Interesting piece. This is an excellent example of the "science" that is being used to advocate the notion of accelerating global warming, atmospheric instability the need to wipe out or severely limit human civilizations as a necessary means of preventing it.
Scientists have career ambitioons just like everyone else. To advance they need to get published. To get published they need to focus their efforts on "hot" topical areas and on the specialized journals that spring up to support them. NPO advocacy groups accelerate the growth of favored "hot" topocal areas and stimulate intergovernmental activities and policy documents that in turn offer further grist for the mills of both the NPOs and the "scientists on the make". This is a fairly predictable process that has occurred in areas as wide ranging as; health care and disease prevention; the right way to externally stimulate economic and political development in poor, badly governed countries; and now global warming.
Very little of it has produced any tangible benefit for anyone but the various practicioners of the process itself who often do rise to a prominence they would otherwise not find.
In the case at hand the government of Canada has acccepted the Kyoto regime, but also put forward the interesting notion that, because of its large forest areas, limitations on their use of fossil fuels should be reduced relative to those applied to people in nations less gifted with such forests. The U.S. also put this argument forward during the Kyoto negotiation, but later took the more honorable course of rejecting the treaty entirely. Canada has clung to its Hypocrisy, the treaty and the forest argument.
Now an ambitious Stanford scientist has devised a numerical simulation that evidently considers the interplay of (only) two key variables in the myriad physical processes involved, namely the amount of carbon locked up in forests (until the tree dies and decays) and the associated moisture it releases into the atmosphere and cloud cover that results. He offers a "scientific" paper that debunks the Canadian forest argument - something that, in the current debate, is sure to get published and advance his career.
What is lost in all this is the fact that the climate of the earth has never been stable, either on geologic, millenial, century or decades-long time scales. Our planet's atmosphere is known to have been affected by the numerous shifts in the magnetic polarity of the planet, volcanism, asteroid impacts, continentaL drift, the advance and retreat of forests and deserts, the cycles of soilar activity, and many other factors that operate in a complex and highly non-linear way in which cause and effect become mixed and nearly everything effects everything else.
So in this milieu our ambitious Stanford scientist comes up with his absurdly simplifies numerical simulation of unspecified accuracy and rigor, announces his rather vague new finding - 'temperate zone forests are less effective in combatting warming than tropical ones', and gets himself published - a sure thing.
No one notices that despite the truly astounding advances in computing power over the past few decades, the very real science of numerical wheather prediction has hardly advanced at all in terms of the extent into the future in which its predictions are valid (about two weeks). This is an inescapable result of the intrinsic complexity and non-linearity of the interlocking processes themselves and the sensitive dependence on initial conditions exhibited by the equations being modelled. With this in mind, one should ask himself 'of what possible real scientific merit could be this long range, over-simplifified prediction in advancing the understanding of our atmosphere? The answer is - almost none at all. However in the very artificial, and unscientific, world of the advocates of limited human civilization and development, and the various hypocritical arguments about how those limits should be imposed or measured - all facilitated by a self-serving network of NGOs, academics, and international bureaucrats - , this is surely grist for the mill.
