Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for June 2006

Worrying About Mekong River Dolphins

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They’ve been described as the rabbits of the sea. I’m referring to minke whales.

How much money does Greenpeace spend sending boats to the Antarctic to ‘save’ them?

I’m more concerned about the species that are really threatened with extinction like the freshwater dolphins of Asia.

After posting earlier today on the baniji in China, I was sent a link to the Mekong Dolphin Conservation Project.

dolphin_out_of_water.jpg
[from the Mekong Dolphin Conservation Project website]

This project to save the Mekong River Dolphins appears to have been initiated by one dedicated PhD Student, Isabel Beasley.

I wonder how her budget compares to the Greenpeace budget for minke whales?

Where are our priorities?

Polling the State of the Environment

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Greenpeace tell us we should worry about global warming and GM food. But what are most people worried about when it comes to the environment?

There is currently a poll on ‘The Environment’ at the ‘What the People Want’ . If you fill it in and leave your email address Graham Young will send you a summary of his findings.

The poll is structured along the lines of work done by Riley Dunlap in the early 1990s. He asked people how the environment was locally, nationally and globally and found everyone thought the environment was worse ‘elsewhere’. Even in the one country most respondents believed the environment was worse ‘elsewhere’.

In his book ‘The Skeptical Environmentalist’ Bjorn Lomborg suggested this is because our fears for the environment are to a high degree communicated by scientists, conservationists and the media.

A Note on Energy & Adaptation: Steven Hayward

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“In the end, a relentless campaign to extend political control over the world’s energy use is likely to fail, in part because, even if severe climate change is in our future, most people intuitively recognize that rhetoric about “the end of civilization as we know it” is inconsistent with human experience. Our distant ancestors survived an ice age with little more than animal skins, crude tools, and open fire pits. For all the talk of science and progress, the global-warming alarmists betray an astonishing lack of confidence in human creativity and resiliency. It’s almost as if the scientific community had abandoned the idea of evolution.”

Steven Hayward, American Enterprise Institute

Worrying About the Baiji

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I was a little confused by a recent article at ABC Online about the Baiji, the rare river dolphins in the Yangtze River in China.

I was confused because the news article titled ‘Plan hatched to save Yangtze dolphins’ suggested the dolphin would be saved because they could be relocated to a nearby lake. But this is not a new plan, I understood from the IUCN that a reserve was created for the dolphins back in 1992, but conservationists had been unsuccessful at moving individual animals.

Is this a new initiative? Since about 2004 the baiji.org Foundation has been working for the conservation of the river dolphins.

chinese_dolphin.jpg
[picture from CITES]

The banji (Lipotes vexillifer) is considered the most endangered of all the worlds dophins, porpoises and whales and it is thought to only occur in China’s heavily polluted Yangtze River. There are two other closely related river dolphins one in the Indus (Platanista gangetica minor) and one in the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna and Karnaphuli-Sangu (Platanista gangetica gangetica), and also freshwater populations of Irrawaddy dolphins (Orcaella brevirostris) in the Mekong, Mahakam, and Irrawaddy Rivers, and populations in the brackish waters of Sonkhla (Thailand) and Chilka (India) lakes.

Update 4.30 pm

It seems the story at ABC Online was a summary of a story at the BBC Online which ends with comment that:

“The plan is to set up a reserve in an oxbow lake 21km long which was part of the Yangtze until the 1970s.”

Tian-e-Zhou lake already houses another freshwater cetacean, the Yangtze finless porpoise, so conditions are likely to suit the baiji.

There are fish in the lake to provide food for the dolphins; and although there may be some human fishing, it is likely to be on a much smaller scale than in the Yangtze itself.

…Costs could amount to between £200,000 and £300,000 ($365,000 and $545,000) for the first year’s operations.

Boats are needed to catch the dolphins, helicopters to transfer them to Tian-e-Zhou. Holding pens need to be constructed, veterinary staff provided, and an inventory made of fish stocks.

The rescue plan speaks of conducting five dolphin capture operations in the Yangtze within the next three years “…in order to establish a viable ex-situ breeding population of baiji at Tian-e-Zhou before the Yangtze population undergoes a further decline or becomes extinct”.

The long-term plan would be to re-introduce them to the Yangtze, but only when the prospects of them thriving there have risen.”

And I’ve just been emailed an article from Nature Vol 44 0/27 (April 2006) which states that during a nine day pilot search for the dolphins in March not a single dolphin was found. The same article talks about catching and releasing the dolphins into the Shishou reserve. There will be another ‘survey’ along the river in November.

So we have a species right on the verge of extinction and the IUCN came out just a month or two ago banging on about polar bears and global warming. Where are our priorities?

Climate Consensus & The End of Science: Terence Corcoran versus Thomas Kuhn

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I grew up in a family where we would sometimes take a vote, and then Dad would decide. Dad had some respect for the idea of a ‘majority’ or a ‘consensus’, but I can’t remember ever worrying too much about trying to convince my siblings to vote with me.

