Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for January 2006

I Would Rather be a Minke Whale

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I didn’t expect Greenpeace Expedition Leader Shane Rattenbury to hesitate for so long and then to be so coy, when he was asked by Michael Duffy on ABC Radio Counterpoint (23rd January 2006) whether he would have blamed the Japanese if one of his men was hurt or killed in the Antarctic.

The text follows (for full transcript click here), but to hear the really long pause from Rattenbury, listen to the full interview (click here).

Michael Duffy: What if something went wrong? What if one of your people was killed or seriously injured? Would you blame the Japanese for that?

Shane Rattenbury: That’s something we desperately hope to avoid. We do place a real paramount on safety. All our activists are well-equipped, and you mentioned someone heading into the water…we did have that happen just last week and we were in a situation there were we were able to quickly retrieve that activist. He was suitable dressed for the occasion. I guess we do rely a certain amount on the whaling fleet in this case having a level of respect for human life as well and that they would not place…or take actions that would bring even greater risk upon our activists.

Rattenbury was not so coy when the Nisshin-Maru and Arctic Sunrise collided, click here. But that was perhaps just damage to a ship – not a life.

The Radio National interview is fascinating and includes Glenn Inwood explaining how and why the Nisshin-Maru was moving before the collision occurred, click here for my first blog on the issue.

The radio interview was just a few days after Greenpeace decided to leave the whales, the whalers, and the Antarctic, click here for Greenpeace’s summary of their campaign (20th January 2006).

That was only a few days after one of the Greenpeace campaigners ended up in the freezing waters of the Antarctic coloured red with the blood of a recently harpooned whale. The campaigner had maneuvered a small inflatable between whale and ship and then clung to a taut harpoon line. The Japanese version of events with a link to the Greenpeace video is at the end of this blog post, see below.

There is no denying the bravery of these righteous Greenpeace activists.

I say righteous, because they are so sure of themselves.

But I am not so sure.

They have left the Antarctic but will continue their campaign focused on whales and whaling.

But why not campaign for Sun Bears? It would seem there is much more real need here with the bears dwindling in number and being held in the cruelest of conditions. The World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA)claims about 7,000 bears are kept at more than 200 farms across China in excessively cruel conditions,
click here.

There has been a fair amount of arguing at this blog about how special whales are. All life is special.

As long as we eat meat, some animals are going to be slaughtered, but I like the idea that they have the opportunity to ‘stretch their legs’ and feel the sun before they are slaughtered.

To quote from the High North Alliance website:

…obviously, it is extremely difficult to compare the whale’s relatively short-lasting, but intense pain when being killed, with the other more long-lasting but less intense forms of suffering experienced in cattle farming. Personally, I have no problems in making such a comparison. The conclusion of this comparison is that,

I would rather be a minke whale living in freedom until the final few minutes of pain, than a …pig or hen [or a sun bear].

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ICR Media release about Greenpeace Activist in Water:

Greenpeace claims that their activist was thrown into the cold Southern Ocean by a taut harpoon line are shown to be false in new video released by the Institute of Cetacean Research (ICR) today.

The version of the story by Texas Joe Constantine that the harpoon line fell onto their inflatable, became taut and threw him out of the boat has been placed on their website:
http://tvyil.greenpeaceweb.org/default.asp?loadfilm=59&loadcat=10
Texas Joe said:

“The harpoon line came down onto our boat trapping us between the whale and the catcher. The line came tight at that point and threw me from the boat into the water. It was a few minutes before our boat was able to come around and pick me up out of the water.”

The ICR has today placed video footage on its website that shows the line was slack on the Greenpeace inflatable for some time while Japanese crew members told the activists to throw off the line before something dangerous occurred.

ICR Director General Dr. Hiroshi Hatanaka said, “Our crew were concerned about their safety and urged them to throw the line off their boat. This can be clearly seen by the video. They kept the line on their inflatable so long that eventually it became tight. The Greenpeace activists deliberately held onto the rope while they decided how to get the best PR from it.”

