Global Deforestation Demoed In Google Earth 207
eldavojohn writes "On Google's official blog, they claim a 'new technology prototype that enables online, global-scale observation and measurement of changes in the earth's forests.' Ars has more details on what Google unveiled at Copenhagen. If you have Google Earth installed, you can find a demonstration here. Many organizations and government agencies are on board with this initiative to put deforestation before the eyes of the public. If only satellite data of North America existed before the logging industry swept in!" It's interesting to contemplate the implications for intelligence gathering of Google's automated tools to compare satellite photos.
Trees (Score:5, Insightful)
Interestingly, before the white man appeared in North America, there were an average of 8 trees per acre and now there are an average of 220 trees per acre in the US alone.
Just saying...
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Of course, increased forest cover could be just as bad as decreased forest cover. It's more about balance than maximization.
Re:Trees (Score:5, Interesting)
8 Trees per acres sounds about right for centuries old trees in pristine forest.
I have a quarter acre with 5, 30-40 year old maples on it, we also have 2 Japanese Cedars and a Cherry tree.
200 trees in an acre would be pretty closely spaced young trees, maybe like an orchard or nursery.
Now what we should be looking at is not how many trees we have per acre, but how many of those are young AND carbon absorbing trees, compared to carbon producing trees from decomposition. Forests have a carbon life cycle, and their balance shifts during that cycle, also some species of tree are better absrbers than others.
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Forests and Jungles are generally carbon neutral.
Every atom of carbon that a plant absorbs is naturally released when the plant decomposes.
A natural Forest or Jungle is a collection of plants in all parts of their life cycle. Simple math tells me that they don't absorb net carbon.
Unless we're talking about a swamp that is in the process of storing young hydrocarbons (there's a word for them, IIRC the Okefenokee is a rare example). The carbon has to go somewhere.
Tree farms on the other hand 'sequest
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Re:Trees (Score:5, Interesting)
It's important to note that the North American forests were not "pristine" when the white folks showed up. The people who had lived there for a few thousand years had practiced some fairly sophisticated forest management. For instance, they would regularly clear undergrowth to make it easier to travel and hunt, and put significant effort into managing herd sizes. They also cleared some spaces for agriculture, which the Pilgrims in particular took advantage of when they went to set up their own colony.
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They also practiced the same slash and burn agriculture that is now devastating the rainforest, their populations were just never high enough for it to catch up to them in the same way.
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It wasn't just a matter of population - they had to do it all with hand tools. Let me tell you, if you haven't tried it - clearing
dense growth by hand is very hard work. I did it several times a year for about 4 years and I would rather freeze and starve
to death before I'd do that again.
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Where, who, how many, how large the area, at what times. Otherwise this is just mythical FUD about "noble Indians"
Actually, the term is "noble savages", and you are an incompetent troll.
I live in Lake County, California, where the Pomo people lived in peace for 10,000 years or more. They built basket-like houses to ride out the winter, and then burned them down in the summer, producing yearly burns that kept down the undergrowth without harming old growth, with which the county was covered until the US Government paid the influx of whites money to cut them down and plant Black Walnuts. You can live on Oak acorns, but y
Re:Trees (Score:4, Insightful)
[Citation needed]
Re:Trees (Score:5, Informative)
[Citation needed]
Not the op, but the number I have is: Natural Density in California is 60 trees per acre, but it currently is at 273 per acre. From "Green House Gas Emissions From Four California Wildfires: Opportunities To Prevent and Reverse Environmental and Climate Impacts" (PDF) [calforestfoundation.org]
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Of course, I agree with the thesis of the article. I saw pictures of my hometown from a hundred years ago, and there wasn't a tree in sight, but now it's like living on Kashyyyk. There are huge pine trees everywhere where the land isn't kept clear. I'm sur
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A quick google search reveals this quote from '92 [cato.org].
