We are now -HERE-

This SOS Forests (the original version) will remain up, as an archive of art and work of art on its own, but new posts (subsequent to this one) will be posted

-HERE-

Additional comments will be accepted to existing posts here at SOSF ver. 1.0 (well, 1.3, actually, in our minds). However, we would really like it if you would give the new site a try

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Thank you all very much for your visits and participation. But we are not done. This is a move up to bigger and better. Your future visits and participation in the new, improved SOS Forests will also be very much appreciated. By the way, you can get there by clicking

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[We are pleased to present these guest shots at sitting ducks from the affable Bear Bait]

OK, Bobzee. You know what the real deal is on all this: money. It is about the money.

To avoid taxes,  big money creates trusts.  It is the only way with high death taxes to pass on wealth.  Your kid can be a director of the trust,  and be paid handsomely to manage the money.  The catch is that trusts have to dispose of a percentage of their dough each year.  Give it away,  as it were.

So science types, universities, and NGOs line up to take their money. They are given the money to research whatever the trustees think they might like researched. Idle heirs,  living well, tilt to “causes”, and social engineering projects, like “saving” the planet.  If you romance them well enough, you get paid well, get to pursue your scientific specialty, and maybe or maybe not, the world will benefit. But mostly, you are turning the tricks your John prefers. The Sun Oil fortune is the Pew Trust. Do you really think the Sun Oil founders went to grave knowing someday their money would be used to shut down the oceans to fishing,  among other things? Naw. Trust managers hijacked the trust, aided and abetted by heirs. Turned it into a liberal’s goose of the golden eggs. And there are hundreds of trusts just like that spewing money to support outcome based science.

None of this species splitting and ESA stuff comes out of thin air. Someone has to be making themselves the world’s authority on some sub species of plant or animal, then writing about it, and then promoting it to become the next ESA candidate. That, of course, translates to a lifetime job. You are the authority and protector. Lucky you.

If we don’t watch out, we will have someone assigned to every plant and animal on earth,  and just their science and research will probably cause more harm than good to come to all species. I have often thought about Audubon, and how many critters he killed every day.  Just to look at them up close.

For those who are not of the lucky sperm club or who have not made millions in commerce,  there is the opportunity to “save” the earth by giving small amounts of money to BINGO’s,  the Big International NonGovernmental Organizations, like Greenpeace, Sierra Club, Nature Conservancy, ad nauseum. You get to feel good and have a tax write-off. Again, good intentions are the product of financial manipulation, the tax write-off. You tithe to our Earth’s saviors.  Oh,  goody for you!! And what a better hook to get you into doling out your cash than a charismatic critter or plant that needs saving in some special habitat most certainly doomed to be farmed, logged, mined or otherwise developed.

Ducks Unlimited buys land with hunter’s money to keep hunters from shooting ducks. The Rocky Mtn Elk Foundation does likewise. Hunting is not a catch and release sport, so fishermen fare somewhat better. Their NGOs allow some fishing on waters they “protect.”

Giving is driven by tax deductions, advertising, and applied guilt. No matter, the process is about saving the Earth and getting enough money to pursue that goal, with government help. For trusts, foundations, any non-profit, and people with a need to reduce their tax load, the ESA is perfect. Just dandy. And it is a NIMBY deal. You do it to someone else,  somewhere else. Just so you can feel good, look good, or make a good impression on someone else. It is not really about the animals or plants. Most giving is a Ralph Lauren moment on a JC Penney budget. Look at me!

So the Zappa moment in jumping meadow mice, the Don’t Squeeze the Prebles Movement, is about money. Who has control, the power, and the money. If you are a biologist working for whoever has the money at this time, saving the ESA listed meadow mouse will pay more bills than your being a laborer on the road crew or the framing crew that will build the house in the meadow now used by the mouse. If you work it right, you have a lifetime job and the poor jaboney building houses has a job until this one runs out, which is yesterday.

And so it goes. The bankers who handle the NGO money until it is needed, the fund raisers, the smooth talkers, the shills and go-to boys and girls, the science types, the trust puppies and their trust management yes men and women, the list is very long, and it is all about people sucking on the teat of the ESA and for the sweet milk of success they are enjoying. It is an industry. It is a cornerstone of urban living and lifestyles. 