Dr. Hatanaka said that when you view the edited Greenpeace video it appears the event happened in a matter of seconds, but there was plenty of time available to throw the rope off. “This slick manipulation misrepresented what happened, and Greenpeace must come out and admit their man had enough time to avoid being thrown into the sea.”

He added that this was the second time edited Greenpeace footage had shown the organisation to make false claims. Greenpeace claims that the Japanese vessel the Nisshin Maru collided with the Arctic Sunrise have also proved false.

The latest video footage can be seen at:
http://www.icrwhale.org/eng-index.htm

Gagging Who? James Hansen! Impossible!

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James Hansen has already featured on the front page of most the world’s influential newspapers at least once telling us the sky is about to fall in … well, not exactly.

James Hansen has though been in the media a lot, over the last decade or so, telling us that temperatures are rising and that by 2010 the earth will be somewhere between 0.6 and 1.1C warmer, see some of the discussion here at the Real Climate blog.

Prof Bob Carter coined the term, Hansenism, based on pronouncements by James Hansen, click here for the original speech.

According to Carter:

Why Hansenism? Because James Hansen was the NASA-employed scientist who started the climate alarmism hare running on June 23, 1988, when he appeared before a United States Congressional hearing on climate change. On that occasion, Dr Hansen used a misleading graph to convince his listeners that warming was taking place at an accelerated rate (which, it being a scorching summer’s day in Washington, a glance out of the window appeared to confirm). He wrote, in justification, in the Washington Post (February 11, 1989) that “the evidence for an increasing greenhouse effect is now sufficiently strong that it would have been irresponsible if I had not attempted to alert political leaders”.

Hansen’s testimony was taken up as a lead news story, and within days the great majority of the American public believed that a climate apocalypse was at hand.

Much later (2003), Hansen came to write “Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decision-makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue. Now, however, the need is for demonstrably objective climate … scenarios consistent with what is realistic”.

But this astonishing conversion to honesty came too late, for in the intervening years thousands of other climate scientists had meanwhile climbed onto the Hansenist funding gravy-train. Currently, global warming alarmism is fuelled by an estimated worldwide expenditure on related research and greenhouse bureaucracy of US$3-4 billion annually. Scientists and bureaucrats being only too human, the power of such sums of money to corrupt not only the politics of greenhouse, but even the scientific process itself, must not be underestimated.

Now, today Hansen features on the front page of the New York Times Online, not telling us how 2006 is going to be the hottest year ever, but claiming he is being gagged by the government.

For Hansen, claiming you are being gagged, seems to be yet another way of getting a link to all your research papers out there.

At least I found this link, on this page.

How could you gag someone like James Hansen in 2006 in the US – if you really wanted to?

Whaling Off Norway is Sustainable: Rune Frovik

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I have just been reading about the High North Alliance, an organisation representing whalers, sealers and fishermen from Canada, The Faroes, Greenland, Iceland and Norway.

Their base is in Reine, Norway, which is a long way away from me here in Brisbane, Australia.

Last night I received an email from Rune Frovik from the High North Alliance with some comments in response to the letter that I published from Peter Corkeron, click here.

Rune Frovik.jpg
(Picture Copyright High North Alliance)

Here’s a picture of Rune (left) with the New Zealand Minister for Conservation, Chris Carter.

Rune responds issue by issue to the various claims made by Peter Cockeron:

1. Peter Corkeron wrote:

Minke quotas have trended upwards over time – the 2006 quota is 1052 animals. Some of this has come from carrying over untaken quotas from previous years – not a part of the RMP/RMS as far as I’m aware. Some has come from changing the “tuning level” – a multiplier built into the CLA/RMP to allow for uncertainty, and changing circumstances. Other problems with quota setting include that predominantly female minkes are taken, and (as I understand it) the CLA assumes a balanced sex ratio in a hunt.

Rune Frovik responds:

The carry-over mechanism for unused quotas is a part of the RMP. Such carry-over can take place within the five years quota periods.

