My five-year-old daughter has a few animal books, published for children by National Geographic. She likes them very much. They are not political. Written long before global warming became an issue.
Therefore, since we have beloved NatGeo animal books, when I saw a Facebook post about a NatGeo article related to trees, I called her over and told her about it. And asked her if she would like to read it with me. I explain things as we go along and also use articles as a reading lesson.
However, this turned out to be a very bad idea.
The article turned out, not to be about the beauty of nature, but how trees are going to destroy the planet because they exude methane.
Because you will find it hard to believe that this article says, here is a link to it, so you can enjoy it for yourselves here.
The title of the article should have of course warned me off:
Trees release flammable methane—here’s what that means for climate
To summarize, the Brazilian rainforest is subject to the overflow of rivers and becomes a swamp for many months each year.
This swamp environment evidently causes the trees to produce methane. The discovery was made in 1907, then forgotten about…until now…during the global warming hysteria.
A neat little video as part of the article shows a small blue metal pipe inserted into one of the trees, and indeed the tree acts as a sort of blowtorch. Let’s assume that it’s accurate.
I found this whole idea a bit strange. As part of cold weather research on ultra-low natural temperatures on infrastructure and living things, I’m lucky to spend a day or two a week in a northern pine forest, sometimes more. And have done so for many years.
I’ve never seen a tree exhibit spontaneous combustion. And fresh wood is very hard to use as firewood. Getting it to burn is very difficult.
Also, in natural forest fires, I’ve never seen anything that would indicate the trees are explosive or extremely flammable. If a tree is alive and healthy, it will resist fire up to a point.
But in any case, the article starts building hysteria that trees are going to destroy the earth since methane is a greenhouse gas.
National Geographic sounds the alarm in full volume:
“At the global scale, this could be huge”
“The emissions from an individual tree are small,” Covey (the chief researcher on the tree methan project) said. “But there are several trillion trees. At the global scale, this could be huge.”
Covey just published a paper in New Phytologist that is, in essence, a call for help from a host of disciplines not yet focused on this (methane) issue.
His coauthor is J. Patrick Megonigal, a tree researcher at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Maryland.
So it seems we have some high-powered groups going after the trees.
And we can expect more and more trees = methane articles because…just mention the words “global warming” and receive funding to publish.
My daughter asks if National Geographic is going to try and kill all the trees
As we read on, and before being informed at the end of the article, that trees actually have a strong net methane scrubbing/absorption effect, it does seem as though trees are going to send the world into catastrophic heat, because of their methane production.
One tree is not a problem, the article informs us. But there are several trillion trees, and that’s a “huge problem.”
About halfway through the article, of which we skipped a lot because it wasn’t much fun, my daughter and I noticed the global warming message building into the usual hysteria.
And she asked if NatGeo wanted to kill all the trees. She’s heard AOC talk about the cows, thinks it’s hilarious, and wondered if that’s the direction the article was heading.
– “Well,” I said. “Even if the writers of the article want to kill the trees, they can’t.”
“Why Daddy?”
– “Because the trees belong to somebody. It might be the government of Brazil, it be a company that makes paper from the wood. But they won’t let anyone kill their trees. The owners have an army.”
“Oh like George Washington stopped the British soldiers from taking our rights.”
Smart kid.
But, just as we were ready to start thinking a tree war might break out, the article suddenly reverses course and informs us that there is nothing to worry about.
That most trees don’t have this wet swamp condition. And whose which do, have it just a few months a year. In fact, trees are net scrubbers of methane. So they are saving the planet.
Why then write this article and generate hysteria for nine-tenths of it?
Well, funding is for the purpose of stoking global warming alarm generation. If there’s no fire, no need for the firemen/women.
So stoking hysteria is a natural part of the global warming fear industry. To keep the industry going, they need scary articles, whether they are true or not.
I also wondered how the tree methane researchers knew how many trees there are in the world. I suppose the golden egg of global warming funding would be a grant to count them.
Dr. Joel Glass is an alternative energy engineer, working primarily in hydropower and solar thermal. He knows the limits of alternative energy and the very considerable downside for everything except hydropower. The maximum of total energy requirements met would be about 12% to 18% of what is needed.
He happens to be the author of the new bombshell book ICE AGE … 2025, which is found on Amazon here.
And would be glad to get comments on the book from readers at ma*****@**il.com
Trees also emit O2. Which is critical for combustion and fires. So trees cause fires. Another reason trees are bad.
Gee, this type of (climate hysteria) logic sure is fun.
Remember Sonny Bono and Micheal Kennedy were murdered by Trees by trees
The article mentioned truly must have been grant money inspired. For those who believe in the fraud methane is a stronger green house gas than carbon dioxide. However, the main factor about trees is that they are huge, huge sinks of carbon dioxide. This wasn’t even mention. However, in some of the UN COP meetings nations with large forests have argued that they should have to reduce emissions less because their forests adsorb so much carbon dioxide.
Quick!
Burn all those pesky trees before they kill us!