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America was not "mostly forested", it was only about 46% forested before 1630

Forest Facts Metric

It is estimated that—at the beginning of European settlement—in 1630 the area of forest land that would become the United States was 423 million hectares or about 46 percent of the total land area. By 1907, the area of forest land had declined to an estimated 307 million hectares or 34 percent of the total land area. Forest area has been relatively stable since 1907. In 1997, 302 million hectares— or 33 percent of the total land area of the United States— was in forest land. Today’s forest land area amounts to about 70 percent of the area that was forested in 1630. Since 1630, about 120 million hectares of forest land have been converted to other uses—mainly agricultural. More than 75 percent of the net conversion to other uses occurred in the 19th century.

Is there a biomass index?

There's one for the US. Presumably other governments have something similar.

We had this dance already :
https://it.slashdot.org/story/...

As I said last time :
"Water diverted from the forest ranges from 7 to 17 percent of average flow throughout the year, with up to 54 percent of flow diverted from individual watersheds (table 5). A much higher percentage of average flow is diverted when intakes outside of the forest are considered (table 6)."

https://www.fs.fed.us/global/i...

That forest isn't as pristine as the researchers pretend it to be.

Climate change affects everything, but in close proximity to humans it's generally better to look for other causes ... because we are far better at fucking things up.

The paper says :
"Given its long-term protected status (59), significant human perturbations have been virtually nonexistent within the Luquillo forest since the 1930s, and thus are an unlikely source of invertebrate declines. "

Which is either stupidity or a lie.
"Water diverted from the forest ranges from 7 to 17 percent of average flow throughout the year, with up to 54 percent of flow diverted from individual watersheds (table 5). A much higher percentage of average flow is diverted when intakes outside of the forest are considered (table 6)."

https://www.fs.fed.us/global/i...

There has been a massive increase of diversion of the water from that rainforest.

https://www.fs.fed.us/global/i...

Lets not confuse the issue though ... it's all climate change.

Yeah, no. The Forest Service disagrees.

You just invented plywood!

Plywood is weaker than normal wood not stronger and definitely not stronger than steel.

Plywood that is weaker than wood exists. However the vast majority of the product is built and selected because it is stronger and more stable than wood. The greater the number of plys, the stronger it gets. Sure it has some weaknesses like bending strength but the trade off is a no-brainer. For nearly every applicable purpose, after crisscrossing the grain at 90 degrees and lamination its structural strength, resistance to warping, and and moisture resistance is vastly enhanced when compared to solid wood. Whether it's floors, walls, furniture, toys, almost anything you can think of, plywood wins. Except in beauty of course, whichis why it's hidden with edge banding! https://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/docu...

The only effective way of binding CO2 that we know of is planting forests, but the problem is that that amount of land that is available for forests is decreasing rather than increasing as people convert forest into agricultural, commercial and residential land.

You are only half correct. In many countries (such as Brazil), forest is being cut down for agriculture. However, in the most advanced economies (like the US), forest cover loss has slowed and even reversing to some extent as agricultural efficiency becomes higher and people move from rural to urban/suburban areas (see this graph).

The practice of making smoothed wood 1/4 inch smaller than the nominal size started some time after 1870. The first national standard was set it 1924 and has been revised several times. https://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/documnts/misc/miscpub_6409.pdf

The trees are fine. All this talk about trees is because the Califronia taxpayers will not build new infrastructure for farmers.

So you are telling me that the US Forest Service wants to build new irrigation projects for farmers. Here's the link to the actual forest service report. http://www.fs.fed.us/news/rele...

Here's photos of dead trees perhaps you'll claim photoshopped by the USDA? The Farmers? So they can implement the ultimate non-sequitur solution? http://www.fs.usda.gov/main/ca... So the warmer than normal temperatures and drought conditions have enabled bark beetles to infest and kill more trees, and you think this is a plot by farmers to build new irrigation projects that will have zero impact on the situation.

This is the logic that says - "Honey, the car broke down, so I'm buying a new furnace and computer."

