SOS Forests

Global Warming Is To Blame For Everything

It’s global warming’s fault. No matter what it is, global warming did it. As reported [here]:

Among the items on the list: acne, alligators in Britain’s Thames River, brain-eating amoebas, childhood insomnia, the risk of an asteroid strike, attacks from killer jellyfish, the death of the Loch Ness monster, killer cornflakes, the extinction of salmon, and a change in the tilt of the Earth’s axis.

Also on the list: frogs with extra heads, frostbite, witchcraft executions, traffic jams, UFO sightings, a walrus stampede, an invasion of king crabs, indigestion, short-nosed dogs, and nuclear war.

An outfit called Number Watch has compiled a list of 756 dire outcomes allegedly caused by global warming. But they can’t keep up. Yesterday Science Daily presented #757: Swiss needle cast.

Forests at Risk: Swiss Needle Cast Epidemic in Douglas-Fir Trees Unprecedented, Still Getting Worse

ScienceDaily, Apr. 12, 2010 [here]

The Swiss needle cast epidemic in Douglas-fir forests of the coastal Pacific Northwest is continuing to intensify, appears to be unprecedented over at least the past 100 years, and is probably linked to the extensive planting of Douglas-fir along the coast and a warmer climate, new research concludes.

What warmer climate? The climate in Oregon is the same as it has been for the entire Holocene. If anything, it is COOLER now than it was 6 to 9,000 years ago, albeit by only a degree or two.

Last December we reported [here] that glacial runoff from glaciers along the Gulf of Alaska are enriching near shore marine ecosystems with organic debris. The debris has been carbon-dated and is 2,500 to 7,000 years old.

The evidence strongly suggests that forests existed along the Gulf of Alaska between 2,500 to 7,000 years ago but have been subsequently covered by glaciers. The crushed organic matter from those forests is being expelled by the glaciers there today. From 2,500 to 7,000 years ago the coast of Alaska was warm enough to grow forests. That is not the case today.

Neoglaciation has been occurring for the last 6,000+ years, ever since temperatures started to decline from the Holocene Climatic Optimum, entirely consistent with the decline in solar insolation due to Milankovitch cycles, which peaked ~10,000 years ago.

The Earth has been cooling for 6,000+ years as we head toward another Ice Age, a pattern that has been repeated ~18 times over the last 1.8 million years.

To make matters in Oregon cooler, 2 to 3 years ago the Pacific Decadal Oscillation [here] shifted into its cool phase, bringing cooler water to Oregon’s coast and cooling our weather patterns. Cooler, cooler, cooler cooler.

Hence, therefore, and ergo, it can’t be warmer weather that is causing the Swiss needle cast epidemic, since our weather here is cooler now.

Note: it’s 40 deg F right now. Which is a good thing because it didn’t frost last night on the fruit blossoms. However, we had hard frosts earlier this week and more are expected. Orchardists are smudging from Medford to Hood River.

I have not read the journal article cited in the Science Daily alarmist article above. It is:

Black et al. Impacts of Swiss needle cast on overstory Douglas-fir forests of the western Oregon Coast Range. Forest Ecology and Management, 2010; 259 (8): 1673

I cannot say whether Black et al. blame global warming for the Swiss needle cast epidemic or not, since I have not read the report and I do not trust Science Daily as far as I can spit.

I am very aware, however, that there is also a laminated root rot (Phellinus weirii) epidemic in the Oregon Coast Range. Both Swiss needle cast and laminated root rot are phenomena associated with dense mono-specific stands of Douglas-fir.

Douglas-fir tree farms are not the historical norm. They are outside the “historical range of variation”. For many thousands of years the aboriginal residents kept the Oregon Coast Range in prairie and savanna through the use of anthropogenic fire.

High-density stands of pure Douglas-fir are a modern day aberration, something that has never occurred before, or at least not since the Eemian interglacial of 115,000 years ago.

It could be that when you cover the landscape with one species, certain diseases that were otherwise rare suddenly appear and spread epidemically. It’s happened before. Potato blights, onion blights, wheat rusts, cotton boll weevils, etc. etc. etc. Monocropping breeds mono-specific pest outbreaks. Every farmer in the world knows that. It’s old knowledge, dating back thousands of years.

But Science Daily thinks it’s gloooobal waaaaarming!!!!!! If you damn drivers would only drive horses, maybe the Douglas-fir plantations of Oregon wouldn’t have Swiss needle cast.

If only Chairman Obama and his minions in Congress would jack up taxes to ungodly levels on everything, and throw a million monkey wrenches into our economy, and the economy would grind to a halt, and people starved and froze to death, and humanity extincted itself from the planet, then maybe we wouldn’t have Swiss needle cast in the tree plantations of the multinational corporations.

Maybe. It all depends on whether Science Daily is correct in their theories.

But we need to take precautions anyway, because they could be right, even though all logic argues against them. So based on the Precautionary Principle, we should huddle in the cold and dark and allow ourselves to be taxed to death just in case they are right, which is very doubtful but we can’t be sure.

Three headed frogs, killer jellyfish, Swiss needle cast! The sky is falling, the sky is falling! Brrrraack, brack, brack!!! Here come the Chicken Littles!! Panic attack, panic attack! Kill everybody! Tax your nose off! Won’t somebody do something??? The trees are dying! Brrrraack, brack, brack!!!