WashPost Lectures Tree Farms Aren't So 'Green'
Most folks dream of a white Christmas. No one, not even Elvis fans, want a blue one. But the Washington Post's Brian Palmer is fixated on how you can have a green one. Spoiler alert: He doesn't think trekking out to the local tree farm to fell your own tree is the way to go.
"Do you deserve a lump of carbon under your Christmas tree?" Palmer asked in his December 11 EcoLogic column. Apparently, the issue of tree farms during this holiday season is a point of contention within the environmentalist community. Yes, the greenies can't give it a rest, not even for the holiday season.
Tree farm advocates say that it’s good for the environment since carbon dioxide absorption in trees deceases dramatically after maturation. But, Palmer notes,“many climate experts think it’s bunk.” Keep in mind, these are the same clowns who said a few short years ago that the Earth was cooling, the North American continent would underg0 periods of re-glaciation, and mass unrest would ensue due to food shortages. It’s hardly appropriate for them to label anything “bunk” when they have been so abjectly and demonstratively wrong in the past.
In 2009, George Will rattled off a litany of nonsense the environmental left spewed during:
... the 1970s, [where] "a major cooling of the planet" was "widely considered inevitable" because it was "well established" that the Northern Hemisphere's climate "has been getting cooler since about 1950" (New York Times, May 21, 1975). Although some disputed that the "cooling trend" could result in "a return to another ice age" (the Times, Sept. 14, 1975), others anticipated "a full-blown 10,000-year ice age" involving "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation" (Science News, March 1, 1975, and Science magazine, Dec. 10, 1976, respectively). The "continued rapid cooling of the Earth" (Global Ecology, 1971) meant that "a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery" (International Wildlife, July 1975). "The world's climatologists are agreed" that we must "prepare for the next ice age" (Science Digest, February 1973). Because of "ominous signs" that "the Earth's climate seems to be cooling down," meteorologists were "almost unanimous" that "the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century," perhaps triggering catastrophic famines (Newsweek cover story, "The Cooling World," April 28, 1975). Armadillos were fleeing south from Nebraska, heat-seeking snails were retreating from Central European forests, the North Atlantic was "cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool," glaciers had "begun to advance" and "growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter" (Christian Science Monitor, Aug. 27, 1974).
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The first question is who in their right mind would actually care about tree farms during the most joyous time of the year? Second, who cares that older forests are now shown to be “more active than they appear?” Like health studies, this one could be debunked in six months, a year, or seven years. Environmentalists have been wrong before, and their credibility has been damaged due to ClimateGate, where one academic admitted he wished he could omit the entire medieval warming period.
What's more, the man behind the whole debacle, Phil Jones, admitted his data was poorly organized. And yet, these are the people who are saying to trust them with future investments in various technologies to curb CO2 emissions.
Oh well, at least Palmer didn't propose some onerous "tree tax" or "Christmas tree credit" to offset carbon. It's probably just a matter of time, though.
