Author: postMigrator

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“Mekong forests are also home to a range of endangered animals,
including the clouded leopard, tiger, and Malayan sun bear.”
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NATIONALGEOGRAPHIC.COM/NEWS

U.S. Major Importer of Illegal Asian Timber, Study Says
Stefan Lovgren for National Geographic News
May 13, 2008

Vietnam has become a hub for processing Asia’s
illegally logged timber, much of which is sold in
the United States as outdoor furniture,
conservationists say.

In a report released in March, the U.K.-based
nonprofit Environmental Investigation Agency
(EIA) and its Indonesian partner Telapak warned
that the illegal timber trade is threatening some
of the last intact forests in Southeast Asia,
especially in Laos.

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As the climate warms, there will be more, larger, hotter forest fires…&
they won’t distinguish between public & private lands…

ASW

—————————- Original Message —————————-
Subject: Cost of building homes in harm’s way
From: “Lance Olsen” <lance@wildrockies.org>
Date: Wed, May 14, 2008 10:26 am
To: “cmcr-outreach” <cmcr-outreach@vortex.wildrockies.org>
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————————-
“Big price to protect homes

“Suppressing wildfires in the wilderness-urban
interface accounts for 85 percent of firefighting
costs in the United States, according to the
report.”
—————————–

The Denver Post
Article Last Updated: 05/14/2008 12:16:43 AM MDT

Growing focus on fires leaves other
Forest Service programs withering
By Steve Lipsher

The U.S. Forest Service plans to spend $1.9
billion – nearly half of its annual budget – to
prevent and fight wildfires this summer.

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Note the US Forest Service official’s quote at the end: smells like something’s afoot…

ASW

———————————————
“The findings run contrary to expectation. It was
thought that more trees meant more carbon being
drawn from the atmosphere. ‘If you suppress fires
and lots of little trees show up, then you ought
to store more carbon,’ says ecologist Richard
Houghton of the Woods Hole Research Center in
Falmouth, Massachusetts.”
—————————————————————

Nature
14 May 2008   doi:10.1038/news.2008.818

News

Forest-fire management ‘raises carbon emissions’

California study suggests fire-free forests store less carbon.

Quenching forest fires leads to more carbon in
the air, says new research carried out in
Californian forests. The discovery suggests that
forests spared from fire may release more of the
greenhouse gas into the air than they absorb.

Decades of suppressing natural fires has
increased the number of surviving trees in
California’s forests. But this growth has been at
the expense of larger trees, which are less
resilient to drought and other stresses than
smaller, younger trees, resulting in a decline in
the total amount of carbon stored in these
forests.

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The new study is written by many of the people
who wrote the so-called Working Group I report,
the first of a trio of major assessments released
last year by the IPCC.

It concludes “significant changes” are already
occurring among natural systems on all
continents, with the exception of Antarctica, and
in most oceans.
—————————————————

Alalam News  (Tehran, Iran)
Wednesday,  14   May   2008

‘Significant’ Climate Change Occurring
<http://www.alalam.ir/english/en-NewsPage.aspnewsid=032060120080514111031>

PARIS, May 14–A wide-scale study published
Wednesday has strengthened warnings, spelt out
last year by UN scientists that climate change is
already on the march.

The paper, published in Nature, goes beyond the
scope taken by a landmark report issued by the
UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) in February 2007.

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