Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for December 2005

Go Wikipedia

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A few weeks ago I loaded my many volumes of The Encyclopaedia Britannica into my mother’s car and suggested she flog them at her church fete. I gather they didn’t sell, but Dad has kept them.

I used to tell my 16 year old daughter to check The Encyclopadeia, but more recently have just suggested she search Wikipaedia on the internet. I had been feeling a bit guilty, but given today’s article in The Australian – well I feel vindicated.

Wikipaedia takes up a lot less room in a small house than the Britannicas!

The article in The Australia reads along the following lines:

PARIS (AFP) – The free Internet encyclopaedia Wikipaedia, recently embroiled in controversy over a fake entry, reportedly comes close in accuracy to the paid-for Encyclopaedia Britannica in its articles on science.

In a report published in this Thursday’s issue, the British journal Nature says it gave independent reviewers 42 pairs of articles from both encyclopaedias, covering subjects that ranged from Archimedes’ Principle and Dolly the Sheep to field-effect transistors and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

The reviewers were not told which article came from where, and were asked to check the entries for accuracy.

“Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia,” Nature reports.

“But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively.”

Nature says “Britannica’s advantage (over Wikipedia) may not be great” when it comes to science, and comments that this result is “surprising” given the eclectic way that Wikipedia’s articles are written.

Founded in 2001, Wikipedia is an “open source” of information that asks its users to write, edit and update entries.

In contrast to traditional encyclopaedias, there is no hierarchy of experts through which material is vetted before being accepted for publication. Any user can contribute.

Wikipedia has more than two million articles, including over 850,000 in English. It has sites in 200 languages, 10 with more than 50,000 articles — in English, German, French, Japanese, Polish, Italian, Swedish, Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish.

The US survey firm Nielsen/Netratings found that Wikipedia had more than 12.7 million US users in September, up nearly 300 percent from a year ago. It was ranked as the 35th most popular global website by Alexa.com.

Wikipedia came under criticism when a spoof biography was posted on its site this year purporting to be that of John Siegenthaler, a retired journalist who was an aide in the 1960s to attorney general Robert Kennedy.

The joke entry said: “For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven.”

Wikipedia says it has tightened up procedures in an effort to avoid further abuse, although its policy of open sourcing will not be changed.

Nature says that the science reviewers’ main criticism of Wikipedia was that its articles were often poorly structured and confused, and gave undue prominence to controversial theories.

People and National Parks: Are They Compatible?

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The total area of land now under conservation protection worldwide has doubled since 1990, when the World Parks Commission set a goal of protecting 10 percent of the planet’s surface. That goal has been exceeded, with over 12 percent of all land, a total area of 11.75 million square miles, now protected. That’s an area greater than the entire land mass of Africa writes Mark Dowie in the latest issue of Orion magazine.

Mark writes that he was curious about “this brand of conservation that puts the rights of nature before the rights of people” and visited with tribal members on three continents who were grappling with the consequences of Western conservation and found an alarming similarity among the stories he heard.

Maasai.jpg

He concludes:

“Many conservationists are beginning to realize that most of the areas they have sought to protect are rich in biodiversity precisely because the people who were living there had come to understand the value and mechanisms of biological diversity. Some will even admit that wrecking the lives of 10 million or more poor, powerless people has been an enormous mistake – not only a moral, social, philosophical, and economic mistake, but an ecological one as well. Others have learned from experience that national parks and protected areas surrounded by angry, hungry people who describe themselves as “enemies of conservation” are generally doomed to fail.

More and more conservationists seem to be wondering how, after setting aside a “protected” land mass the size of Africa, global biodiversity continues to decline. Might there be something terribly wrong with this plan – particularly after the Convention on Biological Diversity has documented the astounding fact that in Africa, where so many parks and reserves have been created and where indigenous evictions run highest, 90 percent of biodiversity lies outside of protected areas? If we want to preserve biodiversity in the far reaches of the globe, places that are in many cases still occupied by indigenous people living in ways that are ecologically sustainable, history is showing us that the dumbest thing we can do is kick them out.

I don’t think it is as simple as Mark suggests.

There are instances where even recent arrivals, for example foresters in the Pilliga-Goonoo region of north west New South Wales, have been excluded from forest areas they were sustainably harvesting. While there are indigenous groups who have access to, for example, power boats for hunting dugongs, and appear to be harvesting beyond the sustainable capacity of these populations.