I'm sure it wouldn't take much more searching to find other comparable numbers. I'm guessing that 1920 in the quote was picked because it is a low point, but still, it's not like we currently
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Question... I've seen some old-growth trees in New York's Adirondack Mountains (and elsewhere) that are 200+ years old ... their diameter is more than the reach of my arms. Meanwhile, all the trees in more recently-logged areas, which are maybe 50 or 80 years old, or less, are much, much smaller. Do the bigger, older trees do more for the environment? Or do the smaller trees make up for it in volume?
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Bullshit. Cite your references
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Citation, please? 220 don't sound right. Even 8 seems like a lot.
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I'm glad the natives cataloged these statistics for us.
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Obviously they are trying to ruin the environment, don't you read Nature?
http://www.iema.net/news/envnews?aid=10949 [iema.net]
All kidding aside though, the type of trees matter, even palm oil plantations aren't the same ecosystem as the native rainforest they replace. Though the Palm Oil plantations are seen as the greener alternative to soy bean farms which is what a lot of rainforest is being cut down for.
The crux (Score:3, Insightful)
That's the crux of the matter, *employment*. This is hardly ever addressed when it comes to draconian "no you must stop this" laws and proposals as regards the vast rural areas of the world.
This is what I see all the time: Wealthy urbanites in the industrialized areas are all for "conservation" in areas they don't live, but they have pitiful to non existent whacko theories on what exactly the human beings who live in those other areas are supposed to do for a living. Can't cut down jungle hardwoods
North American Reforestation. (Score:5, Informative)
The original poster wishes he could see North America before the logging industry swept in. Around 30-50 years ago, his intuition would have been rewarded. But, for the last decades, much of the United States has actually been reforested, rather than deforested. The reasons for this are complex and mixed, but some factors include the original mills going out of business in the Northeastern USA, adoption of better forestry practices, a reversion of farmland to homesites - which invariably means planting even more trees, and so on.
Indeed, Americans have been catching something of a break as they have planted so many trees that North America would be a net carbon sink, if they didn't also drive so many cars. This picture changes as all the new trees mature and their carbon uptake decreases. But, the important lesson here is that while Americans might be bad about CO2 emissions, they have, in their own way, also showed how areas can be reforested, that were once barren.
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Trees don't remove CO2 from the atmosphere in any permanant way.
Half the CO2 the take in during the day is put back out at night, and the rotting foliage put it's CO2 back into the air.
That said, it's not like planting trees in the US will compensate for the rainforest's loss. Thats like saying poking holes in your body make up for the loss of your lungs.
Re:North American Reforestation. (Score:5, Informative)
Trees don't remove CO2 from the atmosphere in any permanant way.
If you go from 0 trees, to 1 tree that you replant every time the old one dies then you have removed 1 trees worth of carbon from the air as long as you keep a tree growing.
If you go from 0 trees to 1 tree that you harvest every time it is fully grown and use the wood in building a house or some other permanent structure and keep replanting that tree every 10-15 years then you are removing 1 tree's worth of carbon from the atmosphere every 10-15 years.
It is only if you plant a tree and let it die and decompose and plant no additional trees that your example holds.
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If you go from 0 trees to 1 tree that you harvest every time it is fully grown and use the wood in building a house or some other permanent structure and keep replanting that tree every 10-15 years then you are removing 1 tree's worth of carbon from the atmosphere every 10-15 years.
Yea, but every time you take a tree, you don't restore the nutrients in the ground. So its unlikely the cycle will continue to be 10-15 years. It will grow to be longer and longer as it takes more time to replenish the nitrogen in the ground.
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That said, it's not like planting trees in the US will compensate for the rainforest's loss. Thats like saying poking holes in your body make up for the loss of your lungs.
Planting trees in the USA could compensate for the rainforest loss, if we did indeed plant enough. This would be a massive terraforming project in the Southwestern USA, for sure, but, it certainly could be done.
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That said, it's not like planting trees in the US will compensate for the rainforest's loss. Thats like saying poking holes in your body make up for the loss of your lungs.
That's a dumb metaphor and you should know it. It's a modest compensation. It's more like losing a million bucks, then getting a few tens of thousands of it back. It's replacing some part of what is lost.