What happens is the warmer and dryer conditions don't kill off the beetles, so they infest the trees and kill them. Under normal circumstances, they wouldn't do that. We have a similar issue near me with the Emerald ash borer, a beautiful green critter that has been devastating forests. As in miles of dead trees. http://ento.psu.edu/extension/... http://buffalonews.com/2016/06...

EAB isn't based on drought or temps, just accidentally introduced and no local predators. But no, the trees are not fine.Neither are teh ones in Cali. They're dead, Jim!

The SF Chronicle has degraded from a real newspaper to a poorly edited regurgitation in many cases. This seems to be a case where the author of the piece didn't actually check their facts.

I believe the "third" quote is just an error:
"There are about 21 million acres of trees spread across Californiaâ(TM)s 18 national forests, and the latest figures show 7.7 million of them â" more than one-third â" are dead. "

This quote is linked-cited to their other paper site, sfchronicle, and that article does not give those same numbers.

The sfchronicle article links to this http://www.fs.fed.us/sites/default/files/DROUGHT_book-web-1-11-16.pdf

The New York Times version of the article does NOT make the same "third are dead" claim and it links to a USDA release:

http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usda/usdahome?contentid=2016/11/0246.xml&contentidonly=true

That also does not make the "third are dead" claim.

As a non-professional forest person in California, the claim that a third of forested acres are "dead" or that a third of all trees are dead is demonstrably absurd.

I think someone slipped a digit somewhere and sfgate's editing is no longer good enough to trust anyone checked it. If anyone happens to see any original source making this claim, please let me know.

New paper, that says fires decreasing last decades, much less 100s years rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/371/16... Love the title: "...perceptions versus realities in a changing world" [Les Johnson, 2016-06-11]

Again, as I pointed out, land clearing fires decreased (among other factors involving direct human intervention). From that new paper:

"... During the first half century, the global average area burned decreased somewhat by about 7% [41]. This was largely attributed to human factors, such as increased fire prevention, detection and fire-fighting efficiency, abandonment of slash-and-burn cultivation in some areas and permanent agricultural practice in others. ..."

That's why I objected when Tom Nelson and Lonny Eachus and "Steven Goddard" accused scientists of fraud and dishonesty based on a graph that compares apples and oranges by grafting old data which includes intentional burns onto newer data that excludes intentional burns. Short 2015 explains why their accusations are wrong:

"... Intentional ('controlled') burning was used extensively for vegetation management on nonfederal lands, especially in the south-eastern US during the early 20th century. Although now used to a lesser extent (but on both federal and non-federal lands) in the US, intentional burning is not classified in the current reporting systems as 'wildfire' unless the controlled burn escapes and requires a suppression response. However, the early USFS wildfire activity summaries do include millions of hectares of intentional burning on 'unprotected' lands, which, until approximately the mid-20th century was viewed by the USFS as akin to wildfire, as something that should be prevented and ultimately eradicated (Pyne 1982). Controlled burning was accepted as a viable landmanagement practice over time and persists to this day (Melvin 2012); however, statistics regarding its use have not been included in summaries of 'wildfire' activity for several decades. ..."

That's exactly what I told you earlier, and it answers your repeated question about intentional burns in the USA. So when you claimed a "massive decline" in fires, what you really meant is that the older USFS data included intentional burns, but more recent statistics don't include intentional burns.

There's really no need to imply that mainstream scientists don't understand that direct human intervention is currently a bigger factor than climate change. That is, in fact, exactly what Pechony and Shindell 2010 Fig. 2A shows. The gray line (fires without direct human intervention) projects an "impending shift to a temperature-driven global fire regime in the 21st century, creating an unprecedentedly fire-prone environment. These results suggest a possibility that in the future climate will play a considerably stronger role in driving global fire trends, outweighing direct human influence on fire (both ignition and suppression), a reversal from the situation during the last two centuries."

In fact, three years ago I quoted the same paper

Oops, sorry. I forgot to add the forest fire data. Here it is :)
http://www.fs.fed.us/research/...

It's well-known that mosquitoes are nothing's favorite food, except perhaps species we only care about because they suppress mosquitoes...

Can you provide a citation for this? "Well-known" = "totally fabricated."