So put some more ethanol in the tank and bitch about food prices and mega-Ag ruining the environment by fence row to fence row plantings, fossil fuel fertilizers, and the like.  Bitch about slow responses to forest fire fighting, and then brag about stopping the loggers trying to reduce fuels. But most of all, keep those dollars flowing to the BINGOs, the little NGOs,  and the like. They want your money. They exist on your money! Send them more!!! Save on those taxes. Maybe they can find a sub-sub-species of Prebles, and raise some more ruckus, file some more lawsuits, let the monkey dance for more money, forever and forever.

I will tell that the defining moment for me in this species deal was when I read the justification the Gallatin Natl Forest gave for funding a program to eliminate brook trout (salvelinus fontanalis), rainbow trout, and brown trout from some tributaries of the Shields river. The money came from the money Exxon paid to the USFS in the Exxon Valdez tanker spill in Alaska. Not only was the money not being spent on fixing the Alaskan environment, it was being used to kill fish in Montana. This was a save the Bulltrout, save the Cutthroat trout deal, using blood money from an oil spill to kill non-native chars and trout. They had the money and a place to spend it. Just the iron in the irony of the deal was more than enough to build another double hulled oil tanker.

It is truly about the money. If a critter is ever helped, it was by accident. And I finally figured it out when my grandson asked me if I knew what the first thing that went through a bumble bee’s brain when it hit a  pickup truck windshield. I didn’t know. He told me: it’s his butt.

I asked if that was an Epiphanbee? He just looked at me in way that implied “wateryoutalkingabout?” Well, it was for me and the bee, too, I suppose.

It is all about the money. — bear bait

The Meadow Jumping Mouse (Zapus hudsonius) is a cute little rodent distinguished by a long tapering tail, large hind feet, small front feet, and a propensity to hop erratically through the grass when disturbed. Sometimes called a kangaroo mouse, Zapus hudsonius is native and common to North America and Asia, frequenting hayfields and wheat farms as well as native grasslands. Billions of the little critters live in perfect harmony with graziers and agriculturalists across two continents.

From the Animal Diversity Web, University of Michigan Museum of Zoology [here]:

Meadow jumping mice may be found throughout northern North America. They are found from the Atlantic Coast to the Great Plains in the United States, northward throughout the north eastern and north central states to the arctic tree-line of Alaska and Canada, and as far south as Georgia, Alabama, Arizona, and New Mexico. They have the widest known distribution of mice in the subfamily Zapodinae.

It might then come as some surprise to you sports fans to learn that the meadow jumping mouse has been listed as a Threatened Species under the Endangered Species Act. Not every meadow jumping mouse was listed, just the Preble’s Mouse (Zapus hudsonius preblei). The Preble’s MJM are a sub-species, allegedly. There has been a lot of taxonomy done on Zapus. Here are just a few of the species and sub-species alleged to exist today:

Z. trinotatus orarius · Z. burti · Z. hudsonicus · Z. hudsonicus acadicus · Z. hudsonius (Jumping Mouse) · Z. hudsonius acadicus · Z. hudsonius alascensis (Alaska Jumping Mouse) · Z. hudsonius alscensis · Z. hudsonius americanus · Z. hudsonius campestris · Z. hudsonius canadensis · Z. hudsonius hardyi · Z. hudsonius hodsonius · Z. hudsonius hudsonicus · Z. hudsonius hudsonius · Z. hudsonius hudsonsius · Z. hudsonius intermedius · Z. hudsonius ladas · Z. hudsonius luteus (Meadow Jumping Mouse) · Z. hudsonius pallidus · Z. hudsonius preblei (Preble’s Meadow Jumping Mouse) · Z. hudsonius tenellus · Z. insignis · Z. orarius · Z. princeps (Pacific Jumping Mouse) · Z. princeps chrysogenys · Z. princeps cinereus · Z. princeps curtatus · Z. princeps idahoensis · Z. princeps kootenayensis · Z. princeps kootenayonsis · Z. princeps kootnayensis · Z. princeps luteus · Z. princeps major · Z. princeps minor · Z. princeps oreganus · Z. princeps oregonus (Big Jumping Mouse) · Z. princeps pacificus · Z. princeps palatinus · Z. princeps princeps (Western Jumping Mouse)

We say alleged because there is some dispute. For instance, Z.h. intermedius (Mysterious MJM) is supposedly a cross between Z.h. campestris (Bear Lodge MJM) and Z.h. pallidus (Common Ordinary Everyday MJM), but nobody can say for sure. The reason for the confusion is the alleged sub-species look identical and interbreed like randy rodents if given half a chance. In addition, there is some dispute that Z.h. preblei (Preble’s MJM) even exists in a separate genetic way (DNA testing has been far from conclusive) from Z.h. campaestris (Bear Lodge, Room #4 MJM), Z.h. intermedius (Half-and-Half MJM), or Z.h. pallidus (Plain Run-of-the-Mill Backyard MJM).