As an aside, I wonder how much reforestation goes on in the tropics. As far as I know, there isn't a lot of deliberate reforestation, but there is a bit of letting the land go back to jungle.
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It is interesting to drive through certain areas in the northwest US and see entire forests which were clear cut a few decades ago but were replanted and now look just like a fully-grown forest (however you define that).
Oregon (Score:5, Interesting)
We have more trees here in Oregon now than were here 100 years ago or even 200 years ago. (Unlike nature, we don't let forest fires burn them down.)
We plant them all over the place and take care of them. Every time we cut one tree down, we plant 3 to 10 more of them.
We really are not deforested to the west of the Mississippi. Now east of the Mississippi is a different story. But no one is talking about deforestation on the east coast. They only talk about it out west where we have plenty of trees to go around.
School kids went out 30 years ago on filed trips here in Oregon to plant trees. Why? As a reminder that most of the income in this state came from logging, and that timber was a renewable resource. If we plant trees today, then in 20 years when you are old enough to work a timber job, there will be plenty of trees to cut down.
I live in a county that has been devastated by the loss of 80% of the logging industry. We have as many trees now as we had 30 years ago. The only difference is we have 15% unemployment and we can't cut and replant trees to actually make a living.
Earth first -- we will log the rest of the planets later
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I'd say east of the Mississippi is pretty heavily forested too. I can't help but wonder how much carbon dioxide is being removed from the atmosphere because of forests. I wonder if there are any metrics because it seems like any news posted about the environment is invariably negative.
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Forests don't remove as much as you might think--although it is significant for above the surface, most of the work is actually done by sea life as I understand it.
Re:Oregon (Score:5, Insightful)
"The only difference is we have 15% unemployment and we can't cut and replant trees to actually make a living"
what does that mean?
Also, forest fires don't burn down forests.
"Every time we cut one tree down, we plant 3 to 10 more of them."
Cite needed.
"They only talk about it out west where we have plenty of trees to go around."
there is a reason for that, it's called 'shifting baseline'. Basically it mean that people who grow up where there aren't trees have no reference to go by to realize there should be trees.
In Oregon people cans ee the fantastic forests, and when they start to diminish they say something.
Careful citing logging industry stats, they ahve a tendency to be massively incorrect.
For example, According to the Labor dept.there are only about 8000 worker in the logging industry, but they would have you believe there are 100K +.
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Another interesting point, a vast majority of loggers have been removed by the logging industry itself by optimizing them out through automation. While the price of wood keeps going up, they keep trimming work practices to improve their margins.
If anyone really cared about putting loggers to work, they would found a company that used selective logging as opposed to creating the giant swaths of clear-cutting you see throughout Washington just outside the shallow strip of trees they leave beside the road. (j
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Actually, speaking from my own life here in Oregon, there are so many complexities to this issue.
I once truly believed we should stop clear-cutting and only allow select cut. I still do to some extent, but then the question becomes where do we sell that wood? The forestry industry has changed their cutting and added more machines and less men not just because of the cost (including liability, which is HUGE) but also to be able to compete with cheap lumber from around the world.
Then you go to Coos Bay and
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Really depends on where you're doing it. I worked for a while with a lumberjack from the Minnesota/Wisconsin area. He said most of the cutting they did around there was selective cutting by individuals.
A fair amount of timber still comes out of private woodlots where owners have trees cut in stages every few years so that they have a steadier cash flow than if they just clear cut it.
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What does it mean?
It means that when the big "spotted owl" controversy of the early 90's happened and the temporary injunctions on logging went into place, logging stopped and mills shut down.
If the mills had not shut down and went out of business due to the lack of trees and those mills were still in place, we would have an unemployment rate down below 5%.
I am going to college to improve my skills. Almost everyone else there over the age of 30 is someone who has lost their job due to layoffs in the logging
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And there's people who use toothpicks, too. Shouldn't they also count as employees of the logging industry?
