I'm glad rainforests are finally being remembered! I have been trying to remind people of their importance for years. They were the "trendy cause" a few years back and then were essentially forgotten in the public's eye. I have been tyring to get people to take any kind of action to bring that issue back in to the spotlight. No issue is even close to being as critical. I'm sorry to say, but in comparison, polar bears are meaningless. The Amazon is the last remaing large rainforest area left. People seem to not understand the actual value of this forest in regard to its elemental contribution.Consider these facts:
If deforestation continues at current rates, scientists estimate nearly 80 to 90 percent of tropical rainforest ecosystems will be destroyed by the year 2020. This destruction is the main force driving a species extinction rate unmatched in 65 million years.Once a vast sea of tropical forest, the Amazon rainforest today is scarred by roads, farms, ranches, and dams. Brazil is gifted with a full third of the world's remaining rainforests; unfortunately, it is also one of the world's great rainforest destroyers, burning or felling more than 2.7 million acres each year. More than 20 percent of rainforest in the Amazon has been razed and is gone forever. This ocean of green, nearly as large as Australia, is the last great rainforest in the known universe and it is being decimated like the others before it. Why? Like other rainforests already lost forever, the land is being cleared for logging timber, large-scale cattle ranching, mining operations, government road building and hydroelectric schemes, military operations, and the subsistence agriculture of peasants and landless settlers. Sadder still, in many places the rainforests are burnt simply to provide charcoal to power industrial plants in the area.
A single pond in Brazil can sustain a greater variety of fish than is found in all of Europe's rivers.
A 25-acre plot of rainforest in Borneo may contain more than 700 species of trees - a number equal to the total tree diversity of North America.
A single rainforest reserve in Peru is home to more species of birds than are found in the entire United States.
One single tree in Peru was found to harbor forty-three different species of ants - a total that approximates the entire number of ant species in the British Isles.
The number of species of fish in the Amazon exceeds the number found in the entire Atlantic Ocean. It produces 20% of earths oxygen. It holds 1/4 of the freshwater.Experts estimate that we are losing 137 plant, animal and insect species every single day due to rainforest deforestation. That equates to 50,000 species a year.In 1950, about 15 percent of the Earth's land surface was covered by rainforest. Today, more than half has already gone up in smoke. In fewer than fifty years, more than half of the world's tropical rainforests have fallen victim to fire and the chain saw, and the rate of destruction is still accelerating. Unbelievably, more than 200,000 acres of rainforest are burned every day. That is more than 150 acres lost every minute of every day, and 78 million acres lost every year!1.5 acres PER SECOND! More than 40 percent of the Amazon rainforest is already gone, and much more is severely threatened as the destruction continues. It is estimated that the Amazon alone is vanishing at a rate of 20,000 square miles a year. If nothing is done to curb this trend, the entire Amazon will be gone within 30 years.(sea levels will not have risen one half inch in that time, yet that is what is being worried about...) As the rainforest species disappear, so do many possible cures for life-threatening diseases. Currently, 121 prescription drugs sold worldwide come from plant-derived sources. While 25% of Western pharmaceuticals are derived from rainforest ingredients, less that 1% of these tropical trees and plants have been tested by scientists.The U.S. National Cancer Institute has identified 3000 plants that are active against cancer cells. 70% of these plants are found in the rainforest. Twenty-five percent of the active ingredients in today's cancer-fighting drugs come from organisms found only in the rainforest.More than half of the world's estimated 10 million species of plants, animals and insects live in the tropical rainforests. One-fifth of the world's fresh water is in the Amazon Basin.One hectare (2.47 acres) may contain over 750 types of trees and 1500 species of higher plants.
But who is really to blame? Consider what we industrialized Americans have done to our own homeland. We converted 90 percent of North America's virgin forests into firewood, shingles, furniture, railroad ties, and paper. Other industrialized countries have done no better. Malaysia, Indonesia, Brazil, and other tropical countries with rainforests are often branded as "environmental villains" of the world, mainly because of their reported levels of destruction of their rainforests. But despite the levels of deforestation, up to 60 percent of their territory is still covered by natural tropical forests. In fact, today, much of the pressures on their remaining rainforests comes from servicing the needs and markets for wood products in industrialized countries that have already depleted their own natural resources. Industrial countries would not be buying rainforest hardwoods and timber had we not cut down our own trees long ago, nor would poachers in the Amazon jungle be slaughtering jaguar, ocelot, caiman, and otter if we did not provide lucrative markets for their skins in Berlin, Paris, and Tokyo.
Logging concessions in the Amazon are sold for as little as $2 per acre, with logging companies felling timber worth thousands of dollars per acre. Governments are selling their natural resources, hawking for pennies resources that soon will be worth billions of dollars. Some of these government concessions and land deals made with industrialists make the sale of Manhattan for $24 worth of trinkets look shrewd. In 1986 a huge industrial timber corporation bought thousands of acres in the Borneo rainforest by giving 2,000 Malaysian dollars to twelve longhouses of local tribes. This sum amounted to the price of two bottles of beer for each member of the community. Since then, this company and others have managed to extract and destroy about a third of the Borneo rainforest - about 6.9 million acres - and the local tribes have been evicted from the area or forced to work for the logging companies at slave wages.
Fuel Wood and the Paper Industry
In addition to being logged for exportation, rainforest wood stays in developing countries for fuel wood and charcoal. One single steel plant in Brazil making steel for Japanese cars needs millions of tons of wood each year to produce charcoal that can be used in the manufacture of steel. Then, there is the paper industry.
