LETTERS: ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES FUELED BY LIES

To the editor:

It is important to bear in mind as we continue to sort environmental reality from environmental fantasy that the whole environmental wacko movement is based on half-truths and outright lies.

A common and false assertion of the Chicken Little mentality is that deforestation proceeds at a ruinous pace. There is now more forest on the planet that there was 200 or 300 years ago. There are more trees on Earth today than there were a century ago. And a century ago there were more trees than there were two centuries ago. Forests are profitable when maintained, and they are. The United States, not including Alaska, in 1920 had 600 million acres of forest. Today it has 728 million acres. New Jersey is the most populous state in the nation, and one-third of the Garden State is classified as forest. The only areas of deforestation that were of significance during the past half-century were in the Communist countries of the U.S.S.R and mainland China. Since 1978, China has been reforesting. The former U.S.S.R., which is almost all forest to begin with, is being reforested too.

On the issue of global warming, scientists agree that carbon dioxide constitutes only 1 percent of the material that produces a greenhouse effect, and water vapor constitutes the other 99 percent. If all the water vapor were removed, the surface temperature on Earth would be lowered by some 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Of the carbon dioxide, 97 percent is produced naturally by volcanic activity, forest fires, plant decay and the oceans. Only 3 percent is produced by mankind: driving cars, heating homes and fueling industrial plants.

Last but by no means least in the "outright lie" category is the assertion that 1,500 scientists have signed the 1995 report that somehow gave authenticity to global warming gloom-and-doom predictions. There were not 1,500 scientists who signed that report, only 40.

ED STEWART

Middlebrook