To start, I’d like to thank the Morning Star for the amusing juxtaposition of Eli Pivnick’s excellent article Effects of Clear-Cut Logging on Forest Fires and the Letter to the Editor Whose Science Is It? by Doug Macdonald, in the Feb.1 edition of the paper.
Eli’s article is well-tempered common sense; likely well-researched from good science. Unfortunately for Mr. Macdonald, the juxtaposition puts his letter in a poor light.
I’m embarrassed for Doug by the narrow-minded half-truths presented, by stooping to calling people names, and by doing the very thing about which he complains.
Point-for-point: Yes; Doug tells us that plant life flourishes in a CO2-rich atmosphere; but the flip side is that human life does not. We need balance. Through the miracle of photosynthesis, we were blessed with an oxygen-rich atmosphere, making life as we know it on earth possible.
Doug extols the benefits of the Haber-Bosch Process. According to articles I found in a Google search, the Haber-Bosch Process is a chemistry science development for large-scale reaction production of ammonia. Plentiful ammonia could then be used for large-scale manufacturing of things like bombs and nitrogen-rich chemical fertilizer. This fertilizer increases crop yields by “up to 60 per cent”, or about 1.6 times; not four-fold. This is perhaps an average, as other articles found in my Google search mention a six-fold increase in USA corn crop yields over the last 70 years.
What Doug doesn’t tell us about the Haber-Bosch Process is that this process that makes ammonia plentiful has been a major contributor to the serious problems we have today, as the huge increase in mono-crop agriculture (which has its own inherent problems) has encouraged the massive overpopulation of the world (along with the attendant limitations on Human Rights), the process is a major source of pollution as nitrogen in agricultural run-off has disrupted the nitrogen cycle, the reactors for the manufacturing process use about two per cent of the total world-wide energy consumption, and the process produces huge amounts of CO2 greenhouse gas. Yes, Doug; “Better Living Through Chemistry.”
And Doug talks of the amazing benefits of fossil fuels. I absolutely and whole-heartedly agree!! It’s an amazing resource, and it has fuelled the industrial revolution, major economic recoveries, and the growth of wealth and population around the world. But again, our use of it is horrendously out of balance! We are squandering this precious resource; one example being millions of vehicles idling in traffic jams around the world for hours every day. If we suck all of the oil from under the crust of the earth and burn it, while we continue cutting down our oxygen-producing, life-giving forests, we will over-consume our supply of oxygen.
Fracking; here we are, detonating underground explosions so we can keep extracting oil and gas from deep inside the earth, undermining the stability of the very ground upon which we build the foundations for our homes, highways, and skyscrapers, and releasing innumerable toxins safely sequestered for millions of years in that huge underground carbon filtre.
We live in a delicate and beautiful balance, and we’re disrupting and destroying it to satisfy our insatiable greed. Barbara Kingsolver in her book Flight Behaviour shared the image of the earth, if it were the size of a basketball, having an atmosphere the thickness of a layer of plastic wrap surrounding it.
Doug, Al Gore and John Kerry are grifters??
I had to look-up that one too; “Con artists.” More Google searches to try and learn what Gore and Kerry did to earn Doug’s disgust, but what I found instead was long lists of positive achievements and awards, including a Nobel Peace Prize for Al Gore and numerous military awards for John Kerry. Those two gave of themselves to enrich our social fabric. On a whim, I also searched for information about Donald Trump, and amazingly not only found nothing positive, but instead a huge litany of abuse and corruption. The man is morally bereft! He’s also the only USA president ever to not have served in the country’s military. Doug, if you think that those two Statesmen, Al Gore and John Kerry, are con-artists, then I bet that the Right Dishonourable Donald Trump is your hero.
You downplay the catastrophic crises of climate change? What I have read about global warming tells of a gain of more than one degree celsius, but regardless, the changes upon us are accelerating now; most of the changes have come in recent years. With different very bad news reported every day, with problems in many sectors, with mass extinctions, melting glaciers, permafrost, and polar ice caps, with violent storms, flooding, heat waves and droughts, and many varieties of devastation and suffering all around the world, anybody who still denies climate change must live in a different reality than do I.
I have come to recognize a common and consistent pattern in people’s behaviour; that those who complain bitterly about others’ undesirable behaviours often prove to be guilty of such behaviour themselves. Doug complains of policy makers picking and choosing scientific data to skew it to support their point of view. Seems to me that this pretty much sums up Doug’s letter, from start to finish.
There is still hope. We just need to work together to develop healthy and sustainable solutions, and Mother Earth will heal herself the best possible. We must stop the idiocy of destroying that which supports life on earth.
David Friedman