Mosquitoes are one of the primary foods of most bat populations. Little brown bats can eat up to 1500 mosquitoes in a single evening. Some bats eat as much as 1,000 mosquitoes in an hour.

We care about bats. Bats don't just serve to suppress mosquitoes. They also serve as pollinators. Given the problems that the bee populations have had in the last decade, bats are becoming increasingly important to agriculture in this pollinating role. Plus they protect agriculture by eating "thousands of tons" of agricultural pests each year.

The odds of them actually fining a reporter doing anything like reporting are nil. That is clearly not the intent of it, as it has an exception for reporting news. I guess the problem is writing the law in a way that disallows shooting commercials or movies, without creating some objectionable corner cases.

Unless there has actually been any issue with this, it's just another trumped up nonstory that will be inflated to cartoonish proportions in the comments to follow.

To be fair, the wording written in the Forest Service Handbook is incredibly vague, and encompasses all photography, not just commercial or news photography. http://www.fs.fed.us/specialus...

Guess what...
Do the Kochs really pay you that well?

I have a new tool when talking to deniers. I just use one word. RISK! Risk as a concept is well educated in American society.. EX-Smokers reduce their RISK of lung cancer for every year they are an EX-Smoker... So, if we talk about climate change and RISK it becomes very easy to bridge the topics... such as the RISK of invasive species spreading into new areas. http://www.fs.fed.us/ccrc/topi...

No, I just noticed that on my own. Apparently just the sites I tried to get information off of were closed down. http://www.census.gov/ http://www.fs.fed.us/ http://www.nps.gov/ Those were the ones that I tried to use.

Depending on whether you rake/clear the ground before or not ( and even if you do) large trees still can and do die:
http://www.fs.fed.us/psw/publications/documents/psw_gtr189/psw_gtr189_073-082_laudenslayer.pdf

If you select what you want to remove you can be more certain of the survival of the trees you want. Whereas if you use fire the results are not so controlled.

But fire is faster and less labour intensive (assuming you don't lose control of it - I believe there have been controlled burns that have gone out of control ).

http://www.fia.fs.fed.us/library/briefings-summaries-overviews/docs/ForestFacts.pdf

"It is estimated that—at the beginning of European settlement—
in 1630 the area of forest land that would become
the United States was 1,045 million acres or about 46
percent of the total land area. By 1907, the area of forest
land had declined to an estimated 759 million acres or
34 percent of the total land area. Forest area has been relatively
stable since 1907. In 1997, 747 million acres—or
33 percent of the total land area of the United States—
was in forest land. Today’s forest land area amounts to
about 70 percent of the area that was forested in 1630.
Since 1630, about 297 million acres of forest land have
been converted to other uses—mainly agricultural. More
than 75 percent of the net conversion to other uses
occurred in the 19th century."

And it does go on to describe the kinds of differences - one of which you mention - between historical and contemporary forest composition.

I tried to look up information on the Ouachita National Forest last year, and was warned by Google Chrome that the site was a potential malware host, with parts of the site coming from a .cn domain. I didn't push forward to the site to find out exactly what part of a .gov site would require .cn content.

It looks like they've fixed it now, though I'm really not sure... this sensible URL expands to a hundred character monstrosity that's just begging for a reverse-engineering attack.

haha, yeah.. i've never gone that "primitive". I'll fish if i'm on a kayak or canoe.. but never hunted anything for food (crayfish sometimes.. but doesn't really count).

The passes aren't for permission really, but more like a use fee. So they can keep the trails clear/clean and provide trashcans at trailheads and stuff. I use to just go out into nearby forest but lately i've enjoyed the Red River Gorge area and you absolutely cannot just go for a random hike.. you would certainly die, haha. Trailmap is a must in that place. Some of the most bizare land to walk through.

The downside is douchebags on the trail with you. Once i was just finished breaking camp and this guy comes into the area searching for stuff. He found a couple tent stakes and scooped them up and started huffing and puffing. I didn't leave them and certainly didn't know they were there. He just took the stakes and walked off, head held high. If he would have confronted me with that attitude, i'm sure i would have hurt him. The whole thing was so intrusive.

