Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for March 2006

Apology Owed to CSIRO and BOM: Geoffrey Sherrington Letter Misleading

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“On the 15th February The Australian newspaper published a letter from Geoffrey Sherrington of North Balwyn, Victoria, alleging that CSIRO fraudulently selected weather recording sites that showed more warming, including sites predominantly from capital cities under suspicion for heat island effects. This would give a result that suggested global warming, even if most weather recording sites showed little or no temperature change since the 1880s.

The Sherrington letter was emailed about cyberspace and used by some global warming skeptics as reason to dismiss the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) finding that last year was the hottest on record.

I phoned Geoffrey Sherrington last week. He said that he stands by everything he wrote in that letter. But when I pressed him for details, he said it was the University of Bath in the United Kingdom, not the CSIRO or BOM Bureau of Meteorology, that had been selective in its choice of weather recording sites and furthermore that the letter related to work he did 20 years ago.

I suggest The Australian newspaper and some global warming skeptics owe the CSIRO and the BOM a big apology. The claims in Mr Sherrington’s letter should be discounted accordingly.

While I am often labeled a global warming skeptic because I not convinced that ratifying the Kyoto Protocol will bring Australia anything but grief, and I am unsure how much of the warming over the last 100 years is due to natural forces as opposed to human activity,, I have no reason to dispute the methodology that the BOM Bureau of Meteorology uses to calculate temperature change and I accept that last year was the hottest year since official recordings were made in Australia.”

This is a draft of the letter I intend sending to The Australian newspaper tomorrow, or Tuesday, based on discussion at a previous thread at this blog, click here. Apart from Louis Hissink who republished the letter, here, I can’t find any other reference to it in the public domain?

Let me know if you have any suggested additions or changes to this letter, by posting a comment below or sending an email to jennifermarohasy@jennifermarohasy.com .

The Whale: A Fish in Japanese Eyes (Part 1)

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Whales&Jap_Komatsu.jpg

Glen Inwood recently sent me some books about whaling from a Japanese perspective. They are so interesting with a lot of history. Given many readers of this blog have a particular interest in whaling, I plan to post some extracts from these books over the next few months. Here’s the first installment:

“Since time immemorial, the Japanese people have been religiously taught to avoid eating four-legged animals – a teaching that has its genesis in the influence of the Buddhist faith. When Buddhism was introduced from the Asian continent well over a thousand years ago, the Prince Regent Shotoku, who ruled the nation at the time, quickly became a devoted follower of the new faith. He promoted a marriage of Bhuddism with the indigenous Japanese religion, Shinto.

After Prince Shotoku, there was a successful coup bringing Emperor Tenchi to power, and he wasted no time in declaring Buddhism the national religion. In the seventh century, Emperor Tenmu prohibited the eating of land animals entirely. The whale, however, lived in the ocean and was regarded as a fish, and therefore notably not included in the prohibition.

Centuries after this decree, in 1687, the Shogun Tsunayoshi introduced a special mercy law protecting animals. He loved dogs to the point of madness, and all animals were further protected by this law. However, even under this Shogun, whales were not protected.

Moreover, because this law made it harder to procure animal meat, the whale found itself even more sought after as a crucial source of protein in the Japanese diet. It was during this era that net whaling developed, and whale meat consequently became a more regular feature of the Japanese diet.”

(From Whales and the Japanese by Masayki Komatsu and Shigeko Misaki, pg. 54)

And here’s a link to a recent news story with Japanese surfers complaining not enough was done to save stranded melon-head whales.

Some Forests Need Fire: Dieback Spreading in Eucalpytus Forests

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Some months ago I received a note from a forester about dieback in native Australian forests, following is an edited version:

“There is a very large and growing forest health issue particularly in the dryer forest types. Die back known by a variety of names from Bell Bird Dieback to Mundulla yellows is affecting thousands of hectares of native forest and appears to have the potential to affect thousands more.

It is a little talked about issue but it covers all land tenures public forest and national park and private property.

Based on observation by forest managers an hypothesis has been put forward that dieback is the result of changed fire regimes. In particular reduced incidence of low intensity burns has promoted changes in soil chemistry and moisture levels that have promoted antagonistic conditions to over storey eucalypts resulting in dieback and ecological change. Parallels can be drawn with the US Pacific North West and the forest health problems being documented there after 70 years of fire exclusion as a result of the overly successful ‘Smokey the bear’ campaign.”

This morning I received a note from David Ward. The following has been edited slightly:

“There is an article (Jay Withgott ‘Fighting Sudden Oak Death with Fire?’, Science Aug 2004 Vol.305 p.1101) which decribes how California oaks are dying from Phytophthora ramorum.

