[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by captainslug

Global severe deforestation? Nope. Only the countries that are undergoing land-clearing have recorded high losses of forestation in the past 10 years.

And what percentage of the planet is that? Most of it, excepting small parts of the US and Europe.

The United States and Canada have more forest land than they did 150 years ago.

This is an example of cherry-picking, taking two selected data points, drawing a line through them, and calling it a trend. You pick the starting point 150 years ago, when most of the Northeast had been deforested, and claim that the increase since represents the growing forests. Why not start from a century or two earlier, before all the forests were cut down?

Today, none of the wood or paper products you buy are made from natural forestation. They're made entirely from trees grown specifically for producing wood products.

This is a flat-out lie. Any summer you're in this area (the Sierra Nevada), I can take you out and find some ongoing logging operations in natural forests. And if it were true, I'd hardly think that converting the county into tree farms counts for much. It will take many centuries to get some of the previously-logged areas, such as the upper midwest (Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, etc) back to something resembling their natural state, even though some parts now have scrub growth replacing original forest.

Volcanoes worldwide have and continue to have the power to directly alter cloud coverage percentages. In 1883 the Krakatoa eruption was large enough to directly alter global average temperatures by just over 1C.

And who said otherwise? But two things you need to remember about volcanos. First, they're pretty hard to overlook, so we'd know if one or more affected climate. (And their effects are predictable: see for instance climate model predictions of the effects of the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo.) Second, their effect are transient on the timescale of climate. A major eruption can change things for a year or two, then the dust & sulfates settle out, and things go back to normal.

40 years ago the scientific "consensus" was that we were slipping into an Ice Age. And that was the prevailing politically popular opinion then.

Another lie. As has been pointed out many times, there was one scientific paper (soon refuted) that raised the possibility, and a few scare-type articles in the popular press as a result. Nowhere near either a scientific consensus or a prevalent popular opinion - and I was there at the time :-)