temperature and sunshine can be highly misleading. Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin points out that the Earth's average temperature during the great Ice Ages was only about seven degrees lower than during its warmest eras -and that the present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average. Others regard the cooling as a reversion to the "little ice age" conditions that brought bitter winters to much of Europe and northern America between 1600 and 1900 - years when the Thames used to freeze so solidly that Londoners roasted oxen on the ice and when iceboats sailed the Hudson River almost as far south as New York City.

Just what causes the onset of major and minor ice ages remains a mystery. "Our knowledge of the mechanisms of climatic change is at least as fragmentary as our data," concedes the National Academy of Sciences report. "Not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions."

Meteorologists think that they can forecast the short-term results of the return to the norm of the last century. They begin by noting the slight drop in overall temperature that produces large numbers of pressure centers in the upper atmosphere. These break up the smooth flow of westerly winds over temperate areas. The stagnant air produced in this way causes an increase in extremes of local weather such as droughts, floods, extended dry spells, long freezes, delayed monsoons and even local temperature increases - all of which have a direct impact on food supplies.

"The world's food-producing system," warns Dr. James D. McQuigg of NOAA's Center for Climatic and Environmental Assessment, "is much more sensitive to the weather variable than it was even five years ago." Furthermore, the growth of world population and creation of new national boundaries make it impossible for starving peoples to migrate from their devastated fields, as they did during past famines.

Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.

-PETER GWYNNE with bureau reports

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