Climate Change 2015

The best scientists in the world are all telling us that our activities are changing the climate, and act forcefully. We will continue to see rising oceans, longer, hotter heat waves, dangerous droughts and floods, and massive disruptions that can trigger greater migration, conflict and hunger around the globe.

As Dunwiddie states, literally in a matter of decades the forests was cleared- there is no more oak pollen, and all of a sudden lots of grass pollen.

According to Bill Mckibben, in his book, the end of nature, “Human beings were ending the very idea of wildness as our cars, factories and burning forests filled the skies with green house gases. According to Prof. Gregory Benford from University of California, “Lessening solar UV radiation would lower skin cancer deaths now about a million per year. Crops under less UV grow better and yield more food especially in the tropics.In his state of union address 2015, President Obama “ 2014 was the planet’s warmest year on record- one year doesn’t make a trend, but this does- 14 of the 15 warmest years on record have all fallen in the first 15 years of this century”

President Obama on Climate Change.

There is a big danger of changing the flora and the fauna everywhere in our beloved planet earth.

As Bill (2007) states, “Nature as something separate from man has vanished…..it should depress us to live on a planet that becomes less complex and wild with each passing day, and it should depress us even more that we are the cause of that change” (P.13) unfortunately, the Florida comedy of 2000 never allowed the Democratic candidate AL Gore to achieve his vision for this planet earth. The earth’s forests used to cover about a third of the planet land surface- but of recent, vast tracts of forest have vanished from Japan, the Philippines, and the mainland of Southeast Asia, from most of the Central America and the horn of Africa, from the Indian Subcontinent and sub-Saharan Africa……..Southeast Asia resembles a dog with the mange. Malaysian Borneo is shaved, clearing spreads to Siberia and the Canadian north. Forests disappear so suddenly from sp many places that it looks a plague of locusts have descended on the planet.

As William Cronon in his book’ Changes in the land’ writes, “Nothing could be further from the truth” It is tempting to believe that when the Europeans arrived in the new world, they confronted Virgin lands, the forest primeval, a wilderness which had existed for cons uninfluenced by human hands. “New England lumbering used forests as if they would last forever. 

As Bill(2007) states, “ the colonial squandering of resources is best typified….by the use of firewood to heat homes.(P.22) They consumed on average, more than thirty cords of wood a year, or about an acre of forest. One of the prominent forest researchers Douglas Mac-cleery noted, “Total land in grain and vegetables had grown to 76 million acres, a number that quadrupled to 319 million acres by 1900. Sometimes new technology helped coal and oil began to replace wood as fuel source in the late nineteenth century.

As Andre Michaux (1805) noted, “ In more than a thousand leagues of the country over which I have traveled at different times in North America, I do not remember having seen one to compare with the Ohio valley for the vegetative strength of its forests.

The time is now to act- President Obama

As noted by Ohio state university professor using satellite data and ground maps recently compared the region as it was in 1938 with that of 1988. He found that fifty years ago, there were 2146 polygons- farm fields, clear cuts and other definable boundaries in 1988, the number was down to 710 the woods were reclaiming pasture and road. It should be noted that as the last animals were vanishing, Theodore Roosevelt banded together to oppose market hunting, enact game hunting, enact game laws and establish refuges and reserves. Unfortunately, as games have spread, so have predators.  The most fearsome are probably family dogs, capable of killing huge quantities of deer for sheer sport.

We must operate within certain limits- most nitably the large population not faced by the first Europeans to reach the US. Climate and whether are now influenced by our gaseous contribution to the atmosphere- remains sufficient vigor to reassert itself for its original species to press up through the weight of our settlement and reestablish themselves.

Charles (1890) states, no other true grows so rapidly or to such great so rapidly or to such great size on the gravelly hills of the northeastern states…in early summer, long after the flower of its companions has disappeared, the crestnut covers itself with great masses of spikes of yellow flowers and is then the most magnificent object of the sylvan landscape.

Computer projection of climate change indicates that by the end of the next century, hemlock trees- which shade the streams in some places, cooling the water for the trout may not survive south of the Canadian border. We are the ones desperately in need of missionaries but could show us how to live closer to the ground.

 ~~Dr. Edwin- Economicst.