Anyways, here are the trails i enjoy most: http://www.fs.fed.us/r8/boone/documents/maps/rrg.pdf

And if you think they don't look difficult, checkout the topo: http://www.fs.fed.us/r8/boone/maps/topos/83slade.pdf Makes my spine hurt looking at it, hah.

haha, yeah.. i've never gone that "primitive". I'll fish if i'm on a kayak or canoe.. but never hunted anything for food (crayfish sometimes.. but doesn't really count).

The passes aren't for permission really, but more like a use fee. So they can keep the trails clear/clean and provide trashcans at trailheads and stuff. I use to just go out into nearby forest but lately i've enjoyed the Red River Gorge area and you absolutely cannot just go for a random hike.. you would certainly die, haha. Trailmap is a must in that place. Some of the most bizare land to walk through.

The downside is douchebags on the trail with you. Once i was just finished breaking camp and this guy comes into the area searching for stuff. He found a couple tent stakes and scooped them up and started huffing and puffing. I didn't leave them and certainly didn't know they were there. He just took the stakes and walked off, head held high. If he would have confronted me with that attitude, i'm sure i would have hurt him. The whole thing was so intrusive.

Anyways, here are the trails i enjoy most: http://www.fs.fed.us/r8/boone/documents/maps/rrg.pdf

And if you think they don't look difficult, checkout the topo: http://www.fs.fed.us/r8/boone/maps/topos/83slade.pdf Makes my spine hurt looking at it, hah.

It's mostly from simply flying into the wires. Some birds get electrocuted when they somehow manage to touch two wires at once. http://www.treesearch.fs.fed.us/pubs/32105

But suddenly I say: and some people want this same government in charge of our military and now I'll be modded troll into oblivion.

Fixed that for ya. Oh wait, still a dumb thing to say...?

The government is a very large and diverse group of people. Some of those people do legitimately deserve to be criticized, but many, many, many of them do not. They do their jobs daily and with excellence, often for little compensation.

To infer that the government would be bad at managing health care because of a single instance of idiotic training materials is an example of woefully poor logic...

Yeah, it's not like bee's are natures #1 pollenators.

Actually, beetles are nature's #1. Bees just dominate humanity's food crops. http://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/pollinators/beetles.shtml

Here are a couple cheap and easy ways to get rid of forest for farmland.

If it is old growth call a company that wants to harvest it for lumber. Make it a requirement that they remove the stumps. Depending on the economy with that requirement at worst you'll pay nothing for them to take the trees. If wood is at a premium or if you have really nice growth or hardwoods you'll make a profit. Not every lumber company would be willing to make that deal but some are. Especially the guys who cut it into boards on site.

If the trees are junk fast growth trees you slash and burn. Cheap & easy. I don't live in a dry state so in my area you don't even need to get a permit for this. You just call and leave a message on the machine of the local volunteer fired department. Girdle the trees in late summer/fall and burn in the spring and you are ready for early planting. You probably won't even need to fertilize the first couple of years.

As for stones and boulders if you farm in a "glacier state" you are already used to growing boulders and rocks and it is just part of life. You take your rock picker or rock rake you and clear them. Heck you can even sell the rocks to landscapers or the public.

I'll agree though that farming and ranching isn't what is the biggest threat to the forests. According to US Forest Services the biggest threat to the forests (at least in 2005 when it was written) is urban development. U.S. Department of Agriculture "Forests on the Edge - Housing Development on America's Private Forests" (2005) http://www.fs.fed.us/projects/fote/reports/fote-6-9-05.pdf An interesting side note and more applicable to question of paper use, it looks like the Forest Service is researching urban tree utilization for wood and paper products.

and moving the goalposts to "places in the US" (where natural gas is among the cheapest in the world), you're simply trolling.

I'm in the US. This site is in the US. This site declares itself to be an US site. Are you in the US? If so, why would you be considering the rest of the world when comparing cost of energy that we have access to? It would seem that you are trolling, and not me.

