Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for June 2006

Florida Corals Not At Risk of Global Warming: Gary Sharp

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Dr Gary Sharp, Scientific Director of the Center for Climate/Ocean Resource Study in Monterey Bay, California, makes a few good points regarding global warming and coral bleaching with particular reference to the Florida Keys in a recent article published by Tech Central Station titled, ‘Coral Bleaching: What (or Who) Dunnit?’:

1. Cold winters, not global warming, wiped out large areas of cold-sensitive corals in the Florida Keys in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

2. Coral reefs currently exists along a 6-7 degree temperature gradient so all the corals aren’t likely to die from a projected 2 degree celsius warming.

3. Sea surface temperatures are unlikely to increase by 2 degree celsius because the ocean responses to “excessive heating” through Deep Convection when the sea surface temperture exceeds about 27.5C.

Read the full article here:

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=042606B .

Counting Energy Efficiencies: Wooden Verus Cement Floors

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At the recent Timber Communities Australia national conference, prominent federal Labor politician Martin Ferguson called for a rethink of the national energy efficiency standards for residential buildings in Australia. He told conference delegates:

“Whilst we would all support practical measures that increase energy efficiency, it seems to me that the new building standards are underpinned by too many questionable assumptions and too little scientific evidence.

So does the Productivity Commission which reported its concerns about the analytical basis for the standards last October.

The key issue is the focus on reducing household energy running costs and the thermal performance of the building shell.

And, at least at the time the Productivity Commission was undertaking its investigations the Australian Greenhouse Office’s (AGO) home design manual noted that true low energy building design will consider embodied energy and take a broader life-cycle approach to energy assessment – merely looking at the energy used to operate the building is not really acceptable.

Because timber framed construction is lightweight in nature, it does not fit the thermal performance philosophy.
The analytical basis used also means that concrete slab-on-ground comes up trumps for efficiency over suspended timber flooring.

Consequently, $70 million worth of sales a year have been lost in the Victorian timber flooring market since the Victorian rating system was introduced.

This is despite the fact that a 1999 study undertaken for the AGO found it would take 62 years to get a net greenhouse benefit from a concrete floor over a timber floor.

And recent research indicates a concrete slab produces a net increase in CO2 emissions of 15 tonnes per house compared to a timber floor.

The problem is the standards ignore the fact that cement is highly energy intensive to produce while timber is a renewable resource, grown using direct sunlight and processed using relatively little energy in sawmills.
And sometimes, the energy in sawmills is produced using biomass from wood waste itself.

The Productivity Commission has recommended the Australian Building Codes Board commission an independent evaluation of energy efficiency standards to determine how effective they have been in reducing actual – not simulated – energy consumption and whether the financial benefits to individual producers and consumers have outweighed the associated costs.

And the sooner the government ensures this is done, the better because in the meantime the timber industry is suffering and it may well be doing so for no good reason.

I am pleased to see that the industry has successfully lobbied the Victorian government for an amnesty on wooden floors in new homes until April 2007 to allow time to address this issue.

But it is clear that the greens are now much more sophisticated in their attack on the forest industries, directly targeting industry markets to achieve their ends.

The Wilderness Society responded to the Victorian amnesty saying it was a “cynical attempt by the industry to maintain market share” rather than improve energy ratings or environmental sustainability.”

My house is cold in winter, it is wooden, with old wooden floors. But its my choice and I can’t understand why environmental groups don’t support the Australian timber industry so other home owners can appreciate the beauty of wood… wooden floors, wooden furniture, wooden window frames. And as Martin Ferguson said at the conference:

“Australia has 164 million hectares of native forests – 4% of the world’s forests – and 1.7 million hectares of plantations.

About 10% of our native forests are managed for wood production with less than 1% being harvested in any one year. That small proportion of forests harvested annually is regenerated so that a perpetual supply of native hardwood and softwood is maintained in this country.

Australia’s rigorous forestry standard, the AFS, has global mutual recognition under the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification, the largest international sustainability recognition framework for forestry in the world.

But the greens are running a duplicitous campaign around the globe to undermine the status of the standard.”

It’s Raining Now in Southern Sudan, And the Climate Models Tell Us?

