To personally plant 100,000 trees is an amazing accomplishment !

We can barely get cities to manage such things in the states.

How many years did it take you ?

Sorry, Rog, random question:

If you're "on the climate junket" nowadays, who do you work for? (If anyone?)

Woops, soory- Queen's English- For Whom dost Thou Work?

He is currently Tipper Gore's attorney.

Craig; very emotive but it doesn't leave me any the Wisner.
Looks like a bunch of people doing some recycling? Or is it a comment on relative wealth and poverty?

If so, why has the green movement opposed electricity production in Africa and condemned millions to cooking on dung fires which shorten their lives? (An activity for which they are punished these days, but while still not being given access to cleaner power sources).

Rog, this statement made me very angry. Not because you and Jeff aren't right about everyone needing to be more accurate, honest, and unsentimental about the problems we all face, but because you are deliberately being flippant about huge problems and great suffering. If you don't know what is being depicted in Craig's photo and what exactly is going on, then you have no call to make any judgements about what other people are insisting are more important than the Carbon Flame War's arguments.

Have you been to the Third World? Have you witnessed firsthand what is happening? If not then I would suggest that, in the same way that you admonish anyone for not doing their "science", that you refrain from joking about something you don't really understand. Seeing the enormous suffering and environmental damage on television or in a magazine article gives you absolutely no idea about just how bad it really is. It is on a scale that no one in the States or Europe who has not actually been there has the slightest notion about. And when you see it in person it is devastating.

Yes, I get very "emotive" about this. I've lived with such people as you see in Craig's photo, in the Philippines. They are my people (I am part Filipino). Two memories in particular are forever branded in my mind: One, from a bridge over a river exactly as in Craig's photo, of a man just having taken a dump in the filth covered water (including a bloated, dead pig just a few meters further out) and a few minutes later a little girl coming down to the same spot and with a plastic detergent bottle scooping out water to drink. Another memory, of two little boys, each about 3 or 4, squatting beside the curb of a very busy city street with a tiny wooden box, on top of which lay a single slice of pork, so thickly covered with flies you couldn't see the meat. The boys were trying to sell the meat as trucks and cars shuddered by, exhaust smoke blasting over the boys and their ware. You see scenes like these everywhere in the Third World, very, very real, vast, and heartbreaking. It isn't in the least bit funny.

As to the "green movement" opposition you are talking about... do you really know what you are talking about, Rog? Groups like the Solar Cookers International and Journey to Forever are trying very hard to bring safe and healthy cooking methods to the poor throughout the world. The green movement isn't just made up of those who work with the natural environment; it is made up of hundreds of thousands of people working with all aspects of the environment, health, food production, hygiene, shelter and settlements, community development, transportation, education and the structures necessary for conducting schooling, efforts to bring computing and information to the poor, financial education programs to help people get out of poverty, and new manufacturing and production methods. The image of the pot-smoking, head-in-the-clouds hippie is so outdated and lopsided that it is laughable to anyone who knows what is really happening in the green movement.

And to anyone here who is criticizing those of us who don't stick with the Carbon Flame War's topic, let me remind you that this thread's original topic is not the Carbon Flame War thread's topic. I don't at all mind the drift of the thread, but please don't criticize those who want to bring in other points.

Edited by butuki on 10/08/2010 16:51:41 MDT.

" If more people spent less time bemoaning the human condition and actually got off their keyboards and did something about it, the world would be a better place pretty quickly."

Ahem. Speaking of people who spend a lot of time on their keyboard....How did you ever find time to plant well over 100,000 trees? How did you find time to plant 100,000 trees, period, for that matter?

Just curious.

BTW, there are a lot of ways to do something about the human condition beside planting trees, and I suspect that more than a few people here have made a decent contribution, from the general tenor of many folks' posts.

Tom:
I've been spending more time on my keyboard over the last few years following a serious injury when I was knocked off my motorcycle by a hit and run driver and left hanging in a tree with a broken spine. Before that, I worked half the week in forestry and the other half running a network support business. The forestry work was low paid in comparison to the computer work, but it got me outdoors, kept me fit, and fulfilled my desire to make a positive difference to the environment.

Dean:
I'll only be on the climate junket for three days. The system doesn't like having to pay skeptics the kind of money they dish out to alarmists, but in this case they have to appear even handed. I now work half time for a university which has prominent earth and atmospheric sciences departments.

Miguel:
Sorry my flippant humour made you angry. My anger is directed at government level directives, not the earnest efforts of small organisations trying to make positive differences to third world situations. In my view, there is an appallingly bad set of policies run by the IMF and World Bank, with the connivance of profit seeking corporations, which causes gaping wounds in the fabric of third world societies. Charities appear to me to be attempting to fix these with sticking plasters, and unwittingly providing a fig leaf to cover the deeply unpleasant politics driving the bigger picture.

Apologies too for the thread drift. I'll start my own to continue providing news and views on climate science. I'm not sure what this thread is for, beyond pointing out that BPL's forum software is old, tired and broken.

Thanks Rog. I agree with you completely about governments and very big organizations, like the UN. My father worked at the United Nations University and I grew up with and saw firsthand just how self-congratulating and out of touch with reality, or simply callous, a lot of the people there were. It seemed like going to cocktail parties and rising in the UN ranks mattered more to a lot of the people than actually doing any good. And with my exposure to the rich and famous, in addition to the time I spent among the desperately poor, I also learned just how separated the rich and poor really are. It made me quite cynical, wondering how we were ever going to solve the most pressing problems with the attitude that the rich have (and which, curiously, drives the will of the poor, too. Almost every one of them would die to get into the position of the rich).

There is no point to this thread, really, which is why I pointed out that people wanting to post about their non-global-warming/ cooling argument topics are perfectly within thread etiquette bounds to do so.