The Scientific Committee of the International Whaling Commission recommended tuning level in the interval 0.60 to 0.72, the former calculates a higher quota than the latter. Until 2000, Norway set quotas with 0.72 tuning level. Since then various tuning levels have been used, and for 2006 Norway’s quota is based on 0.60 tuning.
The sex ratio is taken into account. Corkeron correctly points out that CLA assumes a balanced sex ratio in the hunt. But the CLA also has a mechanism in case of unbalanced sex ratios. So if the more than 50 percent of the harvested animals are female, this leads to lower quotas. This has been practiced for the Norwegian quota. If the sex ratio was balanced, the current quota could have been higher.

2. Peter Corkeron wrote:

The most recent survey series was not synoptic – the survey area was divided into 5, with one area surveyed in each of five years. These surveys are logistically difficult to run, and synoptic surveys are really hard to organize – I think the last was in 1995.
So a strong assumption (that is, an assumption that, if it’s wrong, the analysis wrong) is that whales don’t move between survey areas between years. This remains untested.

Rune Frovik responds:

Corkeron has a point. But the precautionary logic mainly goes the other way, since it is not proved that the stock is not comprised of sub-stocks, the scientists assume there could be sub-stocks.

Therefore quotas are set for smaller areas. However, scientific evidence now indicates that there is no need for sub areas. The whalers have always argued that the whales don’t respect these borders, that the whales go where there is ample food supply, something which varies between and within years.

The sighting surveys take into account that whales move between areas. But for logistical reasons not all areas are covered in one season, but in a five to six year period all areas are researched.

3. Peter Corkeron wrote:

I’ve never taken part in one of the minke surveys, but know how they work, as I’ve taken part in others elsewhere (US waters, Antarctic). Unlike virtually all other vessel-based surveys for cetaceans, the Norwegian team don’t use binoculars. They have their reasons for this, but it reduces their effective strip width, hence their survey coverage and so the precision of their abundance estimates.

Rune Frovik responds:

This is correct, except the conclusion that it reduces the precision of the abundance estimates. With binoculars you see both more and less. There are good reasons why the Norwegian whalers don’t use binoculars in the lookout.

4. Peter Corkeron wrote:

Over time (this has been going on for a little over a decade), quotas set have trended upwards, and now don’t bear much resemblance to quotas that would have been set under the way that the IWC Scientific Committee designed the RMS. So, this management procedure, developed to ensure sustainability (as far as humanly possible) hasn’t actually been implemented by the Norwegians.

Rune Frovik responds:

Norway is still using the quota calculation model developed and recommended by the IWC Scientific Committee. Only Norway has implemented this procedure.

5. Peter Corkeron wrote:

The final decision on quotas for the minke hunt is made by the Norwegian Sjopattedyrradet (marine mammal advisory board), comprised of industry representatives, based on advice from the Fisheries Directorate, who in turn receive advice from IMR.

Rune Frovik responds:

This is wrong. Final decisions are made by the Ministry of Fisheries and Coastal affairs. The advisory board only supplies advise and their view to the Ministry.

6. Peter Corkeron wrote:

So in theory, the sustainable harvest of whales may be possible. As things are playing out in Norway at present, this remains theory.

Rune Frovik responds:

Well, Norway has taken more than 100 000 minke whales in this area since WWII. From the 50s to the early 80s the annual average catch was about 2000 minke whales. The IWC Scientific Committee has considered this to be a sustainable harvest in that period. While historic catch records are an indicator that this could also be a future sustainable level, it is not a proof. Current science however indicates so.

What Norway is doing is not theory, it is very hard reality.

7. Peter Corkeron wrote:

One aspect of whether Norwegian whaling is sustainable or not that gets missed completely – by both sides, it appears – is the economics of the Norwegian market for food. From an OECD report on agricultural subsidies in 2004, Norway is one of the five worst offenders internationally when it comes to overpaying their internal agricultural lobby.

Australians may be astonished to learn that one of the reasons against Norway joining the EU is Norwegian agricultural subsidies would have to be dramatically reduced to drop to EU levels.