I have some sympathy for Duke University’s John Terborgh position which is, “My feeling is that a park should be a park, and it shouldn’t have any resident people in it,” he says.

According to Mark Dowie, John Terborgh bases his argument on three decades of research in Peru’s Manu National Park, where native Machiguenga Indians fish and hunt animals with traditional weapons. Terborgh is concerned that they will acquire motorboats, guns, and chainsaws used by their fellow tribesmen outside the park, and that biodiversity will suffer.

I hope that the Machiguenga people do acquire guns and motorboats. I don’t suggest that this be a reason for preventing their access to Manu National Park, but there will be a need to determine quota for sustainable harvest. And the only way to be sure any system is working is to have a proper monitoring program in place.

What Was Special About 2005?

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According to Foreign Policy magazine the world will remember 2005 for its natural disasters, the passing of a pope, and the ongoing insurgency in Iraq.

In terms of environmental issues that “fell through the cracks” the magazine focused on reduced greenhouse emission in the US and peak oil.

Reduced emissions in the US came in as no. 4 in terms of overall issues, it was reported as follows:

When it comes to emitting greenhouse gases, the United States is usually seen as the bad guy, content to belch out fumes at its pleasure. But reports released in late November show that U.S. emissions have fallen for the first time in more than a decade. Between 2000 and 2003, U.S. emissions fell by 0.8 percent. By contrast, global goody-two-shoes Canada saw a 24.2 percent increase in 2003 from its 1990 levels. Even the sanctimonious Europeans are set to miss their Kyoto targets by 6.4 percent. Uncle Sam’s emissions dropped partly because U.S. firms introduced clean coal technologies and reduced their methane emissions. So, is the United States turning into the Green Giant? Hardly. The most important reason for its drop in emissions was the migration of heavy manufacturing to industrializing countries such as China, the world’s second-biggest emitter.

At number nine was a peak oils story, reported as follows:

With oil prices soaring this year, the debate over the future of this precious commodity heated up. But lost in the mix was ExxonMobil’s report The Outlook for Energy: A 2030 View. The total oil output of non-OPEC producers, according to ExxonMobil’s projection, will peak around 2010, after which OPEC will have to add more than 1 million barrels per day, every year, to keep up with world demand by 2030. “In 2003, Algeria produced 1.1 million barrels per day,” wrote energy analyst Alfred J. Cavallo in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “A new Algeria would need to be brought on line in the Persian Gulf each and every year beyond 2010 just to keep up with the projected increase in demand.” That’s no easy prospect. To make matters worse, most OPEC countries, including vital “swing producer” Saudi Arabia, do not allow independent audits of their oil reserves, so we may have even less warning of any future shortfalls. Under OPEC’s quota system, members have every incentive to inflate their reserve figures: The more they claim to have, the more they can sell. The price of a barrel of black gold just went up-again.

So few Australian environmental stories are properly reported in the mainstream media. But which is the really big one that “fell through the cracks”?

Ian Mott on Googling the ‘Atantic Conveyor’

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I posted on how Europe might end up cooler rather than warmer as a consequence of global warming and its affect on ocean currents, click here for the post.

Following the post, a reader of this blog, Phil Done, suggested in response to a comment from Ian Mott, that Mott really should read up on the phenomenon at Wikipedia.

Mott, who likes working things out for himself, has had a read at Wikipedia and done a bit of a general google and emailed me his findings as follows:

A check of the first pages of google sites dealing with the claimed ice age that would be produced by the collapse of the ‘Atlantic Conveyor’ reveals some interesting stuff. Most carry vague descriptions of how this would take place and seem to indicate that it will be caused by a change in northern salinity levels due to melt water from the Greenland Ice Sheet that will prevent this less dense water from submerging and thereby altering the flow pattern. Most carry the claim that evaporation from the gulf stream currently make this body of water very saline and more dense than the rest of the ocean. All point to the disruption of this salinity level by fresh melt water as the primary agent of disturbed flow pattern.

