Earthsky FC_AFF, Interviews
Neil Sampson says climate change speeding flux of forest ecosystems
12-01-2008 - Biodiversity
Neil Sampson: It’s not a natural flux, it’s a much faster flux than it has ever happened before.
Some current climate models predict widespread ecosystem changes and significant biodiversity loss.
Neil Sampson: For our Eastern hardwoods, they may be replaced by pine.
Sampson also believes the warming climate’s longer, frost-free seasons might make forests more susceptible to invasion by insects. The mountain pine beetle, for example, has already decimated forests in Colorado and Canada.
Neil Sampson: The major fear with forests and climate change is that climate change will affect trees slowly but it may affect insects and disease fairly rapidly. And that could be the ones that cause us trouble as we try to keep our forests healthy under changing climate conditions.
That could prove especially true for remote forests that aren’t actively managed.
Neil Sampson: Private landowners can plant that new species mix and encourage it in one way or another, and perhaps cope with these kinds of changes better.
Our thanks today to the American Forest Foundation, leading the way in conservation and education.
Our thanks to:
Neil Sampson
President, Sampson Group
Alexandria, VA
Dear Friends of the Earth & Sky Community,
The human-induced predicament visible in our time to the family of humanity makes one thing clear: people with eyes to see, ears to hear and no speech impediments have got to speak out loudly, clearly and often now. Silence, the greatest power the rich and powerful possess, cannot be allowed to prevail. The reckless way a few people with wealth and power maintain a “golden” silence, one that protects their greed, gluttony and hoarding, is dangerous and cannot longer be endured because a good enough future for our children and coming generations is being mortgaged and threatened by these leading elders in my not-so-great generation.
Regardless of whether or not other human beings choose to accept the “answers” to one question, I believe we must ask ourselves, “Can we teach one another to live within limits?”
It is necessary, I suppose, for human beings to recognize and affirm human limits
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1332674
and Earth’s limitations
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0CYP/is_/ai_n15690553
To do otherwise and, by so doing, choose willfully and foolishly to ignore the practical requirements of biophysical reality runs the risk of putting life as we know it and our planetary home as a fit place for human habitation in peril, even in these early years of Century XXI.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176
It beyonds majority believes that climate change may destructe our forest ecosystems so gravely, but it is surely true. International society should cooperate together to relieve climate suffering，for our offspring and us, at the same time everybody should assure what we are doing is harmless to our climate.
The climate is changing, as it always has. The term “climate change” has been subsituted for “global warming” because nature is proving capricicious once again and is failing to provide the proper response. Folks, the sun is dwindling is its activity and as a result, the earth is cooling.
There is absolutely no influence of man on that. If you want something to fear, fear the totalitarian socialists that are at the head of the environmental movenment. The earth is fine.
Hi Benjamin.
You state, “Folks, the sun is dwindling in its activity and as a result, the earth is cooling.” Can you let me know what scientific studies have enabled you to make this sweeping statement? The sun’s energy output has to be measured by spacecraft outside of the Earth’s atmosphere, and these measurements in total solar irradiance (TSI) have only been taken since the year 1979. May I quote in part what the site I submitted has to say, “To determine long-term changes in the Sun’s output, which may have time scales extending much longer than the 11-year solar cycle, the TSI climate record requires either very good absolute accuracy or very good instrument stability and continuous measurements. To date, no TSI instrument has achieved the necesssary absolute accuracy, and the TSI record relies on measurement continuity from overlapping spacecraft instruments.”
Happy New Year!
Bruce