Dartmouth Study Calls for Deforestation

by Dave Blount | February 27, 2014 10:29 am

Dartmouth is not as well known as other Ivy League schools like Harvard and Columbia, but it may catch up if it keeps cranking up the moonbattery. The other day we read of an outlandish list of demands that would impose totalitarian liberalism on the campus; now we read of a plan to inflict environmental as well as economic havoc in the name of the debunked global warming hoax:

Snow farming is nothing new for ski area operators, who have long been cultivating the white stuff to help keep their slopes covered. Now, a recent study by researchers at Dartmouth College suggests that snow farming could also make sense on a larger scale, in the context of climate-change mitigation.

In a novel look at forests and snow, their report says that replacing forests with snow-covered meadows may provide greater climatic and economic benefits than if slow-growing trees are left standing in snowy high latitudes. In those areas, persistent snow cover reflects heat back into space, partially offsetting the effect of heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

Keep in mind that we are still enduring a record-cold winter, and that there has been no warming since the 1990s. Even the warmists tacitly admitted that it isn’t getting any warmer when they changed the name of their hoax from “global warming” to “climate change” – possibly as an interim step on the way back to the global cooling they used to terrorize the gullible in the 1970s. Why would we want to reflect heat back into space?

Because our pointy-headed Ivy League masters tell us we do.

Such a scenario could involve a cap-and-trade style program or ecosystem services market, in which land owners are paid to maintain snow cover rather than produce timber or conserve forests.

This would likely hobble the logging industry, thereby driving up unemployment and housing prices, as well as destroy forests. Allowing ideologically motivated environmental engineers to produce vacant fields of snow comes at a steep price.

As a reminder that warmists have no clue what they are talking about, and will wreak economic and environmental havoc pulling us first one way, then another:

Climate change mitigation projects, such as the Kyoto Protocol, encourage reforestation because growing forests take up carbon dioxide. But some studies suggest the cooling aspect of surface albedo could counterbalance the benefits of forest growth.

Albedo refers to the surface reflection back into outer space of the incoming solar energy that prevents the planet from becoming a frozen, lifeless, pointless ball of rock.

The frozen lifeless pointlessness of vacant fields of snow must be why moonbats prefer them even over human-free forests.

Nothing could be more frightening than these lunatics or people who listen to them in positions of authority.

On a tip from Bob Roberts. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.