Take a typical furnace/boiler, at 85,000 btuh or 0.85 therms per hour, or $1.20 an hour (same as running five 2000W electric fluid radiant heaters or more than six of the more typical 1500W units).

I'm a little confused. Are you under the impression that a boiler is operational 100% of the time? And what exactly are you specifying with the "electric fluid radiant heat" statement? I looked up that phrase, and I'm not seeing anything that looks to be a good example. In fact, using quotes on Google give me exactly zero results. So if this is "common" as you claim in some parts, it isn't called what you are calling it. If it is simple resistive heat (and it sounds like that from your description) it should be roughly 100% efficient. I expect you are talking about what I've heard referred to as electric baseboard heat (with the unnecessary specification that it include a liquid), which are all purely resistive in nature. Looking at something like http://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/documnts/techline/fuel-value-calculator.pdf it shows that natural gas is much cheaper than electric resistive heating if you are using a central heat system. And yes, I understand that you are not using a central heat system.

But there is one issue. For every directly comparable whole-house system, gas is cheaper. You claim that it's rigged against your magical electricity, so you compare individual room heat to a whole house system. But then, you state how many of what are needed and where and that it will get you the same or better effect as a whole house system for less cost. For average US cost, gas is about 1/3 the cost of electric. So you are claming a 3x efficiency gain by doing room heating to heat a house. I just don'e see it.

How you can make the leap from "it depends" to "you're pro-electric" is as idiotic as your myopic scope of comparison.

On average, someone in the US is much better off with a natural gas boiler than resistive heating. It may be myopic, but it is true.

Perfect stability, eh?

Yes. An increase in one year was counterbalanced by a decrease the next year, with the average staying remarkably stable, in a slow deflation distorted by just two peaks, around 1815 and 1865. The mean CPI for each decade in the 19th century:

1800's: $46.50
1810's: $51.50
1820's: $35.80
1830's: $31.50
1840's: $28.00
1850's: $26.30
1860's: $38.00
1870's: $33.40
1880's: $27.70
1890's: $25.90

Compare this to the 20th century:

1900's: $26.60
1910's: $34.32
1920's: $52.62
1930's: $42.48
1940's: $56.22
1950's: $80.98
1960's: $95.92
1970's: $156.97
1980's: $313.44
1990's: $449.10

IMHO, enough said.

Not a theory I've ever heard before. What exactly were these "cheap loans"? . . . Too much liquidity? During the Great Depression? Bank failures mean the opposite of too much liquidity. (And again, I'm not sure what by "cheap loans" you mean exactly. Lowering interest rates?)

Yes. Artificially lowering interest rates below natural market equilibrium level.

Austrians and Freudians made strikingly similar rejections of the scientific method. von Mises thought that human behavior 1) could/should not be explained by theories that could be falsified, observed or make predictions, and 2) instead could be deducted axiomatically though "natural laws". And these laws can only be expressed verbally, not mathematically. And, of course, only a Austrian economist could interpret the laws correctly.

Have you actually read something from Mises, say, "Human Action", "Liberalism" or "Socialism"? What Mises affirms is much simpler than anything Freud ever suggested: that exchanges between individuals are determined by what each one wants at that exact moment, and that this "want" is a subjective matter, in the sense that one can say he wants "this" more than "that", but that they cannot quantify this "more". Since there's no "want unit" that you can use to measure "wants" (can you imagine yourself saying: "John here has a 105.204 Kwnt for a cheese sandwich; a 3.57 wnt for a new car; a 1.279 wnt for a new house; and right now his level of bathroom need is increasing at a +12.756 Kwnt/hr rate."?), then the very basic foundation of economic exchange is by definition outside mathematization.

This doesn't mean you cannot mathematize other related phenomena, such as prices, which are objective quantities. Or that you cannot historicize exchanges even under a barter system, for example by studying how many bananas purchased how many coconuts each day for the last decade at that Amazonian village. But a science of monetary prices, or a science of bananas per coconuts, is a derivative of a basic science that has no unit of measurement. Necessary conclusion: any science of Economics based solely on objective parameters is an incomplete science of Economics.