Despite the confusion as to its very existence, the US Fish and Wildlife Service listed the Preble’s MJM in 1998. The listing included “critical habitat designations” that banned human citizens from using their own private property without compensation, in effect stealing those properties in direct violation of the US Constitution. This abortion of God-given, constitutionally-protected, human rights was performed by the USFWS, even though MJM’s love farm fields and prosper in them!!!!!

But so what? The USFWS pulls this kind of junk all the time. Their motto: sieg heil and we spit on freedom, rights, and the entire human race.

Anyhow, after a variety of reactionary expressions of ill-will towards the USFWS, vicious though disoriented administrators decided last February to delist the Preble’s MJM, sort of. The New Plan is to delist the little hopping rodents in Wyoming, but not in Colorado.

Why did the USFWS use an arbitrary state boundary as an ecological ecotone transitional demarcation between a common species and a questionable sub-species? Is there anything scientific in that?

Absolutely not. The partial delisting is as political as it can be, with zero science included.

Continue reading this entry »

At noon today InciWeb reported the Corral Fire near Malibu to be 4,720 acres and 40 percent contained. The winds have moderated, and containment is expected to increase rapidly. At least 52 structures have been destroyed and another 27 have been damaged.

The InciWeb report [here] includes this bit of candor:

Significant Events — Saturday’s suppression effort was notable by the number of aircraft used to support forces on the ground: 15 helicopters and 13 air tankers, including two super-scoopers and a DC-10 Supertanker.

They evidently threw the kitchen sink at the Corral Fire. This has not been the style, frankly, exhibited for the last few fire seasons. The “fire community” has been bingeing on megafires and shirking from fighting any wildfire as much as possible.

It could be that Southern Californians are tired of catastrophic fires and have expressed those opinions to their political bosses.

The feedback the public has received to date from the bosses has been to blame the victims for failing to build underground homes, or for building any home at all that might someday be in the path of a firestorm emanating from public “wildlands.”

Blaming the victims does not go over well, especially with the victims. It’s a sure way to alienate voters, sometimes with a degree of alienation that borders on howling rage.

Perhaps the peasants have been heard this time. After all, some the homeowner victims of this year’s fires have been multi-millionaires and they carry more weight with the “officials” than your regular burned-out peasant. Malibu is not your average residential community, wealth-wise (among other divergences). Money talks, as they say.

So the entire air tanker fleet was called in to fire retard the Corral Fire, like right now. The cost figures have not been released yet.

We suspect that the Gummit decided to spend more than $100 per acre, their self-imposed target for most wildfires. We suspect they discarded the USDA Audit that called for letting fires burn to increase their acreage, thereby reducing per acre costs. We suspect that the Incident Commander will not be targeted by a national investigation for spending too much on fire suppression, as was threatened in the Audit.

The Corral Fire has not been declared a whoofoo (wildland fire use fire) or a whoofurb (wildland fire used for resource benefit). There are no resource benefits to the Corral Fire; there are only resource detriments. Among them are the serious erosion and mudflows that are sure to follow this year’s fires in SoCal. The final tally of homes destroyed by the Corral Fire will not be known until a few winters from now, after the vegetation grows back.

And it will grow back. The fuel hazard is not abated by fire, it is only postponed. The chaparral will sprout back and within 10 or 15 years will present another holocaust waiting to happen.

Without fuels management, i.e. landscape management, this vicious cycle will repeat again and again. Defensible space extends to the furthest reaches of the landscape. Landscape stewardship is the only solution that has a prayer of stopping the cycle of holocaust.

The 2007 Fire Season is not finished. The Corral Fire near Malibu, CA is 2,200 acres at last report (this morning on InciWeb [here]). Thirty-five homes have burned, and an additional 200 homes have been evacuated in the Corral Canyon, Malibu Bowl, and El Nido neighborhoods.

Humidity is low in SoCal and Santa Ana winds are gusting to 60 mph. In late November of 2003, following the Cedar Complex Fires (750,000 acres, 3500 homes burned), Santa Ana winds rose up (again) and blew an ash storm across San Diego. This years SoCal fires (600,000 acres, 1600 homes burned) and the current wind storm are eerie recapitulations of 2003.

