Trees Bring Rain #4

By Atom Bergstrom

Atom’s Blog

Smokey the Bear’s “forest management” has created Tinder Box Forests.

U.S. Forest Service “professionals” are playing the dozens with their uncle’s cousins.

Get well, Edward Abbey (1927-1989). It’s an uphill fight with a short stick without you!

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I’m accessing our Sun Sync Nutrition website files as a PUBLIC SERVICE.

The following Sun Sync blog entry is from May 9, 2015.

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It took 8,000 years for humans to remove half of the world’s global forest cover.

Today, developing countries are losing 16,000,000 hectares of natural forest per year.

Deforestation dramatically changes the climate and waterscape.

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Constantin-Francois Volney (View of the Climate and Soil of the United States of America, 1804) wrote …

“On the Ohio, at Gallipolis, at Washington in Kentucky, at Frankfort, at Lexington, at Cincinnati, at Louisville, at Niagara, at Albany, every where the same circumstances have been repeated to me: ‘longer summers, later autumns, and also later harvests; shorter winters, snows less deep and of shorter duration, but cold not less intense. And in all the new settlements these changes have been represented to me not as gradual and progressive, but as rapid and almost sudden, in proportion to the extent to which the land is cleared.

“A sensible alteration in the climate of the United States therefore is an incontestable fact; and when Dr. Rush, after having adduced the proofs of it, struck with the severity of several winters within these eight years, starts doubts respecting the precision of observations formerly made, in which thermometers were wanting, these doubts vanish before the multitude of witnesses and positive facts. The cause of this change, though it does not possess an equal share of evidence and certainty, has at least a degree of probability, capable of obtaining our assent. The opinion of Mr. [Samuel] Williams, who ascribes it to the clearing of the land, and the extensive openings made through the woods by cutting down the trees, appears to me the more solid, because he explains the fact by an analysis of the circumstances.

“‘In every district where wood is cut down to cultivate the land, the air and the earth undergo considerable alterations of temperature in the course of two or three years. The settler has scarcely cleared a few acres of the forest, before the ground, exposed to all the heat of the Sun’s rays, acquires to the depth of near a foot of heat of 10° or 11° beyond that of the land still covered with wood.’ — Hist. of Vermont, p. 61, 62, 63.”

According to the same source as above …

“‘Clearing away the wood causes the waters to evaporate, and the ground to become dry, as is daily remarked in all parts of the United States, where brooks cease to flow, and marshes and swamps are converted into dry ground.'”

According to the same source as above …

“‘Clearing the ground occasions a very sensible diminution of the quantity and duration of the snows, that less than a century ago covered the whole of New England for three months without interruption, that is to say, from the beginning of december to the beginning of march: and they are still the same in the uncleared land; while in the cultivated parts they are neither so lasting, nor so deep, nor so uninterrupted.'”
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