One pulpwood project in the Brazilian Amazon consists of a Japanese power plant and pulp mill. To set up this single plant operation, 5,600 square miles of Amazon rainforest were burned to the ground and replanted with pulpwood trees. This single manufacturing plant consumes 2,000 tons of surrounding rainforest wood every day to produce 55 megawatts of electricity to run the plant. The plant, which has been in operation since 1978, produces more than 750 tons of pulp for paper every 24 hours, worth approximately $500,000, and has built 2,800 miles of roads through the Amazon rainforest to be used by its 700 vehicles.Not to mention the huge quantities of CO2 emitted from these low tech plants. In addition to this pulp mill, the world's biggest pulp mill is the Aracruz mill in Brazil. Its two units produce 1 million tons of pulp a year, harvesting the rainforest to keep the plant in business and displacing thousands of indigenous tribes. Where does all this pulp go? Aracruz's biggest customers are the United States, Belgium, Great Britain, and Japan. More and more rainforest is destroyed to meet the demands of the developed world's paper industry, which requires a staggering 200 million tons of wood each year simply to make paper. If the present rate continues, it is estimated that the paper industry alone will consume 4 billion tons of wood annually by the year 2020.
Once an area of rainforest has been logged, even if it is given the rare chance to regrow, it can never become what it once was. The intricate ecosystem nature devised is lost forever. Only 1 to 2 percent of light at the top of a rainforest canopy manages to reach the forest floor below. Most times when timber is harvested, trees and other plants that have evolved over centuries to grow in the dark, humid environment below the canopy simply cannot live out in the open, and as a result, the plants and animals (that depend on the plants) of the original forest become extinct Even if only sections of land throughout an area are destroyed, these remnants change drastically. Birds and other animals cannot cross from one remnant of land to another in the canopy, so plants are not pollinated, seeds are not dispersed by the animals, and the plants around the edges are not surrounded by the high jungle humidity they need to grow properly. As a result, the remnants slowly become degraded and die. Rains come and wash away the thin topsoil that was previously protected by the canopy, and this barren, infertile land is vulnerable to erosion. As the demand in the Western world for cheap meat increases, more and more rainforests are destroyed to provide grazing land for animals. In Brazil alone, there are an estimated 220 million head of cattle, 20 million goats, 60 million pigs, and 700 million chickens. Most of Central and Latin America's tropical and temperate rainforests have been lost to cattle operations to meet the world demand, and still the cattle operations continue to move southward into the heart of the South American rainforests. To graze one steer in Amazonia takes two full acres. Most of the ranchers in the Amazon operate at a loss, yielding only paper profits purely as tax shelters. Ranchers' fortunes are made only when ranching is supported by government giveaways. A banker or rich landowner in Brazil can slash and burn a huge tract of land in the Amazon rainforest, seed it with grass for cattle, and realize millions of dollars worth of government-subsidized loans, tax credits, and write-offs in return for developing the land. These government development schemes rarely make a profit, as they are actually selling cheap beef to industrialized nations. One single cattle operation in Brazil that was co-owned by British Barclays Bank and one of Brazil's wealthiest families was responsible for the destruction of almost 500,000 acres of virgin rainforest. The cattle operation never made a profit, but government write-offs sheltered huge logging profits earned off of logging other land in the Brazilian rainforest owned by the same investors. These generous tax and credit incentives have created more than 29 million acres of large cattle ranches in the Brazilian Amazon, even though the typical ranch could cover less than half its costs without these subsidies. Even these grazing lands don't last forever. Soon the lack of nutrients in the soil and overgrazing degrade them, and they are abandoned for newly cleared land. In Brazil alone, more than 63,000 square miles of land has reportedly been abandoned in this way.
Directly and indirectly, the leading threats to rainforest ecosystems are governments and their unbridled, unplanned, and uncoordinated development of natural resources. The 2000-2001 World Resources Report put out by the United Nations reported that governments worldwide spend $700 billion dollars a year supporting and subsidizing environmentally unsound practices in the use of water, agriculture, energy, and transportation.
There is a clear need for industrial countries to sincerely and effectively assist the tropics in a quest for sustainable forest management and development if the remaining rainforests are to be saved. The governments of these developing countries need help in learning how to manage and protect their natural resources for long-term profits, while still managing to service their debts, and they must be given the incentives and tools to do so. Programs to redefine the timber concessions so concessionaires have greater incentives to guard the long-term health of the forest and programs to revive and expand community-based forestry schemes, which ensure more rational use of forests and a better life for the people who live near them, must be developed.
First-World capital must seek out opportunities to partner with organizations that have the technical expertise to guide these programs of sustainable economic development. In addition, programs teaching techniques for sustainable harvesting practices and identifying profitable, yet sustainable, forest products can enable developing countries to improve the standard of living for their people, service national debt, and contribute meaningfully to land use planning and conservation of natural resources.
I won't post more- you can find it online.Just know this. If the US and EU dedicated themselves to assisting the S. American countries involved by setting up sustainable harvest and maintenance practices, sustainable and productive agriculture (used for FOOD NOT ETHANOL!) and removed the markets for exotic products like woods, etc., the cutting would halt in 5 years. Or do nothing and it will be gone before your grandkids are driving.I have not even mentioned the catastrophic effects predicted from a new desertified continent...(erosion, heat absorption,co2 production....) If you are not actively writing letters, making calls to your reps and "green" orgs , cutting back on paper use enormously , acctively supporting alternative industries like hemp and bamboo and making sure you know and boycott all unsustainable imports from that area and you have the gaul to say you care about global warming, then you a sad excuse for an advocate. GET ON IT!