So prices for meat in Norway are artificially high. Given the current population sizes of baleen whales in the northeast Atlantic, were a management regime for whaling that demonstrated a decent chance of being sustainable (the IWC’s RMS or something similar) ever implemented, the meat would be so expensive that it would probably price itself out of an open market.

Rune Frovik responds:

What Corkeron says about agricultural subsidies is correct, but I have some problems seeing where he is heading. I disagree with the statement that prices for agricultural meat in Norway are artificially high, I would rather say it is the opposite, that because of subsidies they are artificially low.

The seafood sector, including whaling, does not receive any subsidies at all. (In fact Norway argues strongly on the international arena that fisheries subsidies should also be removed in other countries.)

Since it has been difficult to compete with meat prices, and also because many Norwegians provide themselves with fish, the seafood industry has traditionally focused on export markets, but recently more efforts are put into the domestic market. The whale meat is currently only sold on the domestic market, and because of no subsidies, the consumers must pay the real price for whale meat.

This is certainly a challenge for the whale meat industry, but something which it tries to cope with.

8. Peter Corkeron wrote:

I’ve seen ‘fresh’ whale meat turning green as it sat on sale at the local fish market, waiting to be bought.

Rune Frovik responds:

Green?! Whale meat doesn’t like air, so it rapidly turns dark if it is not protected from air. For this reason vacuum packaging is commonly used. Anyway, you should absolutely complain if your offered poor quality meat.

9. Peter Corkeron wrote:

Sometimes at these markets, there was also a stand giving away free meals of whale meat, part of the government drive to encourage Norwegains to eat whale. Government-funded undercutting of small businesses run by enterprising migrants.

Rune Frovik responds:

The government does not encourage Norwegians to eat whale meat or not, that is not their business.

With the possible exception of the Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, who is portrayed in a new film documentary (Oljeberget), purchasing whale meat and preparing it for dinner, and smilingly exclaiming that, “whale meat is extremely good”.

The industry certainly attempts to encourage consumption and they pay their own marketing.

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For more information on whaling and the High North Alliance visit their website, click here. The site includes a collection of harpoon cartoons. One of the cartoons includes an Aussie talking to a sheep about eating whale meat, click here.

Save The Locust . Com

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I lived in Madagascar for several years in the late 1980s. They ate locust over there, fried they tasted OK.

A locust is a short-horned grasshopper when it swarms. I always thought a locust swarm was something to fear.

There have been claims that the terrible famine in north west Africa last year could have been prevented if only environmentalists had not prevented aerial spraying with some residual chemicals.

Then this afternoon, after a morning at the beach, I turn on my computer and I have an email from Jim Pashley wishing me a Happy New Year and asking your opinion – as a reader of this blog – on a website run by a group of concerned environmentalists and farmers.

It is all about locusts, but with a twist. The site suggests that contrary to popular perceptions regarding the recent locust plague in New South Wales and Victoria:

For the most part, locusts have ignored irrigated pastures, mature crops and dry feed. The losses that have occurred, contrary to sensational media articles, were largely confined to unseasonal summer green. Spring sown crops are the rarity in this district and are always a gamble, and lucerne (and native pasture) re-growth, brought about by summer rains, is not something that dry-land farmers in our area budget on. From this perspective, the impacts were no more than the other seasonal variations farmers deal with everyyear.

The idea that something as abundant as a species of “plague” locust could become extinct seems impossible; yet this is exactly what has happened to the “plague” locust that used to occur in the USA, and it could also happen here. Already, what was once a one in five year event has been reduced to a one in thirty. The impact of such extinction would be more far-reaching than we realise. Locusts are a natural grazer of our grasslands and a welcome food source to other wildlife. Flocks of over a thousand Ibis, have been observed feasting on un-sprayed bands of locusts. Other native wildlife such as Falcons, Bearded Dragons and Shingle-back Lizards, to name just a few, have all been seen enjoying the feast. The rare Fat-tailed Dunnart has increased its activity since the arrival of the locusts, and even a Bustard (once abundant in Northern Victoria, now virtually extinct), was sighted last summer, in the same season and district that the Locusts swarms occurred. Co-incidence? With wildlife numbers low due to the recent drought: What role might the locust migrations have played in population recovery? And what impact are we having by our interference?