Hey, whatever boosts your stats or makes a pretty picture, I'm all for it. Real numbers are for pussies.
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--Also, forest fires don't burn down forests.--
Yeah, smoking bears with guns do.
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When people start talking about some kind of "total trees then and now" figure, let's not even get near a debate on the difference between an old growth forest and a one species tree farm. It would just get everybody upset.
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Actually under Carbon Emissions restrictions passed in Europe, coal burning plants are burning wood pellets that are seen as carbon neutral. Many of the wood pellets burned in Europe come from the SouthEast US. The author of the BBC article I was reading this in wondered how long the united states will continue to ship wood pellets to Europe when it enacts its own Cap and Trade restrictions.
The wood pellets can be made from young or old trees, sawdust, trimmings, scraps, wood pulp, anything.
Likewise China h
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Well, it helps that Oregon has rain 60% of the time throughout the year. In California the state has to do controlled burning to limit the damage a wildfire might cause. Plus Oregon's heavy rain system makes it easier to grow plants there; the only other place I've seen that has the same capacity have been the Hawaiian islands. Those benefit from frequent rai
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Actually, a lot of the area east of the Mississippi is doing pretty well on that front as well. Thanks in no small part to the conservationist types and Teddy Roosevelt, while most of the old growth forests are gone, a lot of new forests have grown up. For instance, New England went from almost completely forested to 30% forested, and is now 80% forested.
Pre-Logging Industry Maps (Score:4, Informative)
Not from a satellites, but there are some maps. For example: http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/nercNORTHAMERICA.html [ornl.gov]
Note the complete lack of forests over most of NA about 15,000 years ago.
or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Interior_Seaway [wikipedia.org]
Not much forest under the ocean bits.
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Not much forest under the ocean bits.
Kelp forest [wikipedia.org]
Demoed? (Score:2, Informative)
fwarren: I believe fighting natural forest fires has proven to be policy error. For a citation please see the burning of Custer State Park. There are no more Smokey the Bear commercials because forest fires are actually necessary to prevent catastrophic fires. From what I remember reading, the 40+ years of Smokey the Bear campaigning, and fire fighting left MILLIONS of tons of fuel in the form of old dead timber.
I guess I'm just t
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I did not say it was a good thing, I was merely siting it as a factor in why we have more trees.
I believe the longer we go not cutting down trees, and clearing underbrush and just letting forests grow and grow doing everything we can to keep from letting them burn. We should be able to log and remove old dead growth. We are just making sure that eventually we will have a forest fire so big we won't be able to stop it.
People in the timber industry want to cut down trees now (and remove the old dead ones) AND
The evidence has been there all along (Score:2)
I can recall using Google Earth shortly after it was first released to zoom around the earth, randomly poking at it with a stick. I was looking for anything that seemed to stand out, and I found quite a number of unique things in those days: weird geologic features in Brunei/Sarawak, the salt flats in the Andes, the gold/minerals rush in the Atacama desert.
One of them was obvious overhead evidence of clear-cutting in southwest Australia. I've always had a silent fantasy about moving to Australia, believin
We can fix this! (Score:4, Funny)
Breathless summary (Score:2)
The summary gets a little carried away. Google is basically offering cheap (or free) satellite imagery combined with cheap access to existing software and computing power. It's a good, socially responsible project on Google's part, but it's not the breakthrough in image processing that the summary implies.
"It's interesting to contemplate the implications for intelligence gathering of Google's automated tools to compare satellite photos."
The people who do serious, large scale, satellite intelligence gather
Stop using trees for paper - use hemp! (Score:2, Insightful)
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Seriously, we want to slow down deforestation? Stop using trees for paper products. The US needs to get over their high and mighty "We can't use hemp because its taboo" crap.
I was going to reply with a highly sarcastic rebuttal, but closer inspection shows that you may be right.
Wikipedia reckons hemp grows at 'up to' 25 tonnes/hectare/year of dry above ground matter. This [greenwoodresources.com] gives 'up to' 13 tonnes/hectare/year for fancy 'high yield' hybrid poplar, intended for papermaking.