A second fire is burning near the town of Ramona in San Diego County. Ramona was the epicenter of the Witch Fire in October. Evidently not all the fuels were consumed. Ramona is still recovering from devastation, and additional disasters are untimely to say the least.

 U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein last week introduced four bills designed to address fire suppression costs and increase federal aid to fire victims [here]. Careful examination of the bills will reveal that zero, zip, nada fuels management on federal lands is contemplated, encouraged, or funded. That’s right, sports fans, there is nothing in any of the bills that addresses fuels.

In the opinion of the US Senator from the late, great, fried and refried state of California, the fuels should be left untouched and the citizens should be forced to build bomb shelters for huddling in government-mandated firestorms. We can spend billions “rebuilding” Iraq, but not one penny to prevent holocausts in the good ole USA, because holocausts are good for America, I guess.

Feinstein and her ilk have burned millions of acres and thousands of homes, and they are quite proud of it. The stupid, nasty proles who have the unmitigated gall to live in flammable homes deserve federal “cleansing” fires to teach them a lesson, a lesson about who is on top and who is on the bottom. Old-growth chaparral is much more valuable to the power elite than the funky humanoid slobs who dare to live outside the concentration camps (which, by the way, are also quite flammable).

So let’s do absolutely nothing about the fuels. No touch, let it burn, and too bad you stinking proles. Big Dianne is on the job, and she wants more holocaust. Burn, baby, burn. Oh yes, and vote for Porky Dianne, lamebrain arsonist wacko from the Land of Fruits and Nuts.

It is very frustrating to watch one’s home burn down in a federal-mandated fire and then to observe the Beltway Circus shoot off into outer space afterwards. It also ought to be alarming to all California residents who have not been burned out yet to know that Dianne and the Lamebrains prefer the fires to your homes.

 The acreage totals for the 2007 Fire Season have been “adjusted” at the National Interagency Fire Center [here]. A month ago, during the Witch Fire and the others in SoCal, 2007 totals were reported by the National Fire News to be more than 9.2 million acres. Today the NIFC reports 2007 totals to-date are 8.9 million acres. Somehow 300,000 acres got erased. That’s a big number and it leaves this citizen extremely distrustful of any NIFC statistics.

Distrust is rampant, in fact. The government is lying (again) with the intention and outcome of wreaking disaster upon the citizery and our landscapes. It is a sad, sad day in America (again).

A recent comment to a prior post reminded us that the term silviculture is poorly understood. Silviculture is the tending of forests, and as such it encompasses a wide variety of treatments, practices, and activities associated with the protection, maintenance, and perpetuation of forests.

In The Practice of Silviculture by David M. Smith (8th Ed., 1986, John Wiley and Sons), that recognized world’s foremost authority [here] defined silviculture as:

… the art of producing and tending a forest; the application of knowledge of silvics in the treatment of a forest; the theory and practice of controlling forest establishment, composition, structure, and growth (Spurr, 1979). Silvicultural practice consists of various treatments that may be applied to forest stands to maintain and enhance their utility for any purpose. The duties of the forester are to analyze the natural and social factors bearing on each stand and then devise and conduct the treatments most appropriate to the objective of management.

Silviculture is a broad set of practices used to achieve the forest conditions desired. It is not merely a harvest system.

This is an important point and one where confusion is common. The following are harvest systems or treatments, NOT silviculture: clearcutting, selective cutting, group selection, thinning from below, thinning from above, prescribed fire, prepared fire, whoofoos, tree planting, precommercial thinning, etc.

Silviculture is not a single treatment but a collection of practices with specific forest goals in mind. The desired future forest condition is the target, the object of the art, and the particular artistic tool used is of minor importance at best. Just as great paintings may be watercolors, oils, or other media, so too great silviculture is not dependent on the methods used. It’s the final picture that counts.

Silviculture is often divided into two categories: even-aged management and uneven-aged management. Both these systems take into account the origin of the stands, intermediate treatments, and final harvest decisions. As such they are, broadly speaking, systems for tree farming. Traditionally, silviculture has been applied with commercial timber harvest goals in mind.

Silviculture as applied to native forests, however, is or should be much more than tree farming systems. Forests are very different from tree farms, as we have emphasized in past posts. Forests and tree farms differ structurally, biologically, ecologically, in their uses, and in their management. Forests are vast tracts of native ecosystems; tree farms are agricultural businesses. Forests have natural histories; tree farms have artificial histories. Forests are mostly publicly-owned; tree farms are mostly privately-owned.

