Cut the trees

Not long ago, Nevada Sen. Harry Reid famously suggested that global warming may be causing an increased number of forest fires.

In fact, it may be the other way around.

"In the green scheme of things, trees are a good thing and deforestation is bad," Investors Business Daily pointed out on March 31. "We must plant as many trees as we can to suck up all that CO2, the pollutant that sustains all plant and therefore all animal life on earth. Old-growth forests must be protected from those nasty loggers.

"Trouble is, according to Thomas Bonnicksen, professor emeritus of forest science at Texas A&M University, forests left in 'pristine' condition have too many trees and too many dead ones, both of which provide fuel for the devastating forest fires that ravaged California last year," IBD reported.

Mr. Bonnicksen has authored a study available at the Web site of the California Forest Foundation (calforestfoundation.org). It shows that four recent large California wildfires produced 38 million tons of greenhouse gases through fire and subsequent decay of dead trees -- 10 million from the fires themselves and 28 million from the decay. That's equivalent to the emissions from 7 million cars for a year.

Mr. Bonnicksen reports by the time the un-logged forests burned they were clogged with 350 trees per acre, whereas 50 an acre is considered normal. Some California forests, he says, have more than 1,000 trees per acre, with young trees growing under big trees, serving as "ladder fuel" to make fires more devastating.

He advocates "thinning" the forests so they're less like time bombs waiting to explode. "Harvested trees can be turned into long-lasting wood products that store carbon," he notes, adding that it's important to remove trees destroyed by fires and insects "so that they don't decay and send more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere."

"So it just might be forest fires that are causing global warming," Investors Business Daily concluded, "not the other way around, as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently claimed."

Mr. Bonnicksen concludes that, "Reducing the number and severity of wildfires may be the single most important short-term action we can take to lower greenhouse gas emissions and really fight global warming."

Assuming there's anything man can do, that is, to alter a climate cycle that's been repeating every 15,000 years, since long before we had power plants, automobiles or even charcoal grills.