Anyway, they are keen for feedback. The site is here: http://www.savethelocust.com/.

Don’t Blame Arsonists: Roger Underwood

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I wonder how many Koalas have been burnt in the bushfires raging across Victoria?

I received a letter from Roger Underwood today, he writes, “Arsonists do light fires, but they are not responsible for fires becoming large and damaging, especially forest fires. Blaming them is a convenient way for politicians and land managers to avoid taking responsibility themselves, which they should.”

Roger Underwood has over 40 years experience of bushfire management in Australia and overseas. He was formerly General Manager of The Deparment of Conservation and Land Management (CALM) in Western Australia, a regional and district manager, a research manager and bushfire specialist.

Dear Jennifer

I have been watching TV and reading newspaper reports on the recent (and ongoing) disastrous bushfires in Victoria and Western Australia. One common thread is the attempt to blame “arsonists, thought to be responsible for the fires”.

There are two non-debatable things about arson: (i) it has always been with us and will always be with us, as it is an expression of anti-social, criminal or sick human behaviour; and (ii) since arson-lit fires cannot be prevented, we should expect them to occur and take the necessary measures to minimise their impact, not whinge about them.

The ultimate irony to me was to see our Acting Premier promising large sums of money as a reward for information about the supposed arsonist, when the government in which he is a Minister has overseen a massive decline in the capacity of the State’s bushfire management resources.

Bushfires cannot be prevented.

On the other hand we can predict with great accuracy where and when they will occur and we can put in place very effective measures to minimise the damage they cause, and to increase the ease and safety of their control. In the publicly-owned forest, these measures are relatively simple.

In the first place we need a sound policy, and the strong support of government and agencies – this is a matter of simple, good governance and responsible public service.

In the second place we need a resource of permanent well trained and well equipped staff who can undertake fire management, supported by a well-funded volunteer firefighter force. Third, we need effective programs of green burning in our parks and forests, to reduce fuels and to ensure that fires do not become large, intense and unstoppable. Finally we need rural people, including those living at the interface, to take responsibility for making their own properties less hazardous or vulnerable, and if they won’t do it voluntarilly, they must be forced to do it compulsorily.

None of this is new. But for some reason it does not happen. Worse, we seem to be going backwards. I agree with those who blame the environmentalists for antagonism or fear of green burning – they have very successfully created a generation of young people who do not understand the role of fire in Australian ecosystems – but they are not solely to blame.

The political leaders who show no leadership, or who try to slip out from under by blaming the arsonists are also contemptible, but politicians are politicians, and we cannot expect them to behave out of character. I am also very disappointed with some of the new breed of braided Fire Chiefs who tend to see bushfires as theatre, and whose media popularity would be threatened by a fire management system which resulted in fewer fire disasters. But these people are simply a product of the media-dominated world in which we live,and they won’t go away any more than will the arsonists.

I conclude that the real villains in the piece are our professional land managers – the people who are today in charge of our national parks and State forests. They are well aware of the ecological research, they know about the decline in forest health in areas subjected to fire exclusion, they have staff in the field who are skilled in and enthusiastic about green burning, they have media and communications units, and they are in a position to influence government policy and priorities, to fight for a position which is right, even if it is politically unpopular. But they do not appear to be prepared to fight for good and effective fire management, and the result is an increasing number of large, high intensity fires which do no-one any good, and cause immense environmental damage.

The situation in WA is made more difficult by the fact that our land management agency (CALM) is not responsible for preparing the park and forest management plans which they are required to implement. The government has placed responsibilityfor management planning in the hands of a part-time committee of citizens and academics called The Conservation Commission, not one single member of which has any scientific expertise or professional experience in bushfire management or forest firefighting.

