Forum - Global weather changes

I watched a prgram on PBS that was about the decline of a specific type of sea lion and the effect it was having on sea life and human life.

It appears that the sea lion pouplation is in decline because they are not getting the correct diet. Sea lions need herring to survive and the herring pouplation has declined. The reason for this are many.

It seems that herring used to flourish in the ocean, in fact, it was one of the most common fish in the world. Hump Backed whales mainly fed on herring and kept a balance in nature on the number of herring that spawned in the ocean. During the 1800's and 1900's when Whaleing was big business almost 60% of whales were killed and this off set the balance of nature. Herring declined and Dover sole became the most re-productive fish in the ocean and sole is a predator of herring. So, without herring which the sea lions need, their diet is insufficent in the correct nutrients they need to survive.

One of the important facts they mentioned is that the earths oceans have increased in tempature by 5 degrees in the past 20 years. This has affected weather world wide. Many of the earth's sea life is in danger of dying because of this increase.

The other important fact is that due to the earth natural climate change which occurs about every 150,000 years, high and low pressure systems are moving. Here, on the west coast of America, a low weather system that was off the coast of Alaska and directed moisture down the west coast of California has moved to the Gulf of Alaska and now sits off the coast of Alaska and Vancouver, Canada. This is the main reason that the weather, in the US, has gotten hotter and it is not going to stop.

India has developed a car that runs off compressed air. The only problem is is that India uses high sulfer coal to produce electricty. That produces more polution than a car using gas.

Please, recycle and conserve water. We don't have any water, on the plante, that is not polouted in some way.

Here is an article about a lake disappearing blamed on global warming.

The following link takes you to an interesting story.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070704/ap_on_sc/chile_missing_lake_6

Another article.

http://news.yahoo.com/fc/World/Climate_Change

I'm not a member of Green Peace or any other environmental group but I've spent enough time out of doors to see changes my self. I am an avid outdoors man. I hunt, I target, skeet and sporting clays shoot. I go camping, fishing, diving and just about any thing else that requires to be out in nature. I spent 23 years working in Highway, bridge and tunnel construction. I just see thing and am concerned about them. I believe that every thing can be recycled and it is up to us to demand that the government and private industry do this.

Here's a new story about the decline of Rain Forests.

Rain forests fall at 'alarming' rate By EDWARD HARRIS, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 58 minutes ago



In the gloomy shade deep in Africa's rain forest, the noontime silence was pierced by the whine of a far-off chain saw. It was the sound of destruction, echoed from wood to wood, continent to continent, in the tropical belt that circles the globe.

From Brazil to central Africa to once-lush islands in Asia's archipelagos, human encroachment is shrinking the world's rain forests.

The alarm was sounded decades ago by environmentalists — and was little heeded. The picture, meanwhile, has changed: Africa is now a leader in destructiveness. The numbers have changed: U.N. specialists estimate 60 acres of tropical forest are felled worldwide every minute, up from 50 a generation back. And the fears have changed.

Experts still warn of extinction of animal and plant life, of the loss of forest peoples' livelihoods, of soil erosion and other damage. But scientists today worry urgently about something else: the fateful feedback link of trees and climate.

Global warming is expected to dry up and kill off vast tracts of rain forest, and dying forests will feed global warming.

"If we lose forests, we lose the fight against climate change," declared more than 300 scientists, conservation groups, religious leaders and others in an appeal for action at December's climate conference in Bali, Indonesia.

The burning or rotting of trees that comes with deforestation — at the hands of ranchers, farmers, timbermen — sends more heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than all the world's planes, trains, trucks and automobiles. Forest destruction accounts for about 20 percent of manmade emissions, second only to burning of fossil fuels for electricity and heat. Conversely, healthy forests absorb carbon dioxide and store carbon.

"The stakes are so dire that if we don't start turning this around in the next 10 years, the extinction crisis and the climate crisis will begin to spiral out of control," said Roman Paul Czebiniak, a forest expert with Greenpeace International. "It's a very big deal."

The December U.N. session in Bali may have been a turning point, endorsing negotiations in which nations may fashion the first global financial plan for compensating developing countries for preserving their forests.

The latest data from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) helped spur delegates to action.

"Deforestation continues at an alarming rate of about 13 million hectares (32 million acres) a year," the U.N. body said in its latest "State of the World's Forests" report.

Because northern forests remain essentially stable, that means 50,000 square miles of tropical forest are being cleared every 12 months — equivalent to one Mississippi or more than half a Britain. The lumber and fuelwood removed in the tropics alone would fill more than 1,000 Empire State Buildings, FAO figures show.

Although South America loses slightly more acreage than Africa, the rate of loss is higher here — almost 1 percent of African forests gone each year. In 2000-2005, the continent lost 10 million acres a year, including big chunks of forest in Sudan, Zambia and Tanzania, up from 9 million a decade earlier, the FAO reports.

Across the tropics the causes can be starkly different.

The Amazon and other South American forests are usually burned for cattle grazing or industrial-scale soybean farming. In Indonesia and elsewhere in southeast Asia, island forests are being cut or burned to make way for giant plantations of palm, whose oil is used in food processing, cosmetics and other products.

In Africa, by contrast, it's individuals hacking out plots for small-scale farming.

Here in Nigeria's southeastern Cross Rivers State, home to one of the largest remaining tropical forests in Africa, people from surrounding villages of huts and cement-block homes go to the forest each day to work their pineapple and cocoa farms. They see no other way of earning money to feed their families.

"The developed countries want us to keep the forests, since the air we breathe is for all of us, rich countries and poor countries," said Ogar Assam Effa, 54, a tree plantation director and member of the state conservation board.