A good example is http:www.enviroliteracy.org/article.php/545.htm which has a curious link to a graphic called “The Atlantic Thermohaline Circulation” at www.clivar.org/publications/other_pubs/clivar_transp/pdf.files/ . Now the most curious thing about this graphic is that the Gulf Stream is shown as flowing due east from New York to Portugal before heading north past the UK. The generally accepted route up the US east coast appears to have been an inconvenient fact to be ignored for the sake of the story. Even more curious is a “cold, saline bottom current” heading north past New Zealand, through the shallows of Vanuatu into the far north pacific where it surfaces between Alaska and Kamchatka where, curiously, it is supposedly warmed in this sub-arctic clime for the journey south.

The brightest spot was at www.awitness.org/column/global_warming_ice_age.html that rightly pointed out that the mini-iceage of the 1400’s was no such thing and that the other common example provided 12000 years ago was actually a slight pause in the middle of a period of glaciation with little relevance to this scenario.

But it is the actual numbers involved that reveal the truth. According to www.encyclopedia.com/html/G/GulfS1tre.asp the initial speed of the Gulf Stream is 6.4km/hour over a width of 80km. This slows further north as it widens so for the sake of this analysis we assume the Gulf Stream/North Atlantic Current has a median flow of only 3.6km/hr, is 100km wide and about 500m deep. At this speed the entire trip from Florida to Iceland will only take 70 days. And even assuming zero rainfall, the maximum evaporation is only likely to be 70/365 days x 2000mm evaporation = 383mm evaporation per cycle. And this means the 500 metre thick water column is left to absorb the salt reserves of 0.383 metres of evaporated water before it heads south again. As normal ocean salt level is 3.5% then the 499.617 remaining metres of the water column absorbs 3.5% of 0.383 metres of water, a total of 13.4 millimetres of salt that is added to the 17.5 metres of salt in the column. This is an increase of only 0.07657 of 1%.

And as for the claimed impact of fresh water on the current, we have a total of 180 km3 of water flowing past any given point in the north atlantic each hour. This amounts to 1.577 million km3 each year which disperses into the approx 160 million km3 North Atlantic (40 million km2 x average depth of 3.926km). This north atlantic data is derived from the whole of atlantic data from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/atlantic_ocean .

The entire ice volume of Greenland is only 2.44 million km3 so a complete melt over a highly improbable twenty years would add only 0.122 million km3 to the annual current flow of 1.577 million km3, for a total of 1.699 million km3 pa. The existing salt in the NA Current, at 3.5% of volume, will be 0.055195 million km3. And this will only reduce the salinity level of the combined current and melt water by one 14th to 3.25%.

A slightly less improbable 100 year total melt, but still very rapid in climatic terms, would involve only 0.0244 km3 per annum. This would produce a combined flow of 1.6014 million km3 with a salinity of 3.45%. This range is only half the variation normally observed within a 1000 metre ocean profile. See www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/earth/water/salinity_dept

In summary:

The North Atlantic currents are horizontal cycles that flow in a clockwise direction due to the rotation of the Earth. They are doing the same thing as the water in a northern hemisphere bathtub and for the same reason. They are, in most part, not vertical cycles with surface water flowing north and sea floor water flowing south so any theory based on a disturbed flow due to lower salinity from ice sheet melt water is a theory that ignores the primary determinants of current flow, the rotation of the earth.

The theory of increased salinity in the Gulf Stream/Nth Atlantic Current due to evaporation ignores the fact that precipitation also takes place in the same regions. Ocean salinity maps indicate that highest salinity is actually in the middle of the North Atlantic (Sargasso Sea with high air pressure and low rainfall), not in the northern regions.

The volume of water in the Gulf Stream/Nth Atlantic Current is of such magnitude that a complete melt of the Greenland Ice Sheet over a period of only 100 years, contracting North at 27km/year, would dissipate the fresh water to such an extent that salinity levels would only drop from 3.5% to 3.45%. This variation is well within the normal range of ocean salinity levels. To suggest that a minor change in the chemical composition of such a large body of water could override the influence of factors of such magnitude as the rotation of the Earth, itself, is pure fantasy.

Consequently, we must conclude that the Pentagon was rather charitable in describing the Atlantic Conveyor/Ice Age scenario as an extreme scenario and very low probability event. It is, in fact, a highly improbable event that not only extrapolates known effects to improbable extremes but also excludes mitigating factors that are of thousands of orders of magnitude greater.

I am not endorsing Mott’s conclusions, but posting them for general discussion.