Ellen Engstedt - July 31, 2006
Montana Wood Products Association
Global Warming
It is impossible to escape the screaming headlines: climate change, polluted air, disappearing glaciers in national parks, raging forest fires, and record high temperatures all caused by global warming.
Movies are being made by self-proclaimed experts on the subject of global warming including Al Gore with his “The Inconvenient Truth”. Since I am not much of a movie goer, but am an avid reader, I have chosen instead to read “State of Fear” by Michael Crichton. At least the book is admittedly a piece of fiction whereas I have seen any number of letters to the editor in daily papers proclaiming the truth contained in the movie. I certainly can only hope these same people don’t vote if it only takes a slick 90-minute movie to fully inform them about the complex issues surrounding perceived global warming.
Some are blaming major forest fires around the world on climate change. I really don’t know about fires in Russia but I do know the reason there are so many fires in Montana and other parts of the western United States. It only takes a discussion with a forester to understand what is going on in the woods. The land can only support a given number of trees because they need water and nutrients in order to be healthy. When the stems number in the thousands per acre the competition for water and nutrients becomes acute. The condition becomes catastrophic when heat is added and the trees are dead. One strike of lightening and as they say “the rest is history”.
We all depend upon trees for our very breath. As we breathe in our bodies use oxygen and when we breathe out, we emit carbon dioxide. On the other hand, trees do exactly the opposite and by releasing oxygen they help to clean the air. Trees also help cool the air by shading and water evaporation. The thousands of leaves on a healthy 100-foot tree can take many gallons of water from the soil and breathe it into the air in a single growing season. The key word is healthy and our forests are anything but healthy.
In a frenzied consumption of wood fiber last year, Americans used more wood than metal, plastics, and cement combined. We are a nation of consumers and the products will come from somewhere else when we are not allowed to produce them locally. The “somewhere else” is increasingly overseas particularly China where the forests are being depleted at an alarming rate because of the lucrative world demand for timber and little to no environmental regulation. In addition to the imported wood fiber, the EPA estimates that on certain days 25 percent of Los Angeles, California’s air particulate matter also came from China due to ever increasing manufacturing in that country.
Earth changes historically cover, at a minimum, many decades and usually hundreds of years to determine a trend so when we only use statistics from the past few years that relate to climate, the results are terribly skewed. Those sounding the alarm on global warming will use the timeframe of 28 years between 1970 and 1998 as an example of dangerous warming caused by human activities. They do not, however, use the 22-year period between 1918 and 1940 when there was a like example of unexplained warming, I guess because it doesn’t help make their case for our impending doom.
Montana’s weather patterns over the past hundred years of record keeping have shown some interesting trends. The highest temperature recorded was 117 degrees on July 5, 1937 at Medicine Lake. The record number of consecutive days recorded over 90 degrees was 38 days, July through September at Crow Agency in 1922. Both of those records were set during the Dust Bowl days not in the 1970s, 80s, or 90s. Just for information, the lowest temperature on record was in January 1954 on Rogers Pass at 70 below zero.
So, enjoy your movies about global warming but watch them with an eye on the entertainment value, if there is any. And, I’ll keep promoting active forest management because it really is about the very air we breathe.
On behalf of the Montana Wood Products Association based in Helena, I am Ellen Engstedt. Thanks for listening.
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