Yesterday I walked into Boston’s new Liberty Hotel, a former jail at the foot of the Longfellow Bridge. Thanks to the tireless efforts of our Federal Reserve to control inflation, parking was listed at only $39 per day. (I had ridden the T down there, up only to $2 from $1.25 six months ago.) I helped myself to a free Wall Street Journal and opened it to the Opinion page. An Op-Ed by Holman W. Jenks, Jr. attacked John McCain for succumbing to the lunatic theory that human activity could affect global climate.
It occurred to me that it would be nice to get into a time machine and go back to a meeting of the Royal Society in London circa 1800. This would be my presentation:
Gentlemen: What I propose is that we humans breed ourselves up to a population of 6.7 billion from our current 1 billion. Next we will cut down all of the forests either to grow crops or to provide cooking fuel. We are going to dig and drill down into the Earth to bring up the remains of all previous vegetation and animal life, now in the form of coal and oil. We’re going to burn all of it and release the combustion products into the atmosphere. I do not expect this to have any effect on global climate.
I wonder how it would have been received by the scientific worthies of the day.
Brilliant! Except of course, the number of forested acres in the USA at least, is much much greater than it was before.
And you would have been received as a lunatic for claiming that tiny organisms called diatoms actually lock up CO2 in their crystalline-like skeletons, then sink to the bottom of the ocean where the C02 they sequestered has no chance to affect climate.
Patrick, what is your evidence to support your claim that the USA has more forest land than it did in the past? Where past is defined as pre european colonization?