Silviculture in true forests is concerned with restoring sustainable heritage conditions and thereby protecting forests from catastrophic fires. Restoration forestry is a silvicultural system, broadly speaking, that is neither even-aged nor uneven-aged. The objectives of restoration forestry include maintenance and enhancement of multi-aged, low density stands with a predominance of older, fire-resilient trees. Those are forest goals, not tree farming goals, but they are silvicultural.

It is common for discussions about forest management to get sidetracked and hung up on the harvest systems. This is called, “failing to see the forest for the trees.” What matters in restoration forestry-type silviculture are the trees that are left, not the trees that are removed.

In so many cases, such as the Angora Creek watershed in South Lake Tahoe and the Metolius River watershed in the Oregon Cascades, silviculture has been micro-managed with regulations limiting the trees removed. No trees may be cut larger than X, by decree of some ignorant judge acting on political imperatives, not silvicultural ones. As a consequence, those forests and so many others have burned fiercely in canopy fires that have killed all the trees, exploded into nearby towns, decimated landscapes, and left wastelands behind.

It is for that reason that we present this discussion about the true nature and proper definition of silviculture. Misunderstandings and misapplication of the term have led to some horrific megafires. Silviculture is useful in that it can save forests and nearby communities from holocaust.

It is time to raise the level of the discussion above harvest systems. The future condition of forests is the real issue, and whether our forests persist because they are tended with expert care, or are burned to the ground in raging megafires. Silviculture holds the answers, but we must understand that silviculture is broad and much more than a set of cutting practices.

The dead tree media reported yesterday that U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has declared global warming “unequivocal” [here]. General Ban said:

“The world’s scientists have spoken clearly and with one voice,” Ban said, looking ahead to an important climate conference in Bali, Indonesia, next month. “I expect the world’s policy makers to do the same.”

Well, sieg heil, Ban. Shall we all march in lockstep with the pathetic U.N.? Could it be that the U.N. is wrong? Has the U.N. ever been wrong before?

Have they ever been right? About anything?

The imposition of fascist pseudo-scientific myths in the name of science is nothing new. Hitler did it. Hilter’s Holocaust was backed by a consensus of German scientists. An excellent review of Third Reich science is Ecofascism: Lessons From the German Experience by Janet Biehl and by Peter Staudenmaier [here].

[Warning: this essay is published by AK Press, “a worker run book publisher and distributor organized around anarchist principles.” There is spyware in the cookies. Do not visit the AK homepage unless you have powerful anti-spyware software.]

Some quotes:

In fact, ecological ideas have a history of being distorted and placed in the service of highly regressive ends–even of fascism itself. As Peter Staudenmaier shows in the first essay in this pamphlet, important tendencies in German “ecologism,” which has long roots in nineteenth-century nature mysticism, fed into the rise of Nazism in the twentieth century. During the Third Reich, Staudenmaier goes on to show, Nazi “ecologists” even made organic farming, vegetarianism, nature worship, and related themes into key elements not only in their ideology but in their governmental policies. Moreover, Nazi “ecological” ideology was used to justify the destruction of European Jewry. Yet some of the themes that Nazi ideologists articulated bear an uncomfortably close resemblance to themes familiar to ecologically concerned people today.

Continue reading this entry »

Our favorite wildlife blog, Wolf Crossing [here], recently reported that western Great Lakes gray wolves are actually hybrids. The exisiting population, now numbering over 4,000 in Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin, are not pure wolves but wolf-coyote crosses, otherwise known as wolfotes.

The western Great Lakes gray wolf was on the Endangered Species List, but last March the US Fish and Wildlife Service delisted the “species” due to the burgeoning number of the predators. Predictably, an odd assortment of enviro groups including the Humane Society of the United States, Help Our Wolves Live, and the Animal Protection Institute filed suit in April [here].

The discovery that the wolves are not wolves threatened to throw a monkey wrench into the gears of the litigation. What is the point of “protecting” hybrids? But the USFWS countered that it knew the wolfotes were hybrids all along. From Wolf Crossing:

Rolf O. Peterson, a wolf ecologist at Michigan Technological University and the leader of the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Eastern Gray Wolf Recovery Team, said it had been known for some time that hybridization between gray wolves and coyotes was happening in the region.

What’s new in this paper,” he said, “is that they found no evidence of hybridization with coyotes in the historic samples — and no pure historic wolves in the current samples.”