Two researchers (Moritz & Odion,’Prescribed Fire & Natural Disturbance’, Science Dec 2004, Vol. 306, p.1680) have found that there is some association between this pathogen and long fire exclusion. The researchers caution that there is not yet a demonstrated causal relationship, and that prescribed fire may have a different effect from natural fire. However, the article may be of interest to Australian researchers, and land owners.

… Some local WA Nyoongar Elders have said that, in their view, traditional summer burning, on dry soil, prevented the fungal diseases which we see now. At the same time, summer burning promoted other fungi, some of which were good tucker.”

This afternoon, Vic Jurskis send me a copy of his recent paper titled ‘Eucalypt decline in Australia, and general concept of tree decline and dieback’, Forest Ecology and Management, Volume 215 (205) pages 1-20 (available online at www.sciencedirect.com for $30).

The paper includes the following comments under a heading ‘Implications for Management’:

“Considerable resources are being devoted to research of contributing factors in tree decline but
few corrective actions are being applied in eucalypt forests other than quarantine and hygiene measures to restrict the spread of Phytophthora .

… Prescribed burning appears to be the only silvicultural practice that can have widespread application in conservation reserves and
timber producing forests. Passive management of nature reserves in Australia has failed to maintain healthy ecosystems, especially in the case of the grassy forests that were most depleted by clearing for
agriculture and are now mostly declining in health and changing in structure.

To conserve healthy dry and moist eucalypt forests it will be necessary to restore more natural outputs of nitrogen and moisture by using frequent low intensity fire and/or grazing. Ecological burning
regimes should be integrated with hazard reduction burning to protect forest health as well as social and economic values.”

David Ward also commented that it would be “valuable to get views from other parts of Australia on this topic”.

Nature Favors Wikipedia?

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There is currently something of a dispute between Encyclopedia Britannica and science journal Nature on the accuracy of a study Nature conducted some time ago comparing information in the Encyclopedia with the information available on the internet at Wikipedia. The Nature study concluded that Wikipedia was as reliable and readable a source of information as the Britannica.

Readers of this blog may remember that I did a post on the issue quoting an article in The Australia in December, click here.

Now, according to The Register, it seems you can’t trust Nature or Wikipedia, click here. Encyclopedia Britannica is claiming that the study was designed to favour Wikipedia and that information provided from the Britannica as part of the study was incomplete and as a consequence not assessed accurately.

The article concludes with the following comments:

“So why did Nature risk its reputation in such a way?

Perhaps the clue lies not in the news report, but in the evangelism of the accompanying editorial. Nature’s news and features editor Jim Giles, who was responsible for the Wikipedia story, has a fondness for “collective intelligence”, one critical website suggets.

“As long as enough scientists with relevant knowledge played the market, the price should reflect the latest developments in climate research,” Giles concluded of one market experiment in 2002.

The idea became notorious two years ago when DARPA, under retired Admiral Poindexter, invested in an online terror casino to predict world events such as assassinations. The public didn’t quite share the sunny view of this utopian experiment, and Poindexter was invited to resign.

What do these seemingly disparate projects have in common? The idea that you can vote for the truth.

We thought it pretty odd, back in December, to discover a popular science journal recommending readers support less accurate information. It’s even stranger to find this institution apparently violating fundamental principles of empiricism.

But these are strange times – and high summer for supporters of junk science.”

But it seems you can’t trust science journal Nature either? And Nature is presumably not about “collective intelligence” or “voting for the truth”.

Ian Castles has commented:

“This reminds me of a letter to The Economist from ecologist Jeff Harvey, author of Nature’s review on Lomborg in 2001. Harvey quoted in all seriousness a Danish peak science figure who’d said that, to scientists, Nature, Science and Scientific American held the same place as the Bible to Christians and the Koran to Moslems.

Barrie Pittock gives references to the hostile reviews of Lomborg’s book in Nature and Science in the Supplementary Notes and References to Climate Change: Turning Up the Heat. The Science review, by Michael Grubb, was fair comment, though I don’t agree with it. The review in Nature, by Harvey was outrageous – he bracketed Lomborg with holocaust deniers.”

This reminds me of a telephone conversation I had with a farmer some time ago. He always reads my columns in The Land newspaper and was phoning to provide me with some additional information about koalas and their feeding habits. I suggested he should read and contribute to this blog. He replied that he didn’t like the internet because he didn’t trust it as a source of information, he went on to tell me that he did trust what he read in The Land.