That doesn't mean Mises thought it impossible to measure subjective wants. He hypothesized that in future some kind of way to measure this could be developed, maybe through implants. But right then (and right now), objective quantization of personal wants is still outside the grasp of the researcher, so he must deal with this fundamental lack of information.

As for "interpreting", there's nothing to "interpret". Praxeology (the Austrian method) is simple, generic, and its effects are testable as much as anything else in human sciences.

Which all explains why today Austrian economics is taken about as seriously by economists as Freudian psychology is taken by psychologists.

Economists who believe their science only deals with money flows and prices don't take it easy when someone says this is just a part of it.

PS: A "gold standard" where the government can issue paper (such as "war bonds"), promising to give "in the future" gold to the person who

Using this calculator, the car would be between $29897.66 and $40,003,01.

The consumer price index says that $1,775 is about $30k today, a reasonable cost for a low-mid end car new -- try it here: http://woodrow.mpls.frb.fed.us/research/data/us/calc/

But you are right that $700/year was the average annual income back in the 20s. On the other hand, the average annual income today is $26k, so things do work out roughly (i.e., the car is still a larger-than-unity fraction of a year's income.) I think the distinction here needed is not average income, but average income per household (today that is more like $48k.) Of course, there's the mean/median/mode distinction as well, but this isn't a statistics class so I'll spare us all.

For heating houses, wood makes a lot of sense (especially compressed pulp/sawdust). Wood furnaces are incredibly efficient and it is a renewable resource.

About half way through: http://www.na.fs.fed.us/pubs/silvics_manual/Volume_1/pinus/strobus.htm they list the yield for white pine (in a *natural* forest). It's somewhere between 300 - 800 fbm per year per acre (assuming harvesting of 50 year old trees). Assuming 1 cord is about 500 board feet (a number I pulled mostly out of my ass since you can't really convert reliably) and assuming 300 fbm per year, this means that 1 cord of wood represents about .0017 acres of land. So it seems that you could sustainably heat your house with less than 0.1 acres of land if you can get by with 1 cord of wood per year. So that would be great for people with fairly large properties (the size is about 66 feet on each side).

But in terms of land use a ground source heat pump driven by solar power (with batteries) will take up a lot less room.

This isn't surprising. Among all the many other reasons mentioned here, let me add one more. Corn-based ethanol is not a solution to the issue of depleting nonrenewable resources. Simply put, midwestern topsoil is being depleted at a faster rate than the supply of oil and coal. I can't find the study by the Illinois EPA that I learned this from, but it's not hard to find sources explaining that "On human time scales, fertile topsoil is not a renewable resource."

for 10 years despite a %400 increase in the cost of living?

If you're interested in what the United States would be like without humans, there is a nifty map developed by A.W. Kuchler in 1964 and refined periodically since of what would grow where without human interference. It is called Potential Natural Vegetation of the Coterminous United States and can be found at the US Forest Service.

Often in managed forests, where, as you triumphantly declare: trees are "specifically grown to supply paper", the trees that have been planted are not indigenous to the region. This endangers native plant and animal species, such as in Chile.

Contrarily, I've heard quite the opposite; that, in fact, human CO2 production is often undercounted and it in fact dwarfs the carbon dioxide spewed out by volcanoes.

For instance, http://www.fs.fed.us/gpnf/press/2001/pr284.htm
"Volcanologists estimate an annual global output of 200 million tons of volcanic CO2 per year ... By comparison, human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation produce 130 times more CO2 than all the world's volcanoes put together"

or

http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/Hazards/What/VolGas/volg as.html
"Scientists have calculated that volcanoes emit between about 130-230 million tonnes (145-255 million tons) of CO2 into the atmosphere every year (Gerlach, 1999, 1992). This estimate includes both subaerial and submarine volcanoes, about in equal amounts. Emissions of CO2 by human activities, including fossil fuel burning, cement production, and gas flaring, amount to about 22 billion tonnes per year (24 billion tons) [ ( Marland, et al., 1998) - The reference gives the amount of released carbon (C), rather than CO2.]. Human activities release more than 150 times the amount of CO2 emitted by volcanoes--the equivalent of nearly 17,000 additional volcanoes like Kilauea (Kilauea emits about 13.2 million tonnes/year)!"