There is a huge amount of wiggle room with those figures, 'up to' is often meaningless (I'm going to give you 'up to' 100 billion dollars) and both sources are doubtless from organisations trying to promote thei
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It is outside of the U.S. where the logging industry doesn't follow this model. And often it isnt for the trees themselves, but for the land they are covering.
So I don't see how the U.S. using hemp for paper is going to have much of an affect.
There's more to the story (Score:3, Interesting)
Just as long as people keep in mind that satellite photos don't always tell the whole story. A team of Canadian scientists went north recently in an ice breaker. Satellite imagery indicted that the pack ice had expanded rather than contracted, which was totally at odds with Global Warming models.
What they found when they actually got to the location where the satellites indicated the pack ice started, it wasn't there. It had retreated more than a hundred miles beyond where it was thought to be. The satellite cameras had been looking at a slurry of rotted ice fragments that were so broken up the ship just blasted through them at full speed without even noticing it.
Basically, the reality on the ground was very different from what appeared to be happening on cameras located a few miles overhead.
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That is easy for Google Earth in South America. Most of the sat maps on Google earth are well over 10 years old. For example, my office building does not show on Google earth, and it is at least 7 years old, the mall across the street is over 10 years old and missing. The place where my house (and 100 other houses now stand), is also just a field. That is just the high resolution urban areas. The rural areas have even older and less detailed sat images. It is like they bought the discount cold war images.
Th
And another thing... (Score:2)
If you update/install Google Earth, you're also going to get a semi-stealth install of the Chrome browser to go along with it...whether you like it or not. The first time I noticed Google was trying to shove Chrome down my throat was AFTER I'd already initiated an update installation of GE.
So be warned...if you don't want a little something extra with GE, you'd better skip this update.
I hope this extends back 1000 years (Score:2)
Because it is only by doing that that we will get an accurate picture of where we are at now,
and how significant any further changes one way or the other are.
For example, I'd guess three quarters of the UK, continental Europe, and the Americas were forested at
that time, with the remainder being grasslands and mountaintops.
The challenge of global environmental issues is that they are enormous in both geography
and time, and both of those scale problems make them difficult for us to plan for, understand
economi
wtf??!! (Score:2)
Citation (Score:2)
I can't wait... (Score:2)
There was an argument that started way back when deforestation was first discovered.
The fact that north america was quick to judge all other on going countries with deforestation problems
yet not really talking about their past deforestation leading them to dissolve most of their own plant population.
Some even went so far to say, who is USA to talk about Brazil, when Brazil could benefit from the sale of wood and lumber
and become a richer country for it, equal to the US. However, after hearing this debate, I
(N.) America vs Global (Score:2)
I know this is slashdot, but the vast majority of posts so far are elaborate arguments about trees in the US, which is completely missing the point. Forest [...]swaths the size of Panama are lost each and every year. [nationalgeographic.com] Most posts therefore are mere red herrings. IOW, the world / the climate does not care much about Oregon.
There's a lot more to deforestation than that: Fast Facts about Deforestation and Quick Actions to Prevent Deforestation [facingthefuture.org]
You might not be as right as you think (Score:4, Interesting)
Depending on your timeframe.
Forests covered about half the land before settlement, now about a third.
But the amount of forests have been going up in the last decade. One reason is because most of the forests belong to the evil logging industry, and they have an economic incentive to expand forestation if they want to expand their businesses. Today we have about as much forest as we did 100 years ago.
The advent of the automobile and other forms of transport, plus better farming techniques, also helped spread the forests, since we don't need so much land dedicated to feeding us and our livestock.
Re:You might not be as right as you think (Score:4, Insightful)
Genetically modified, fast-growing hardwood cash-crops do not equal "forest".
The things the evil logging industry (your words) wants to call "forests" do not allow for insignificant elements like wildlife, forest floor or wetlands. They are no more "forests" than cornfields are prairies.