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There is an article at the Science and Development Network Website indicating that some climate models predict Africa’s Sahel region will get wetter, while others predict it will get drier given global warming:

“Scientists initially believed that the decline in rainfall was caused by overgrazing and people clearing vegetation to make way for more farming and herding. But since the mid-1980s, several computer models have suggested that changes in the surface temperature of the oceans have changed the dynamics of the West African monsoon and are therefore to blame.

This hypothesis has gained widespread support but there still some disagreement. Different models point the finger at different oceans — some say the influence of the Indian Ocean is most important, others the difference between the North and South Atlantic.

Most scientists agree that the greenhouse gases and aerosols that human activities release into the atmosphere are partially to blame for changing ocean temperatures.

The question, then, is how this will affect future rainfall. Again, the answers depend on the models used.

… Understanding why the models predict such widely divergent futures “is a scientific priority that requires really getting into the bowels of the models” says Alessandra Giannini, a climate expert at Columbia University in the United States.

“There must be something in the models’ physics that is causing them to respond differently.”

For instance, several researchers have pointed out that many of the models show cooler present-day sea temperatures near the Americas and warmer ones close to Africa when the reality is the other way around — suggesting that the models are flawed.

Hurrell attributes the difficulties in modelling future Sahel rainfall to the “multiple competing influence of [factors that have] comparable importance”.

His research with Hoerling suggests that global sea-surface temperatures play a strong, and possibly dominating, role in determining how much rain falls in the Sahel — more so than, for instance, temperatures above Africa.”

The semi-arid Sahel stretches across North Africa south of the Sahara and is well know for its droughts and famines.

I have a friend currently working as a nurse in war torn southern Sudan, in a recent email she told me it was raining:

“It is Sunday and I have some computer time at last. And I am not on call, so hopefully will have some time to myself. After saying last Sudanmail how awful the heat and the dust was, we are now experiencing heat and mud. It has bucketed down for three days now, and the soil has turned to thick, black mud which builds up on the bottoms of your sandals till you are walking on platforms.

Great excitement for the distribution of gum-boots and raincoats last week, so now we all clomp around in boots, but the raincoat is too much of a sauna.

… The rain means the computers don’t charge as there is no solar energy, so we have been short of power. I think there is another 4 months of rain ahead, so I had better get used to power shortages and mud.”

So solar is not so good, when its raining nonstop.

Has Anybody Visited the North Aral Sea Lately?

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When the Soviet Union existed and included Kazakhstan and Usbekistan, tremendous volumes of water were diverted from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers to grow cotton. This resulted in the drying up of the Aral Sea a once huge body of water in Central Asia supporting a large fishing industry.

Its a famous example of cotton and irrigation destroying a downstream environment.

Last night I was sent a link to a piece in The Independent titled ‘The Dead Sea that Sprang to Life’ by Geoffrey Lean suggesting that the North Aral sea has been restored, that its a sea again:

“The Aral Sea was one of the world’s biggest inland bodies of water – until Soviet engineers destroyed it in the 1960s. Now, thanks to a new dam, it’s coming back.

… Fresh fish are on sale cheaply again in markets near the world’s most desiccated sea. Cold green water is creeping back towards dozens of long-abandoned harbours, and for the first time in a generation, fishermen are launching their boats where recently there were only waves of sand.

Life is returning astonishingly quickly to the North Aral Sea in Central Asia, partially reversing one of the world’s greatest environmental disasters. Just months after the completion of a dam to conserve its waters, the sea has largely recovered – confounding experts who said it was beyond rescue. Since April the level of the sea has risen by more than 3m, flooding over 800 sq km of dried-out seabed, and bringing hope to a part of the world bereft of it since Soviet engineers stole the waters in the 1960s.”

The North Aral Sea is part of Kazakhstan and this country is apparently making money out of its large oil and gas reserves. It has wanted to restore the Sea and successfully got money from Japan through the World Bank to build a dyke to hold water back from flowing south to Usbekistan and the South Aral Sea.

What is the impact going to be on the South Aral Sea?