No need to start a new thread. I think this thread naturally moved the way it did and I certainly don't have any stake in what is being said here. I actually really enjoy the whole argument, both sides. A lot of it is very educational.

I remember your writing about your spinal injury a while back, but didn't know that it was as lasting as it is. I'm glad that you are at least involved with something that you care about and still get out and about.

Edited by butuki on 10/09/2010 03:05:24 MDT.

I changed jobs a month or so ago and got to take a week or so off, so I decided to take the train up to my parent's farm and then ride back towards Melbourne. I originally intended to camp at Mt.Cole on the way back but soon realised that there was only so much camping gear I could cram onto my full carbon road bike.

Anyway, the country was the wettest I've seen it for at least 15 years: I thought you might enjoy seeing some photos of what the country used to look like when I was a kid and before the current desertification trend began.

There were water birds everywhere, with lots nesting, and - for the first time since I was 4 years old - I saw brolgas. It sounds stupid but seeing the brolgas left me speechless ...

Edited by Arapiles on 10/09/2010 04:06:27 MDT.

Agree and I for one enjoy reading both sides of a debate and believe flipflopping is a good trait rather than stubbornly at all cost latching on to one side until death.

All of us, regardless of our beliefs, etc., share a common bond with our love for backpacking mostly in a non-traditional way. We are quite diverse except our differences narrow as we discuss packs, shoes, etc.

At least one thing readers of our tread can learn is that we have different personalities. Different ways of dealing with the suffering on our planet. All of seeking to find joy if we can amidst the squalor. Maybe that is why we don our packs and go away when we can.

Enjoy your day.

I'd never heard of Brolgas so i googled:
http://bird.net.au/bird/index.php?title=Image:Two-Brolgas.jpg
Fabulous looking birds. Birds are smart, if their local climate changes in a way they don't like, they fly to somewhere that suits them. Adaptation comes easy to birds, as it does to humans, who a capable of living in searing desert heat, frozen arctic tundra, and even permanently afloat on the seas.

The biosphere and planet is a good deal more robust than the climate alarmists would have us believe.

It's getting cold round my part of the world so Kath and I are flying south down to Carcassonne tomorrow morning on a Ryanair cheap flight for £10 each. We'll be backpacking round the Pyranean foothills with a minimalist handbaggage only kit for a week. See you all when we get back!

Cheers

Rog

Edited by tallbloke on 10/09/2010 09:37:19 MDT.

Hi Miguel

> It seemed like going to cocktail parties and rising in the UN ranks mattered more
> to a lot of the people than actually doing any good.
> wondering how we were ever going to solve the most pressing problems
> with the attitude that the rich have

Welcome to the REAL world. Did you expect otherwise?

cheers

Welcome to the REAL world. Did you expect otherwise?

Now? No. But I was just a kid back then. Being exposed to my father's working world opened my eyes pretty quickly.

UN wow. How could you know? Interesting to look back after you've grown up.

My father was an army sargeant. Little did I know when I was a kid that he actually did experience first hand the REAL world. Not many high social gatherings for his kind. Kid view: occasionally they were home, you thought they just sit in an old chair, smoking a cigar and watching a baseball game. A kid had no clue what they did when they were away.

Now it's 2010, and all and all, life is still UNREAL for some and remains VERY REAL for others.

http://thegwpf.org/ipcc-news/1670-hal-lewis-my-resignation-from-the-american-physical-society.html

Not sure if the above link is real but if it is it worries me a bit.
Once things become deeply politicized and lots of money is involved it becomes very hard to tell what is really going on. This is what has happened with global warming to the extent that, when the earth refused to warm fast enough, there has been a focused effort to re-brand the movement as "climate change". Now, for a lay person lile myself
this is simply amusing. "Climate change" ? Of course climate changes. So does the weather and best of luck controling either. But the view of someone like myself is of little value in gaining any real perspective on the matter other than providing a bit of humor. What does concern me are links like the following one in which a prominent physicist calls it quits and calls global warming the greatest hoax in history.
Read thi

Interesting reading, Jeff.......and not shocking.....

I, like Rog, have planted uncounted hundreds of thousands of trees when I worked in forestry. Now, if we don't go away at the weekends, we try to get to events like these:

Sunday October 10 - Haswell Quarry Park - 1pm–3pm - Working bee
Saturday 16th October - Bowenvale chip site - 1pm – 3pm – Port Hills Revegetation Release
Saturday 16 October - Travis Wetland - 10am–midday - Restoration day
Saturday 23rd October - Greenwood Gully - 1pm – 3pm - Port Hills Revegetation Release
Sunday 26 October - Charlesworth Reserve - 10am–midday - Planting day
Saturday 30th October - Bush Head lower - 1pm – 3pm - Port Hills Revegetation Release

But all of that is a drop in the bucket compared to how much biodiversity has been saved by hard-working groups of volunteers who lobby against *bad* forestry practices. Our biggest coup to date was making Kahurangi declared a National Park:

"Kahurangi national park, at 452,002 hectares is now the second largest New Zealand national park. Translated, its name has a number of meanings including 'treasured possession', an apt description of its wonderfully diverse natural and recreational values. In places it is an untracked wilderness, elsewhere a wonderful network of tracks lets you explore wild rivers, high plateaux and alpine herbfields, and coastal forests.

Now we're working on the Lewis Pass region...as far as I'm concerned, if you're not part of the solution, you ARE part of the problem.

Hal Lewis? Not so much.

http://climateprogress.org/2010/10/11/hal-lewis-resigns-from-the-american-physical-society/

Although he was terrific as Grampa Munster.

I know some of you were happy, some of you were sad that the posting stopped at 1000 posts. It was an errant setting, that took a while to find, that prevented it from continuing.

That's been fixed, so for better or for worse, post away.