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wait wait wait. If the paper industry needs wood, why not let them plant and reap that crop. same for the lumber industry, this way over time more and more virgin forest is left alone until one point the only crop they are harvesting is their own.
in reference to GM Woods, your right it's not a forest, it's a crop. and if you follow that crop ( which is some of the hardest data to get due to eco - terrorist burning down planted fields ), you'll find the creation of some interesting trees ( I am waiting for t
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The problem is when people try to call a tree farm a forest, as the GGP did. A forest is a lot more than a bunch of trees.
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I am waiting for the 8' diameter tree with a height of 20 feet gown in 10 years to be published )
No GMO necessary, it already exists... it is called Eucalyptus, and some species will reach those dimensions in rather less than 10 years in the right climate. It is nowadays grown in vast quantities for paper and construction (although for construction they drown it in poison after harvest because most wood-eating insects seem to think it's delicious.) I live in an area of Brazil that used to be rainforest of which now only patches are left, the rest is all eucalyptus plantations owned by one large paper
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I don't disagree that the forest industry is necessary, but to claim that a replanted forest has anything even close to resembling the wildlife and diversity of an old-growth forest is plain idiotic.
Signed, a former forestry worker
Re:You might not be as right as you think (Score:4, Insightful)
Err, GM trees? I can grok the existence of GM food crops, but somehow I'm not seeing trees as being that easily modified on a commercial scale (mostly because it takes so damned long to grow them and test the results by comparison).
Now selective 'breeding' and grafting, okay - but to be honest, both would barely qualify for the moniker "genetically modified" - Hell, Dachshunds would be better suited to the term "GM" than a selectively-bred Douglas Firs would).
If you have evidence of actual GM trees being sown and grown commercially, I'd be interested to find out where.
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They're going to apply GM methodologies to trees just like food, because it is very profitable.
The paper and lumber industry wants fast growing trees of uniform dimension, with blemishes from blight or sickness. GM methodologies deliver that. The trees become much easier to factory harvest. The trees all reach maturity at the same time. The mill gets set up to chop up everything to the same dimensions. The experts that determine how a particular log will be cut to get the most value from it are no long
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Hmm.. then whats the problem with GM trees? I can really see the issue with corn though which IS highly GM and fed to us and burned in everything imaginable. Yuck, cheese made from corn oil and a tiny amount of milk. US housing built from spf and has always been fast growing. Paper, I am not sure, but cutting down trees in Brazil to make cane fields is way bad.
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The paper and lumber industry wants fast growing trees of uniform dimension, with blemishes from blight or sickness. GM methodologies deliver that. The trees become much easier to factory harvest. The trees all reach maturity at the same time.
What? I think you misunderstand GM.
What you have stated - uniform growing, lack of blemishes, etc. - are all achievable through hybridization and selective breeding and whatnot, which humans have been doing for thousands of years. For example, the tomatoes you buy at the grocery store have been modified this way over the centuries to provide fruits of better yield, hardiness, and even color.
While technically hybridization is "genetic modification," when people talk about GM foods they specifically mean arti
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Your cite talks about trials and R&D, but nothing in place now (GP was claiming that the lumber industry was using GM trees commercially now).
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...somehow I'm not seeing trees as being that easily modified on a commercial scale (mostly because it takes so damned long to grow them and test the results by comparison).
I don't know much about plant science, but I would assume they could measure sprout growth speeds in a reasonable time span. They're also likely able to apply lessons learned in faster-growing plants, like corn, to trees.
I think it's a given that auxins = plants grow. I would bet that a tree engineered to express more of auxin-whatever near the shoot apical meristem would grow faster. Get that strain in however, and plant it next to a normal tree and in a month you should have a pretty good answer. May
They are better than "Forests" for global warming (Score:4, Insightful)
Lots of fast-growing trees suck up more CO2 than ancient forests.
But they are the forest industry, so they must be evil.
FYI (Score:2)
The carbon is only sequestered as long as the tree is alive.
