Outdoor Source Magazine

As promised, we’re going to be presenting information covering both sides of every issue that we cover here.

Right now in NY City, there is a summit on global warming will have 33 Mayors and/or governors as well as delegations from 18 other cities, from around the world, including New Yorks own Mike Bloomburg. The purpose of the meeting was to continue a series of meetings that began in 2005, designed to reduce carbon emissions within major cities. The outcome of the first meeting was to form the committee that organizes these conferences so that it is something that will continue into the future.

The summit includes the following events:

The Economic Case for Climate Action

Transport Beating Congestion & Surviving Your Next Election

Energy The Energy Revolution

Water Keeping the Tap Running without Running the Well Dry

The Business of Climate Change: Job Creation & Development

Buildings Creating Green Skylines

Communicating Change & Ensuring Action

Transport Fuelling Urban Transit Alternatives

EnergyAdopting Renewable Energy Systems

Waste Wealth from Waste

Cities Can Thrive in a Low Carbon Economy

C40 General Assembly

On the website for the summit NYCClimateSummit has some excellent case studies about how major cities around the world are working to begin to use alternative energies in order to try to reduce carbon emmissions within their city.

Personally, whether or not it does reduce carbon emissions, I think that it’s a great thing because it could (over a period of time) work to reduce the costs of alternative energy sources so that the costs of providing them can be reduced. A combination of reduced cost combined with a non-political environment actually making decisions on the future is required for good decisions to be made –> we all know that as soon as the oil companies get nervous about reduced profits, the cost will come down to keep oil the cheapest source of energy.

The biggest environmental issue over the last century revolves around this hot-button topic. We here at Outdoor Source magazine believe that all 3 sides of this issue need to be discussed and debated. It seems as though there never really WAS a debate. We went from the late 1970s where “all scientists agree that we’re heading into an Ice Age” directly to “human activity is causing catestrophic global warming”. The issue was never debated either publicly or within the world of science.

The 3 sides to this debate are:

• Global Warming is occuring and it’s caused by human activity.
• Global Warming is occuring and it’s due to natural climate or other cycles.
• Global Warmins is not occuring

Over the next period of time, we will be doing a lot of research and we will be looking for people that have done significant research to ALL sides of this issue. The purpose is to collect as much information as possible and have it all stored in 1 place. This way people that are trying to figure out the truth about the issue are not swayed by some agenda. It’s really simple, I don’t have an agenda that I’m trying to put forward. I don’t get oil money. I don’t get money from environmentalists. I only have my own personal well being and my own philosophies to worry about. Most importantly — I don’t have anything to prove to anyone on the subject.

I know that many people that see this will automatically assume that I have a position on this subject. I do — however, as I do research I am keeping a completely open mind to this argument (yes, it’s an argument). I believe that there are too many people out there that have something to gain that are trying to set their opinion as the only opinion and they are trying to profit from it. That is most definitely not my goal here.

Believe me, I look forward to a very healthy debate on this subject.

I just finished up my first springtime jaunt into the woods. My family and I were able to get out into a small section of the Long Island Pine Barrens. The Pine Barrens is one of the only protected areas left on Long Island and is a very rare stretch of ground with uninterrupted trees.

A little over a decade ago the Pine Barrens were decimated by a forest fire which destroyed a huge section of the land and most importantly the trees. The pine trees that make up this forest are relatively short trees that do very well in sandy soil — which means that they take a long time to get to full height albeit a squat one. The section that we walked in was not bothered by this fire.

One huge issue that we encountered was ticks. Fortunately this time of year they are not typically carriers of things like Lymes or Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever — however, there were lots of them. Out of the 3 of us, we pulled a combined 10 ticks off of ourselves throughout the rest of the day.

Just a note on the trail. The trail was very poorly marked and we were forced to turn back from the one direction. The trail went off across a road that the map did not indicate. Once I have a little more information about the trail and where exactly we were, I’ll edit this post.

Overall, this was a nice little hike (a 5 mile loop) on Long Island, a locale not very well known for hiking because of the huge population on the island. We have to remember that at its fattest point, it’s 18 miles wide and there’s about 6 million (probably more) people living on the rock.