Redding Record Searchlight -- Environmentalists, timber firm dispute climate change role

A pair of recently released reports -- one by a timber giant and the other by timber critics -- are at odds about the effect logging has on climate change. Anderson-based Sierra Pacific Industries released a report at the beginning of the month saying that intensive management, logging of about 12 percent of its 1.6 million acres in holdings each decade, helps fight global warming.

ForestEthics, a nonprofit environmental group with offices in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Canada, released a report this week that says logging should be done selectively to keep temperatures from going up.

At the heart of both reports is the way trees capture and store carbon when they convert carbon dioxide into oxygen.

Sierra Pacific contends that "younger, faster-growing trees absorb the most (carbon dioxide) and give off the most oxygen," said Cajun James, Sierra Pacific's research and monitoring manger.

ForestEthics' report leans toward older trees: "The more a forest ages, the more carbon it absorbs."

Like their reports, the opinions of spokesmen for the two also differ.

"Ours is a scientific report that was peer-reviewed by professionals; theirs is just allegations that are unfounded," said Sierra Pacific spokesman Mark Pawlicki. He said the report was reviewed by academics, but wouldn't say who they were. He said it was normal for those who perform peer reviews to remain anonymous. Although the ForestEthics report wasn’t peer-reviewed, it was based on peer-reviewed science, said Josh Buswell, Sierra campaign organizer for the group. He said there are fundamental differences between ForestEthics’ “Climate of Destruction: Sierra Pacific Industries’ Impact on Global Warming” and Sierra Pacific’s “How California’s Forests Store Carbon and Improve Air Quality.”

“The subject line is the only thing we agree with in the report,” Buswell said.

With the reports coming from a timber company and an environmental group, Olga Krankina, a forest ecology professor at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Ore., said she wasn’t surprised that they differed in opinion. She said young forests draw more carbon out of the air than older ones, but much of the carbon stored in them is released when trees are harvested. “There is no one-size-fits-all answer,” she said.