A thousand new arson detectives in every state will not catch every arsonist or potential arsonist, nor will they stop arson occurring in the future. What is needed is a new breed of tough, dedicated professional land managers who accept arson as inevitable, like lightning, and work to put in place a system which ensures that when fires start we can deal with them before people are killed, lovely forests incinerated and farms destroyed. What the government needs to do is to put these people in charge, chop off the influence of committees of well-meaning amateurs, and provide policy and political support.

Will this happen? The Bushfire Front developed a template for Best Practice in Bushfire Management in WA which, in early 2005, we sent to the Premier and the Minister for the Environment, together with an analysis of where WA needed to take steps to halt the decline in the standard of fire management, and to get the whole show back on the road. This submission was the outcome of several months work by experienced bushfire managers and former fire scientists. Neither the Premier nor the Minister replied.

Roger Underwood
The Bushfire Front WA Inc

Which Climate Change Consensus? (Part 4)

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There has been some interesting discussion on policy solutions for ‘climate change’ at the thread following Part 2 of this series.

David Tribe mades the comment:

Focusing on policy realism is what is needed. We’ve heard too much about model uncertainties and physics.

Ian Castles responded with a suggestion from Indur Goklany’s submission to House of Lords Economic Committee Inquiry:

“Over the next few decades the focus of climate policy should be to

(a) broadly advance sustainable development, particularly in developing countries since that would generally enhance their adaptive capacity to cope with the many urgent problems they currently face, including many that are climate sensitive;

(b) specifically reduce vulnerabilities to climate-sensitive problems that are urgent today and might be exacerbated by future climate change; and

(c) implement ‘no-regret’ emissions reduction measures; while

(d) concurrently striving to expand the universe of no-regret options through research and development to increase the variety and cost-effectiveness of available mitigation options”.

Ian then made comment that:

In the light of this and other submissions, the House of Lords Economic Committee unanimously concluded that ‘The important issue is to wean the international negotiators away from excessive reliance on the ‘targets and penalties’ approach embodied in Kyoto.

Hence there should be urgent progress towards thinking about wholly different, and more promising, approaches based on a careful analysis of the incentives that countries have to agree to any measures adopted’ (Report, para. 184).

The objections to Kyoto go deep. To quote a few from Aynsley Kellow’s paper for ASSA:

a) the Protocol ‘lacks adequate enforcement mechanisms;

b)it allows paper reductions in emissions to be offset against future real increases;

c)and it is overly sanguine about the ability to create the institutions (especially measurement and verification measures) which will permit the establishment of effective emissions trading regimes.’

… A major element in the Castles and Henderson critique of the IPCC approach is precisely that the Panel is excessively confident of its ability to make long-term projections of emissions, i.e., of socio-economic conditions and technological possibilities. The concluding statements you [Ender] quote from the Econbrowser blog summarise precisely why basing policies on very long-term projections of emissions is wrong-headed.

But the emissions scenarios do need to be constrained by what is logically possible, and they do need to be based on sound concepts. For example, it would be a nonsense (a) to assume that average incomes per head in Africa will increase 15-fold by the middle of the century (as the IPCC scenarios with both the highest and lowest emissions profiles do); (b) to base projections of emissions of GHGs on this assumption; but then (c) conclude that climate change will lead to large increases in the numbers at risk of hunger on the continent. Yet this is what is done in the most widely-cited impact study using the IPCC scenarios.

In his submission to the Lords Committee, Julian Morris of the University of Buckingham made the point that, if Bangladesh and the United States prove to have similar levels of output per head by the end of the century, as the IPCC high emissions scenarios assume, this outcome could only have come about because either (a) Bangladesh has found a highly cost-effective way of coping with the adverse effects of climate change or (b) it would not have suffered these effects. He concludes that ‘Either way there appears to be a contradiction between the economic scenarios that underpin the IPCC’s climate forecasts and the scary stories that the IPCC tells on the back of these forecasts.’