"But we breathe the air, and our bellies are empty. Can air give you protein? Can air give you carbohydrates?" he asked. "It would be easy to convince people to stop clearing the forest if there was an alternative."

The state, which long ago banned industrial logging, is trying to offer alternatives.

Working with communities like Abo Ebam, near Nigeria's border with Cameroon, the Cross Rivers government seeks to help would-be farmers learn other trades, such as beekeeping or raising fist-sized land snails, a regional delicacy.

The state also has imposed a new licensing system. Anyone who wants to cut down one of the forest's massive, valuable mahogany trees or other hardwoods must obtain a license and negotiate which tree to fell with the nearby community, which shares in the income. The logs can't be taken away whole, but must be cut into planks in the forest, by people like David Anfor.

He's a 35-year-old father of one who earns the equivalent of 75 U.S. cents per board he cuts with a whizzing chain saw. "The forest is our natural resource. We're trying to conserve," he said. "But I'm also working for my daily eating."

A community benefiting from such small-scale forestry is likely to keep out those engaged in illegal, uncontrolled logging. But enforcement is difficult in a state with about 3,500 square miles of pristine rain forest — and few forest rangers.

On one recent day deep in the forest, where the luxuriant green canopy allows only rare shards of sunlight to reach the floor, the trilling of a hornbill bird and the distant chain saw were the only sounds heard. As forestry officials rushed to investigate, the saw operator fled deeper into the forest, sign of an illegal operation.

Environmentalists say such a conservation approach may work for rural, agrarian people in Nigeria, which lost an estimated 15 million acres between 1990 and 2005, or about one-third of its entire forest area, and has one of the world's highest deforestation rates — more than 3 percent per year.

But lessons learned in one place aren't necessarily applicable elsewhere, they say. A global strategy is needed, mobilizing all rain-forest governments.

That's the goal of the post-Bali talks, looking for ways to integrate forest preservation into the world's emerging "carbon trading" system. A government earning carbon credits for "avoided deforestation" could then sell them to a European power plant, for example, to meet its emission-reduction quota.

"These forests are the greatest global public utility," Britain's conservationist Prince Charles said in the lead-up to Bali. "As a matter of urgency we have to find ways to make them more valuable alive than dead."

Observed the World Wildlife Fund's Duncan Pollard, "Suddenly you have the whole world looking at deforestation."

But in many ways rain forests are still a world of unknowns, a place with more scientific questions than answers.

How much carbon dioxide are forests absorbing? How much carbon is stored there? How might the death of the Amazon forest affect the climate in, say, the American Midwest? Hundreds of researchers are putting in thousands of hours of work to try to answer such questions before it is too late.

___

NEXT: Part II - Forests in Question.

Hey Paul, here's a tip for making a short quote. (I noticed that you quote the entire post, which is not necessary and it also duplicates the post.)

When you "Reply with Quote", delete the text that is extra and leave the text that you want to quote. But what's important is to leave the beginning and the end quote tags untouched.

For your user id, the beginning quote tag is [ quote="paul50" ] and the ending quote tag is [ /quote ]. Now I wrote these tags this way so that you can see them, they are really written with no spaces between the [ ] square brackets

So the quoted section at the beginning of my reply looks like this in your Post Text box:

[ quote="paulh50" ]I watched a prgram on PBS that was about the decline of a specific type of sea lion and the effect it was having on sea life and human life.
...
Please, recycle and conserve water. We don't have any water, on the plante, that is not polouted in some way.[ /quote ]

In other words, to quote a text passage, you must put a beginning quote tag and an ending quote tag around the text passage, like so:

[ quote="paulh50" ]This is an example text passage[ /quote ]

which looks like this when I take out the spaces between the [ ] square brackets:


By the way, don't assume that I personally know this techy stuff. Its all gobbly-gook to me. My IT tech support guy answers all of my questions and tells me what to do.

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Thank you dominixe!

If about the weather changes I can say that before 2000 the normal temperature in February where I live was nearly from -18 to -25. Since 2000 it is mostly near 0 and -5!

There was only one exception in 2006 when it was -30 :)
But in the winter 2007 it was 5-10 ABOVE! No snow at all in towns!

I think that global warming is everywhere now because of all the climate changes. Even here in SC, the weather is up and down in temperature about every few days in the middle of winter. We get warm weather and then we get cold weather...it's kind of crazy with the weather up and down like that; but we all work through it for now. I wish you all peace through all these hard times and changes.
Peace&Kisses,
12pleaseu

Well I think Kotikkk means something more anomal than typical. Has the wether in US changed so much in several years?

Yes, I know that in the US in SC; our weather in the summer seems to be getting even hotter every year. We even have a water deficit that's gone up in the last few years and some lakes are starting to dry up some. When we do get rain; I am thankful for it; that's for sure.
Kisses,
12pleaseu

So it is another reason to like rain :)

Kotik is completely right. Several years ago i could not even imagine that it would be 0 in february! Winters were really cold and snowy. Last winter was very warm and it was awful that there was no snow at all. Many people fell into depression and even the number of suicides increased! Now we have a snowy but quite warm winter and i love it very much.
And is it cold where you live now?

Hi SexyTWO! Yes, it is getting a little colder here at night; but it is still a little warm during the daytime. That's soon to change in the next week or so. I hope you have a great, safe, and fun weekend sweetie!
Kisses,
12pleaseu

We have 4 degs above now. Not cold but wet.

I used to visit Tallin and should say that it hasn't got such a microclimate as really large cities have. So the weather in T. is more typical.

That sounds great that your weather there isn't too bad with many changes like we have. I guess that's a relief for everyone there.
Hugs,
12pleaseu

You say you like all kinds of weather but maybe you have an anti-ideal of it? What is "too bad" for you? A hurricane?