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Yes, but not if you chop down the ancient forest to do it. The new forest merely re-absorbs the CO2 released from chopping down the forest in the first place. But I can imagine some industry promoting this as a green initiative. Chop down trees, bury them, and grow new ones as a means of sequestering carbon.
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But they are the forest industry, so they must be evil.
Not per se, but the key is sustainability, and despite improvements - as others pointed out, many players in the timber industry don't want to destroy their resources completely - the industry is not acting responsibly:
"But the timber industry's Sustainable Forestry Initiative does not protect forests or deliver credible assurances. The SFI condones environmentally harmful practices including large-scale clearcutting and chemical use, logging of old
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Depends on a lot of factors. For instance, the state of Oregon requires that a certain minimum number of trees be replanted after logging [ct.gov] - even the "least productive areas" (their term) requires that a minimum of 100 tree seedlings per acre be replanted for every acre of logging... IMHO that's likely more than enough to cover the far smaller number of mature trees that had been cut down. They have to replant within a year of logging, and have to insure that by the fifth year, the seedlings must all be "hea
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Deforestation is mostly taking place in the rain forests. Hell tree farms were started 100 years ago. The rain forests are where most of the trees are. The oceans are also high on the list of not absorbing as much CO2 as in the past.
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Re:You might not be as right as you think (Score:5, Funny)
Can you explain the massive deforestation evident from satellite imagery in South America? Huge swaths of land that used to be rainforest are now used for grazing cattle and soybean/palm oil farms.
The satellite deforestation record doesn't completely match up with the surface deforestation record, so both of them are suspect. Plus, ten years ago, a scientist made an error on a non-peer-reviewed graph that was later used as the cover of a report on deforestation.
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http://www.google.com/search?q=south+america+deforestation [google.com]
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Just fyi, she's being subtly sarcastic in parodying the arguments of the anti-AGW crowd.
(sorry for ruining the joke)
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Especially when the same posts in a GW article would have been made with no irony at all.
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Yes we have a lot more forests because of the automobile, you have 1 forest, so you need to put a street through it and now you have 2 forests, make a cross street and you now have 4 forests. Where I live, we have a whole jungle already.
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100 years ago, we didn't have the massive amount of carbon emissions we have today - from coal burning, oil/gas, mining, and
construction (cement production is a significant CO2 emitter).
If we are going to rely on trees as a source of carbon sequestration, we'll need a hell of a lot more than we've probably ever had
in human history.
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I can tell you that the tree farms I have seen (northern Florida, and southern Georgia) are nothing but endless rows of fast growing pine, with absolutely nothing else. The real forests down there are so dense that during the summer you can't see but a few feet into them, and good luck trying to walk through it without a machete or a trail. I'm sorry but a tree farm is not a forest in any sense of the word.
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Never went flying in a small plane have you?
Your suburbs are an insignificant pimple on the face of the Earth.
They are darned ugly from the air, though.
On the flip side from suburbs (Score:3, Insightful)
Extremely large swaths of land have been turned back to forests because they are no longer needed to grow crops to feed us and our livestock.
Urbanization is only about three percent of the US area, while farmland is a lot more, yet continually shrinking.
There are multiple factors, http://www.nationalatlas.gov/articles/biology/a_forest.html [nationalatlas.gov]
"The forest cover in the U.S. has actually increased in the last 100 years - mostly due to farm abandonment in the East and fire suppression in the West."
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Actually, it was just a wasteland of trees that needed to be removed to reveal the view ;^)
I hate alarmists. (Score:2)
But single-species tree cultivation is not forest! Not even close. It's cultivation which does not tolerate all the other aspects of a forest ecosystem. You can't really compare commercially farmed trees to an actual forest. It's disingenuous.
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Suburbia mostly gobbles up farmland.
Farmland just happens to be great for building on. If a state is settled enough to be more than just a "glorified territory" then the prime land that someone like you would claim as forest would likely already be very well established farmland. Some enterprising young chap 100 or 200 years ago would have already gotten rid of the trees.
Suburbia cuts into agriculture, not "nature".
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Not in Washington or Hawaii, and you're only 25% right in Utah.