As a scientist working for government, and later in a management position with the Queensland sugar industry, my colleagues used to try and impress upon me the importance of “having the numbers” and what the “consensus” position was.

But I’ve always been less interested in who has the numbers at any particular point in time, and more interested in the argument. I’ve always believed that a solid logical argument should eventually win the day.

The other day I was sent a link to a piece by Terence Corcoran from the Financial Post in Canada titled ‘Climate Consensus and the End of Science’. It began with comment that:

“It is now firmly established, repeated ad nauseam in the media and elsewhere, that the debate over global warming has been settled by scientific consensus. The subject is closed. It seems unnecessary to labour the point, but here are a couple of typical statements: “The scientific consensus is clear: human-caused climate change is happening” (David Suzuki Foundation); “There is overwhelming scientific consensus” that greenhouse gases emitted by man cause global temperatures to rise (Mother Jones).

Back when modern science was born, the battle between consensus and new science worked the other way around. More often than not, the consensus of the time — dictated by religion, prejudice, mysticism and wild speculation, false premises — was wrong. The role of science, from Galileo to Newton and through the centuries, has been to debunk the consensus and move us forward. But now science has been stripped of its basis in experiment, knowledge, reason and the scientific method and made subject to the consensus created by politics and bureaucrats.”

The piece is interesting, it does correctly emphasis the extent to which the word ‘consensus’ is repeated invoked with the word ‘science’ and ‘climate change’ to justify support for the concept of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

Terence Corcoran’s piece might have been improved with some reference to two well know philosophers of science, Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn.

Popper had no time for consensus, for him science was advanced through ‘falsification’:

“Logically, no number of positive outcomes at the level of experimental testing can confirm a scientific theory, but a single genuine counter-instance is logically decisive: it shows the theory, from which the implication is derived, to be false. Popper’s account of the logical asymmetry between verification and falsification lies at the heart of his philosophy of science. It also inspired him to take falsifiability as his criterion of demarcation between what is and is not genuinely scientific: a theory should be considered scientific if and only if it is falsifiable.”

[from Wikipedia, click here].

Yet so many ‘global warming believer’ complain when ‘skeptics’ present bits of information that don’t necessarily accord with the rhetoric. They might accuse the skeptic of ‘cherry picking’. But if you believe in Popper and falsification, what’s wrong with cherry picking to disprove the general applicability of a theory?

In contrast, Thomas Kuhn would perhaps see the current preoccupation with having a scientific consensus as normal:

“Thomas Kuhn … argued instead that experimental data always provide some data which cannot fit completely into a theory, and that falsification alone did not result in scientific change or an undermining of scientific consensus. He proposed that scientific consensus worked in the form of “paradigms”, which were interconnected theories and underlying assumptions about the nature of the theory itself which connected various researchers in a given field. Kuhn argued that only after the accumulation of many “significant” anomalies would scientific consensus enter a period of “crisis”. At this point, new theories would be sought out, and eventually one paradigm would triumph over the old one — a cycle of paradigm shifts rather than a linear progression towards truth. Kuhn’s model also emphasized more clearly the social and personal aspects of theory change, demonstrating through historical examples that scientific consensus was never truly a matter of pure logic or pure facts.”

[from Wikipedia, click here]

So according to Kuhn the current preoccupation with a ‘scientific consensus’ on climate change is not necessarily novel and contrary to Terence Corcoran’s ascertains it doesn’t necessarily mean “the end of science”.

Being a ‘Chooser’, Not a ‘Changer’ (More on Peer Review)

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There have been several instances where commentators at this blog have criticised others for publishing their information on websites rather in peer reviewed journals. The inference being that if its not in a peer reviewed journal, the idea has little merit.

Interestingly, there’s a new medical journal to be published by Elsevier called ‘Medical Hypotheses’ and it plans to take a deliberately different approach to peer review:

“Most contemporary practice tends to discriminate against radical ideas that conflict with current theory and practice. Medical Hypotheses will publish radical ideas, so long as they are coherent and clearly expressed. Furthermore, traditional peer review can oblige authors to distort their true views to satisfy referees, and so diminish authorial responsibility and accountability. In Medical Hypotheses, the authors’ responsibility for the integrity, precision and accuracy of their work is paramount. The editor sees his role as a ‘chooser’, not a ‘changer’: choosing to publish what are judged to be the best papers from those submitted.

Papers in Medical Hypotheses take a standard scientific form in terms of style, structure and referencing. The journal therefore constitutes a bridge between cutting-edge theory and the mainstream of medical and scientific communication, which ideas must eventually enter if they are to be critiqued and tested against observations.”

What a great idea! And doesn’t the new journal neatly articulate the problems with peer review for those working outside of established paradigms.

The quote was sent to me with a link to a blog piece by Andrew Leigh in which he suggests the concept has application to economics.