Links tagged “deforestation”

Flashback: Greens Stump for a Treeless Christmas – Recommend ‘a storm-felled branch’ instead

“This year the American Farmland Trust said that expanding solar power could gobble up as much as 3,900 square miles nationwide, and predicted that many Eastern states could lose between 1.5% and 6% of their undeveloped land to solar facilities...

A Princeton University study this year forecast that achieving a net-zero-emissions U.S. economy by 2050 could directly impact a cumulative land area the size of Virginia, with forested lands the most directly impacted by solar deployment in Eastern states.

Rich countries have committed to increase international aid for biodiversity to $20bn annually by 2025, rising to $30bn by 2030, so as to help countries in the Global South with their efforts to conserve the world's remaining biodiversity 'hotspots', which are largely clustered in developing economies.

It has been estimated that there has been a 14% increase in vegetation, mostly due to higher levels of CO₂ in this period. In a paper published in 2016 by 32 authors from eight countries, it was noted that there was a “persistent and widespread increase” in growing season greening over 25-50% of the global vegetated area. Recent increases in global vegetation are shown at the top in a picture compiled by NASA. More vegetation of course means more food up and down the chain. Every form of life benefits, from insects to tigers, and of course humans.

Flashback 2013: Deserts 'greening' from rising CO2: Increased levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) have helped boost green foliage across the world’s arid regions over the past 30 years through a process called CO2 fertilization, according to CSIRO research.

In findings based on satellite observations, CSIRO, in collaboration with the Australian National University (ANU), found that this CO2 fertilization correlated with an 11 per cent increase in foliage cover from 1982-2010 across parts of the arid areas studied in Australia, North America, the Middle East and Africa, according to CSIRO research scientist, Dr Randall Donohue. "In Australia, our native vegetation is superbly adapted to surviving in arid environments and it consequently uses water very efficiently," Dr Donohue said. "Australian vegetation seems quite sensitive to CO2 fertilization."

While the report accurately notes that cities are indeed hotter due to “heat islands,” it uses this fact to claim that black people are disproportionately impacted by heat, former Republican aide Marc Morano, who runs the website Climate Depot, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

“Adding tree cover to cities will most likely have a negligible impact on the urban heat of the cities,” said Morano. “These solutions appear to be nothing more than just ‘virtue signally’ racial grievance claims. These types of reports are generated to justify bureaucratic jobs and massive bloated budgets for ‘equity’ programs.”

Morano also said that the climate debate has “descended into cultural absurdity” and called the idea of “shade equity” the latest in a round of “racially charged climate claims and identity politics” in the left-leaning movement.

Locals are in uproar but, thanks to the mania for Net Zero, there may be little they can do

Since the chain saws arrived two weeks ago, workers have moved quickly to get rid of more than 70 species of mature trees at the popular 46-acre park on the Lower East Side, including 419 oaks, 284 London planes, 89 honeylocusts and 81 cherry trees — along with eventually demolishing a running track, ballfields, lawns, picnic areas, an amphitheater and a composting center.

“What’s the point of paying a parks department that cuts down trees?” asked Karen Kapnick, one of a small group of protesters who watched in horror, peeking through a chain link fence next to Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive as workers denuded the first dozen trees. “I’m just here because I care about the trees and the environment.”