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Update 9pm

Here’s a link to the actual response from Britannica, http://corporate.britannica.com/britannica_nature_response.pdf.
Thanks to Benny Peiser for the link.

Jared Diamond: Under the Spell of Malthus & Montana

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Friends and colleagues keep sending me links to critiques of Jared Diamond’s book ‘Collapse’.

Following is a link to a short essay by Ronald Bailey that goes beyond Diamond’s book and discusses what makes a successful society and also a longer piece by Kendra Okonski on Diamond’s chapter on Montana (Chapter 1).

Ronald Bailey titled his essay ‘Under the Spell of Malthus’ and commented that:

“Why is Puerto Rico so much better off than its neighbors? In a word, institutions. Diamond vaguely recognizes the importance of social and political institutions, but his analysis doesn’t go much deeper than arguing that Haitian dictators have been more rapacious than Dominican dictators. In fact, the last two centuries have shown that the more a country adheres to the rule of law, protects private property, reduces bureaucratic corruption, nurtures a free press, permits free markets, engages in trade, and allows democratic politics, the less likely it is to suffer from the Malthusian horrors of plagues, famines, and civil wars. What Haiti and Rwanda have in common is not just dense populations but shattered social and political institutions. What the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Puerto Rico have in common are not only dense populations, but adequately effective social and political institutions.

…As ecology teaches us, the simplest ecosystems are often the most fragile. Similarly, our modern globally interconnected economy that can draw upon a wide array of resources is far more stable and robust than either the fragile pre-modern or the marginally modern societies cited by Diamond. It’s worth noting that in 1800, when the vast majority of people on the planet were farmers, the global average GDP per capita, adjusted for inflation, was about $600.

Diamond adheres to the orthodox Malthusian claims that human population growth is exponential while “improvements in food production add rather than multiply; this breakthrough increases wheat yields by 25%, that breakthrough increases yields an additional 20%, etc.” But just looking at the history of the 20th century, it is very clear that increases in food production have been exponential too; in fact, food production has been increasing faster than human population growth. Since 1961 world grain production has tripled, while world population has doubled. Consequently, per capita global food production increased by 25 percent between 1961 and 2004, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.
“I have not met anyone,” Diamond writes, “who seriously argues that the world could support 12 times its current impact, although an increase of that factor would result from all Third World inhabitants adopting first world living standards.” But increasing human numbers and wealth do not translate automatically into more impact on the natural world. The British demographer Angus Maddison calculates that world GDP increased in real dollars from $2 trillion in 1900 to $37 trillion in 2001, while global per capita income rose from $1,300 annually to more than $6,000. This 18-fold increase in output was not achieved just by doing more and more of the same old things. Most of the increase was achieved through technological innovation: using better recipes to manipulate less physical stuff to give us more services.

…The only way to solve the allegedly impending global ecological crisis, according to Diamond, is “long-term planning, and a willingness to reconsider core values.” Although vague about whom he would put in charge of global planning, Diamond evinces throughout Collapse an alarming affection for authoritarian rulers who issue top-down orders restraining their citizens’ use of resources.”

In Collapse Jared Diamond suggests Montana is in as big a mess as Australia. But Kendra Okonski, a Montana native who now lives in England, disagrees. She argues that Diamond has got it wrong and that he doesn’t understand Montana’s history, forests or anything else. Kendra’s essay titled ‘Montana: On the Verge of Collapse?’ has just been published by PERC, the Property and Environment Research Center.

My critique titled ‘Australia’s Environment Undergoing Renewal Not Collapse’ published by Energy and Environment, recently made it into Wikipedia.

Busting Dams to Save Bilbies

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It will be Easter soon and if you live in Australia you can buy a chocolate bilbie instead of a chocolate rabbit to celebrate the occasion.

I understand that rabbits are traditionally associated with Easter because they represent fertility. Bilbies are not particularly fertile, in fact they are listed as endangered, but hey, it is all about helping an Australian native marsupial that’s doing it tough.

There were once two species of bilbie, but one is recorded as extinct since 1931 (Macrotis leucura). Bilbies have soft silky fur, long noses, long ears and they do not need to drink water.

I was sent a link to a story on ABC Television in Western Australia last week about a women struggling to save horses on a property purchased by government with the intention of putting it back how it was before European settlement. This involves removing artificial sources of water including dams.

Draining the dams has had the effect of starving and dehydrating many feral animals, including wild horses while presumably favoring native animals like bilbies that don’t need a drink.

The transcript is worth reading, it raises issues of animal cruelty, but also how one state government agency is trying to achieve some of its longer term objectives for wildlife management in Australia’s rangelands, click here.