Moreover, two “evolutionary biologists” (whatever those hybrids are) reporting in the journal Biology Letters recommended that “these animals should remain protected… while researchers determine the full extent of hybridization with coyotes.”

In other words, the fact (well-known to the USFWS but now publicly revealed) that the wolves are not wolves is a reason to relist them (as wolfotes, we suppose). This thinking is in line with the Mexican Gray Wolf program, also run by the USFWS, in which the animals are actually wolf-dog hybrids, or wolfogs. This fact is also well-known to insiders.

In stark contrast, the sparred owl has been utterly ignored. The sparred (or botted) owl is a cross between a spotted owl and a barred owl. The latest USFWS plan calls for blasting barred owls with shotguns to “protect” spotted owls [here]. But those birds are the same species, or close to it, and they are known to interbreed. The USFWS makes no mention of sparred (or botted) owls in their owl blasting plan, and there is every likelihood that sparred owls will be blasted by shotgun-toting “biologists” because nobody can tell the difference between any of the “species.”

This is wrong (in many respects). If wolfotes and wolfogs are to be “protected,” then sparred (or botted) owls should be, too.

And why stop there? What about beefalos? It seems highly unevolutionary, biologically speaking, as well as inhumane, to sell beefalo meat in grocery stores right next to the salmon, for instance. Shouldn’t beefalos be allowed to roam free and commune with Mother Nature, freaks of nature though they might be?

And what about ligers, zebronkeys, and jackalopes? This old world is big enough for all God’s creatures, isn’t it?

We want our favorite hybrid listed: that rare cross and the answer to nearly every question that can be asked, the elephino.

With some apprehension, because we know we will regret it, we invite your suggestions as to which hybrids you would like to see added to the Endangered Species List. Warning: creative suggestions will be posted, but not the juvenile ones.

This guest column was written by Damien M. Schiff, an attorney with the non-profit Pacific Legal Foundation, which has represented a group of Tuolumne County organizations in forest management litigation against environmental groups. The essay originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle Nov 5th [here].

Tomorrow – Saturday afternoon, November 17 – tune in to San Francisco’s KSFO (AM 560) to hear PLF attorney Damien Schiff discuss how environmentalist lawsuits have helped magnify the horrific forest fires that California has experienced in recent years. Schiff will be interviewed on the Barbara Simpson Program starting at 5:05 p.m. PST.

Misguided Litigation Magnifies Wildfires

by Damien M. Schiff

The massive toll catastrophic wildfire exacts on human lives and property is well documented.

Since Oct. 20, the ongoing Southern California fires have scorched nearly 500,000 acres - roughly three-fourths the size of Rhode Island, prompted the largest evacuation since the Civil War, caused 12 deaths and injured hundreds, all at a cost yet to be determined, but some think will top $2 billion. And there are other consequences as well, including endangered wildlife dead, watersheds dramatically damaged by ash and erosion, and native plants wiped out.

But the underlying causes of these monster fires aren’t as well understood. Why do they keep happening at such intensity? One reason is that for years, groups that literally make a living by obstructing government efforts to manage forests have filed myriad lawsuits intended to delay, stall or stop anything resembling science. They seek to prevent the federal government from implementing balanced efforts to manage the land, including efforts to thin forests and brushland to help prevent catastrophic wildfire.

Continue reading this entry »

It is the greatest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming; it is a SCAM. Some dastardly scientists with environmental and political motives manipulated long-term scientific data to create an illusion of rapid global warming. Other scientists of the same environmental whacko type jumped into the circle to support and broaden the “research” to further enhance the totally slanted, bogus global warming claims. Their friends in government steered huge research grants their way to keep the movement going. Soon they claimed to be a consensus.

The author of the above is John Coleman, the founder of The Weather Channel, and a professional meteorologist for over 50 years. For the rest of Coleman’s (rapidly spreading) no-nonsense essay, see ICECAP [here].

ICECAP, the International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project, is a web institute (and a model of sorts for our new site). They are attempting to be:

… the portal to all things climate for elected officials and staffers, journalists, scientists, educators and the public.

ICECAP has a bevy of the top climatological talent on their Expert List. They have kept the GW Debate going despite political efforts to squelch dissent. They are winning the GW Debate, as a matter of fact. ICECAP is making a difference.

SOS Forests kudos to Joe D’Aleo, Executive Director, and all the experts at ICECAP. Kudos and thank you for setting a great example.