(just a couple of sources after a brief search on google)

I don't know how accurate those sources are, so take it all with a grain of salt. Just don't blindly accept the axiom that volcanoes out perform humans in CO2 generation; it may not be true.

As the lavadome and spike grows, small rock-falls happen quite regularly. When they happen at night, the hot rock glows in the near-IR and is captured by the US Forest Service Volcanocam http://www.fs.fed.us/gpnf/volcanocams/msh/. There's also a website that collects the individual images and generates daily animations of outbursts of the volcano http://www.luscombe-carter.com/mount_st_helens/ind ex.html.

"The fin will only grow so far before the inherent weakness in its structure, along with gravity, causes it to collapse. Since the current volcanic activity began in October, 2004, there have been several fins and spires that have grown and collapsed. However, this is the first one visible from the VolcanoCam.

This image was taken on May 5, 2006, at 10:45 am PDT. You may click on the image to view it full-size."

There's already a webcam up there...

"The fin will only grow so far before the inherent weakness in its structure, along with gravity, causes it to collapse. Since the current volcanic activity began in October, 2004, there have been several fins and spires that have grown and collapsed. However, this is the first one visible from the VolcanoCam.

This image was taken on May 5, 2006, at 10:45 am PDT. You may click on the image to view it full-size."

There's already a webcam up there...

It was a Sunday.

I was eighteen, living a few miles north of Olympia on Puget Sound, sleeping off a night of partying. I came downstairs about ten a.m. and my parents asked me if I'd heard "it."

Heard what, I asked?

St. Helens erupted they told me, sometime between 8 and 9 that morning.

Nope - I didn't hear it. It's hard to hear anything when you're passed out.

It was a a week or two before we saw any of the ash. Richland, Pasco, and Kennewick on the other side of the Cascades got buried though.

Seven years later I visted the Mount St. Helens National Monument for the first time. The blast area, where the "experts" had said it would take 100 hundred years for any form of life to return to, was already covered with low brush and Douglas Fir saplings.

I live in Florida these days. I put the Volcanocam on my Google page. Now I watch the sun light up the crater in the mornings - or sometimes I don't. You know how the weather is in the Pacfic Northwest. . .

St. Helens webcam, for those interested.

TFA links to a "volcano cam"

http://www.fs.fed.us/gpnf/volcanocams/msh/

http://www.fs.fed.us/gpnf/volcanocams/msh/

if they get the camera up again you can watch it...

Only something dramatic, such as a major volcanic eruption, could cause enough cooling to miss setting a new record.

Well, geologists have been watching Mount St. Helens very closely of late.

Only something dramatic, such as a major volcanic eruption, could cause enough cooling to miss setting a new record.

Come on Mount St. Helens, you can pull us out of this mess!

/ starts staring at the web cam, waiting....
http://www.fs.fed.us/gpnf/volcanocams/msh/

Seriously, I suppose a drastic event now would make winter even harder for some part of the world, possibly killing many people and probably driving heating costs even higher than they are expected to be. Are there any good volcanoes in the southern hemisphere than could help us out and only cool down the southern summer?

maybe this guy can help

Your post hits the primary problem our nation has, inflation.

It is so sad that people in this country do not realize they are being ripped off. Under our current economic system, inflation screws the poor and middle classes. It is essentially a RECURRING tax on savings.

For example : try putting in the 7.00 per hour wage from 1974, then compare it to today.

$7.00 per hour in 1974 would be roughly equivalent to making $27.00 per hour today.

But it gets worse. Any money you try to save, is also worth less over time. The interest you earn on a bank account needs to make at least the level of inflation just to stay the same in terms of purchasing power.

It seems people are just plain clueless about how they are being royally screwed by the governments economic policies.

Actually, the camera is sensitive in infrared, and works (some) at night. If
you poke around on the site, you can find "nightglow" pictures.

Ok, so for others, not so near... If you stare at the web cam shot long enough -- and try to look sort of past your screen -- you can see it in 3D.

No? Just keep staring...