Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for January 27, 2006

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.’

Which Climate Change Consensus? (Part 3)

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There are some interesting questions being posed at the Which Climate Change Consensus? (Part 2) thread. Following are two questions from Graham Young that interests me. They seems to have been lost amongst the more general policy and economic discussion about Kyoto.

David,

Your quotation from the MIT piece illustrates the problem that you have with your models. You say “a projected 18 percent increase [in CO2] resulting from fossil fuel combustion to the year 2000 (320 ppm to 379 ppm) might increase the surface temperature of the earth 0.5C”. Now CO2 is at 380 ppm and you are claiming a rise in surface temperature of 0.5 degrees.

So far, so good, but as we know that temperature of the earth can and does vary independently of CO2 concentrations, how do you know that the rise was due to CO2 alone? And if it wasn’t, then in fact you may have overshot or undershot by more than the 0.5 degrees. If you overshot, your modelling was completely unsuccessful, and if you undershot, then things are a lot worse than you thought.

The IPCC graph at http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/figspm-4.htm is interesting.

It shows general trends between model and observations reaching more or less the same end point, but with significant divergences along the way. You’d probably get a better feel for this by graphing a rolling average.

But you might well be getting this result by massaging the factors that are programmed in until you get a reasonably good fit, but without those factors necessarily being the right ones if you are missing some ingredients.

I’ve gleaned some of my information from the graphs that Jennifer put up on the site on the 28th November. While you’re explaining your models, could you please tell me what the mechanism is that makes temperature dive just after the peaks in CO2 shown in those graphs?

Graham Young

10th Anniversay: GM Cotton in Australia

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This is the 10th year that GM cotton has been grown in Australia. Interestingly I have seen no mention of this milestone in the popular press or online.

GM canola was to be the next GM crop approved for commercial production in Australia but Greenpeace ran a campaign against it. We now have moratoriums banning new GM food crops – cotton exempt on the basis it is grown primarily for fibre – in all states except Queensland where it is too hot to grow canola.

The state government regulations banning this new technology are dumb*, click here for an example.

The general public has no real understanding of the issues, and neither do most bloggers judging from comment earlier in the week at John Quiggin’s site. In this post on global warming he suggests there has been sensible discussion in the Australian media on GM issues – but not on global warming.

I would suggest Greenpeace has just done a good snow job on most Australians – in part because the media and most bloggers haven’t researched the issue, encouraged intelligent debate and discussion.

Most of the rest of the world is planting more GM – even Europe.

On Monday (23rd January) e-news journal farmonline provided an update on GM cotton globally:

Biotech cotton varieties were planted on an estimated 9.7 million hectares in seven countries in 2005-06, accounting for 28pc of world cotton area this season.

Biotech varieties appear to confer advantages in efforts to raise yields, hence their growing popularity.

The average yield with biotech (GM) varieties is estimated at 967 kilograms of lint per hectare, compared with a world yield estimated at 725 kg/ha.

Biotech cotton will account for approximately 37pc of world cotton production and trade in 2005-06.

The US was the first country in which biotech cotton varieties were approved for commercial production in 1996.

Area planted to biotech varieties in the US increased to 82pc of 5.5 million hectares in 2005-06.

Herbicide-resistant and stacked gene varieties having both herbicide and insecticide resistant characters accounted for 90pc of the US biotech cotton area in 2005.

Pure insect resistant varieties were planted on less than 10pc of the US biotech cotton area.

Dr David Tribe has lots of information on GM everything at his blog, click here.

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* I’m sure there is a better word than ‘dumb’? Suggestions?