Sorry, Did we jump you so hard in the last thread that it bounced you all the way here? :?:

Nobody is saying that 'Rainforest'....'deforestation' wasn't a problem...on top of 'global warming' it's making an even bigger mess...worse... <_<

Nobody is saying that the climate and weather doesn't move in cycles that affect the planet...what we DO say is that 'global warming' makes these cycles MORE severe...as for those disappearing rainforests...manufacture of 'charcoal' is ADDING more ghg emissions into the air...so it's ANOTHER MANMADE addition to 'global warming'...just wait until all of those new farmers on 'deforestated' lands ALL want fossil fuel vehicles to move their crops and livestock...there's a BIGGER carbon footprint from South America! :!:

How far do you think use of 'hemp' is going to fly in a society that is afraid of 'drugs'?...the entire reason 'hemp' was eliminated was because of an irrational fear that industrial 'hemp' fields would be used to hide 'cannabis' plants as a 'secret' cash crop...ask Kentucky about that...during WWII they grew tons of 'industrial' hemp...NOT now... :Y:

You want us to ratify and support you views without even considering ours...that's the BU$H--GOP--Neocon way of thinking...you won't even come halfway across the bridge to meet us...but you want us to sprint the whole length of that bridge to confirm your opinions...Does THAT sound FAIR to you? :?:

Newsmax.com - Global Warming? New Data Shows Ice Is Back 02/19/2008 03:40 PM
http://www.newsmax.com/insidecover/global_...2/19/73798.html Page 1 of 2
Newsfront
Global Warming? New Data Shows Ice Is Back
Tuesday, February 19, 2008 11:55 AM
By: Phil Brennan
Are the world's ice caps melting because of climate change, or are the reports just a lot of scare mongering by the
advocates of the global warming theory?
Scare mongering appears to be the case, according to reports from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) that reveal that almost all the allegedly “lost” ice has come back. A NOAA report shows
that ice levels which had shrunk from 5 million square miles in January 2007 to just 1.5 million square miles in
October, are almost back to their original levels.
Moreover, a Feb. 18 report in the London Daily Express showed that there is nearly a third more ice in
Antarctica than usual, challenging the global warming crusaders and buttressing arguments of skeptics who deny
that the world is undergoing global warming.
The Daily express recalls the photograph of polar bears clinging on to a melting iceberg which has been widely
hailed as proof of the need to fight climate change and has been used by former Vice President Al Gore during
his "Inconvenient Truth" lectures about mankind’s alleged impact on the global climate.
Gore fails to mention that the photograph was taken in the month of August when melting is normal. Or that the
polar bear population has soared in recent years.
As winter roars in across the Northern Hemisphere, Mother Nature seems to have joined the ranks of the
skeptics.
As the Express notes, scientists are saying the northern Hemisphere has endured its coldest winter in decades,
adding that snow cover across the area is at its greatest since 1966. The newspaper cites the one exception —
Western Europe, which had, until the weekend when temperatures plunged to as low as -10 C in some places,
been basking in unseasonably warm weather.
Around the world, vast areas have been buried under some of the heaviest snowfalls in decades. Central and
southern China, the United States, and Canada were hit hard by snowstorms. In China, snowfall was so heavy
that over 100,000 houses collapsed under the weight of snow.
Jerusalem, Damascus, Amman, and northern Saudi Arabia report the heaviest falls in years and below-zero
temperatures. In Afghanistan, snow and freezing weather killed 120 people. Even Baghdad had a snowstorm, the
first in the memory of most residents.
AFP news reports icy temperatures have just swept through south China, stranding 180,000 people and leading
to widespread power cuts just as the area was recovering from the worst weather in 50 years, the government saidNewsmax.com - Global Warming? New Data Shows Ice Is Back struck by heavy snowfalls since Thursday, a government official from the provincial disaster relief office told
AFP.
Twelve people have died there, state Xinhua news agency reported, and four remained missing as of Saturday.
An ongoing record-long spell of cold weather in Vietnam's northern region, which started on Jan. 14, has killed
nearly 60,000 cattle, mainly bull and buffalo calves, local press reported Monday. By Feb. 17, the spell had
killed a total of 59,962 cattle in the region, including 7,349 in the Ha Giang province, 6,400 in Lao Cai, and
5,571 in Bac Can province, said Hoang Kim Giao, director of the Animal Husbandry Department under the
Vietnamese Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, according to the Pioneer newspaper.
In Britain the temperatures plunged to -10 C in central England, according to the Express, which reports that
experts say that February could end up as one of the coldest in Britain in the past 10 years with the freezing
night-time conditions expected to stay around a frigid -8 C until at least the middle of the week. And the BBC
reports that a bus company's efforts to cut global warming emissions have led to services being disrupted by cold
weather.
Meanwhile Athens News reports that a raging snow storm that blanketed most of Greece over the weekend and
continued into the early morning hours on Monday, plunging the country into sub-zero temperatures. The agency
reported that public transport buses were at a standstill on Monday in the wider Athens area, while ships
remained in ports, public services remained closed, and schools and courthouses in the more severely-stricken
prefectures were also closed.
Scores of villages, mainly on the island of Crete, and in the prefectures of Evia, Argolida, Arcadia, Lakonia,
Viotia, and the Cyclades islands were snowed in.
More than 100 villages were snowed-in on the island of Crete and temperatures in Athens dropped to -6 C before
dawn, while the coldest temperatures were recorded in Kozani, Grevena, Kastoria and Florina, where they
plunged to -12 C.
Temperatures in Athens dropped to -6 C before dawn, while the coldest temperatures were recorded in Kozani,
Grevena, Kastoria and Florina, where they plunged to -12 C.
If global warming gets any worse we'll all freeze to death.
© 2008 Newsmax. All rights reserved.
Monday. The latest cold snap has taken a severe toll in usually temperate Yunnan province, which has been

Using NewsMax as a source is pretty much like quoting the National Enquirer. You'll have to do better than that.

earthmother, this 'troll' is dumping this Newsmax Electronic Toilet Paper all over this forum. Tell him to change the subject and QUIT dumping the same old garbage all over here like the Idiot he is... <_<

earthmother, please tell this 'troll' to quit dumping this NewsMax stating the obvious that it is cold in February in most places Toilet Paper all over this site. If he can't come up with something original then he should be banned!

Since the same Newsmax article was posted elsewhere in two topics by the same person, they have been deleted.

Wolsley2 has been deleted as a member and banned. :banned:

Thanks Earthmother!

Personally, I think I'm done wasting energy debating folks who deny the scientific facts right in front of them. :wacko:

:clap: :clap: :clap: :clap:

Yes, I've lost all patience with them as well. When they're clearly just spouting right-wing crap and not raising questions for open debate, they're toast.

To put some perspective on this I see at the NASA GISS site that globally January was colder (meaning not as much above normal) as it has been, and it was colder than normal in much of Asia and Africa, as well as the strong La Nina in the Pacific. However globally it still is a bit warmer than the longer term average, so we couldn't call this unusually cold. Perhaps just a "blip" back down to near average for a few months?

And yes, most of the ice does usually recover in the Arctic in the winter, though I would wager the perennial ice still is much thinner than it used to be.

That's what this 'troll' fails to understand...so it extrapolates...Well if it ISN'T 90 Degrees in FEBRUARY then 'global warming' MUST BE A MYTH!...If the NORTH POLE isn't COMPLETELY MELTED then the is NO EMERGENCY!...well what this Idiot fails to acknowledge is if we HAD 90 DEGREES in FEBRUARY and MELTED ICE CAPS then we would all be DEAD ALREADY! :mad:

What this troll fails to understand is if we HAD 90 Degree weather in FEBRUARY and MELTED POLAR CAPS then we would be DEAD ALREADY!...so it extrapolates...well FEBRUARY IS STILL COLD so 'global warming' MUST be a MYTH!...Well if the ICE CAPS are NOT MELTED then there is NO EMERGENCY!...no Idiot...THAT is what we are TRYING to PREVENT! :mad: