A severe winter storm of ice and snow hit many parts of the United States in the past week, causing highway closures, flight delays, massive blackouts and at least one death. The weather was frightful from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Ore., on Monday, with last-minute holiday shoppers shivering and stranded travelers hoping for the best over the Christmas season.
The little town of Eustis, Maine, got nearly 3 1/2 feet of snow.
In Marysville, Wash., north of Seattle, heavy snow collapsed part of the roof Monday at the Whitley Evergreen factory, which makes modular buildings. No one was injured, but inspectors were dispatched to make sure other buildings in the business park were safe.
The 14.5-inch snowfall Sunday in Portland, Maine, surpassed the old record for Dec. 21 of 12.4 inches, set in 1933. On the other side of the country, a total of 11 to 13 inches in Portland, Ore., was the biggest snowfall since January 1980. Depending on how much more fell Monday as the snow trailed off, the storm could rank as one of the city's 10 worst on record.
"It is amazing," said Dave Thompson, spokesman for the Oregon Department of Transportation. "You say to yourself: 'That's Portland?' The roads are snowpacked, covered with ice and it's freezing rain."
The Seattle Post Intelligencer quoted one Washington state trooper as saying that he felt wind gusts as high as 120 km per hour, which were causing complete whiteout conditions. The trooper told a reporter that he had never seen conditions so bad.
And so each winter for the past few years have seen the “environmental” types like Greenpeace and the Friends of the Earth (FOE) bite the dust with their dire predictions of global warming.
It is patently obvious to even the casual observer that if the prophets of doom had even one iota of credibility when it came to their predictions of global warming and melting arctic ice, winter in the Northern Hemisphere should be getting warmer and warmer.
Unfortunately, for the doomsayers the reverse has turned out to be true, year after year after year! And there is a reason for this. The predictions of the likes of Greenpeace and FOE are just that…empty predictions, calculated to alarm the general populace, for reasons best known to them.
And so what do we make of the predictions of Greenpeace and FOE that palm oil is causing so much deforestation that it is leading to, you’ve guessed it, global warming?
The trouble with this prediction is that it totally ignores the fact that palm oil is a crop with superlative productivity, in fact so productive that it yields ten times the yield of other oilseed crops (i)! It follows therefore that palm oil requires ten times less land to produce the same unit of edible oil as its nearest competitor. How can it then be credible to claim that palm oil is causing “massive deforestation”?
This also explains why, Malaysia, which had been the world’s largest producer of palm oil for over a century still has an enviable forest cover of more than 65%.
The Palm Oil truth Foundation is compelled to ask: Could this extreme productivity of palm oil be the real reason for the irrational and concerted attacks launched against the commodity by the likes of Greenpeace and FOE? Could Greenpeace and FOE be paid agents for competing oilseed lobbies to launch their senseless anti-palm oil campaigns to ensure that palm does not continue to make inroads into the traditional oilseed markets in the Northern Hemisphere? If so, Greenpeace and FOE would have to find a more compelling platform than global warming, for it does not look like the weather would be cooperating! THE END.
(i) Palm oil typically yields 4.5 metric tons per hectare, far higher than the typical 0.5 metric tons per hectare yield of its competitors like soy, sunflower and rapeseed.
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