How Are Those Carbon Credits Working Out?

I hope that all of the True Blue readers have been keeping up with the saga of the man-caused global warming fraud that was recently exposed. The main stream news people have been going on as if nothing has changed, and some in our Congress want to go after the whistle blowers. I have been watching the global warming hysteria with interest since it began because it affects the forestry profession. Twenty years ago I heard a presenter tell us that in fifty years, we would be growing mesquite in Illinois. We are almost halfway there, and I haven't heard any rumors of mesquite creeping north. If you are not alarmed by what is going on , watch the video above. The man asking questions at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference is a reporter with credentials to be in this meeting. He is shut down, ultimately by an armed guard so as not to embarass a global warming proseletyzer from Stanford University. It appears that the UN intends to cram carbon regulation down our throats by whatever means is necessary to line the pockets of the world's tyrants.

The Society of American Foresters has been blowing the bugle for man-caused global warming, too, and I am not alone in saying that the leaders in SAF have damaged the credibility of that organization. The leaders of SAF are deeply involved with universities and the US Forest Service, and government grants for research dollars have tempted the SAF away from common sense and sound science. There are many good reasons to grow trees, but I know that I can't change the world's climate by locking up carbon in timber. Trees are temporary, no matter how large and majestic they may grow. We can't come up with magical formulas to make forests "Sustainable." You can't cut more than you grow; it's that simple. The site, the weather, and the type of forest that grows there will determine how much is produced and the rotation schedule.

You might lock away carbon if you bury wood deep underground. This tree which was recently exposed may have been buried hundreds or thousands of years ago. Spruce logs are sometimes unearthed in glacial lakebeds in southern Illinois, buried in glacial outwash ten thousand or more years ago. The carbon in those trees may still be locked up, but on a geological time scale, it is just an interesting footnote.



Eventually the carbon based molecules will be displaced, and the wood will either rot or be replaced by stone. The logs in this petrified forest were buried in sediments, then eventually uplifted and exposed by erosion in a desert totally alien to the environment they grew in; and all that climate change happened before we came along.