I can't resist a story that places any good light on climate change. It gives me hope for my children and children's children. One example, covered by the Times Online of the United Kingdom a few years ago, was a report that residents of Greenland will now be able to grow their own vegetables, rather than import everything from Europe, because of warmer, shorter winters.
A second story on climate change the involves a bit of good news for California appeared in the Stockton Record last week. The story said efforts to battle climate change will likely mean more jobs and better-looking forests in coming decades on the wooded slopes surrounding Sierra Nevada towns.
Reporter Dana Nichols wrote that more intensive management of forests, including thinning underbrush, can speed tree growth and prevent catastrophic wildfires, thus locking up more carbon in wood and keeping it out of the atmosphere. And keeping carbon out of the atmosphere is about to become a paying proposition, thanks to state and federal efforts to set up carbon trading markets and place limits on carbon emissions.
There are additional potential benefits associated with more intensive forest management. Small-diameter forest materials could conceivably be burned in power plants. However, the cost to produce electricity from wood waste in California is currently too high to make such plants competitive with plants that use "dirty" fuels, such as coal and gas.
But it works in Europe. Biomass plants and the electricity they produce are one of the fastest and most effective ways to use forests to reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, according to various experts and studies, the Record story said.
"That, interestingly, is where the Europeans have said is the biggest change," the reporter quoted Bill Stewart, UC Cooperative Extension forestry and fire specialist.