According to this report from a traveller who visited the South Aral Sea in July 1998 there was still some water and a fishing industry:

“It took us about 3 hours to reach Moynaq. Crossed another pontoon bridge outside Nukus. I had expected to see miles of salted sand and rocks. Instead there was a fair bit of wild vegetation on what was previously the sea. The graveyard of ships – the most “popular” attraction of Karakalpakstan – was a sad and desolate place. I was told that the Aral Sea’s shrinking seemed to have reversed slightly in recent years. In fact, they said that the fishing industry is not totally dead. There are still 120 fishermen. Let’s hope this is a turning point. Even then, most people do not see substantial improvement for the foreseeable future.

Has anybody been to Central Asia recently – more specifically the Aral Sea?

The piece in The Independent finished with comment that:

“But after the break-up of the Soviet Union, the new state of Kazakhstan, home of the North Aral Sea, decided to try to rescue it [North Aral Sea], first by building a dam across its narrow connection with the southern sea and then trying to fill it. Two attempts failed, but the World Bank eventually agreed to help. By the time the new dam in the Berg Strait was completed last year, work had also been done to rescue the Syr Darya river, which flows into the northern sea, and its flow was doubled.

Even optimists thought it would take years for the small sea to recover; pessimists said it could never happen. But it has now filled up to the top of the dam, and the waters are flowing back towards Aralsk, the main port in the north, having previously retreated as far as 80km. Fishermen in the surrounding villages are going to sea again, and there are plans to release 30 million young fish into its waters to restock the North Aral.

There are seven wonders in the world and the eighth is the dam on the Aral Sea,” says Kolbai Danabayev, vice-mayor of Aralsk. There are now plans to raise it further, swelling the sea over the next five years. As it is, water is now spilling over the dam into the southern sea, but there is no sign of a similar recovery there. It is much bigger, the problems are much greater, and Uzbekistan, which controls much of it – and most of the Amu Darya river – shows little interest.

In the south, journalist Fred Pearce says in a ground- breaking book, When the Rivers Run Dry, even the local International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea is increasing diversion of the water away from it. But the recovery of the north, which has the potential to be the greatest environmental comeback ever, shows all need not be lost.”

But there must be more to the story than this? Who did they take the water from? Was it just a case of closing down the local cotton industry? Have they had rain upstream lately?

Has anybody been to Central Asia recently – more specifically Kazakhstan?

Why are The Opinionators also ‘Environmentalists’?

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Sydney-based think tank the Centre for Independent Studies puts out a quarterly magazine called Policy. The latest issue features a piece titled ‘The Rise of the Opinionators’ by Peter Saunders which suggests that:

“In the last 50 years, people’s socio-economic characteristics have become much less significant indicators of how they will vote: many working class voters support parties of the right, and large swathes of the middle class vote Labor.

Labor’s strongest support on a two-party preferred basis is not now among manual workers. It is among education, arts and social professionals, people Peter Saunders dubs the ‘opinionators’ for their role in developing, processing, interpreting and transmitting ideas, values and opininons.

The opinionators hold many views at significant variance from the general population. Compared to other voters, for example, the opinonators are less likely to support reducing tax and more likely to favour higher government spending, and they are much more in favour of asylum seekers and much less supportive of defence spending.”

Saunders also suggests that Opinionators stand out from other voters in their strong support for the Greens and their support for, what he calls, “high-visibility election issues like logging, or on touchstone issues like GM crops”.

The article concludes with the comment, “In terms of their wider ideological importance, however, the opinionators occupy many of the key positions within our core educational and cultural institutions. Their political significance should not be measured in votes.”

What has always struck me most about this group is that, yes, they have very definite and strongly held opinions on a range of environmental issues. I have also observed that they are mostly incredibly ignorant on the very same issues for which they hold such definate views. As a consequence I see them as a real threat to the environment. I wrote sometime ago for Policy magazine on this on this issue, the piece was titled Environmental Fundamentalism.

I have also been rather taken-aback when more than once ‘an opinionator’ has declined to discuss an environmental issue with me on the basis that, in their opinion, I knew too much about the particular subject! Most ordinary folk like talking to people who know something about a subject?

What is it about environmental issue and this group, a group that has so much political and cultural clout?

Save the Albatross

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There is a campaign to ‘save the albatross’ at www.savethealbatross.net . The website includes bits of information on the biology of these birds including that there are 21 different species with a mostly southern hemisphere distribution, that the wandering and royal albatross have the largest wingspan of any bird at 3.5metres, they mate for life, and will fly 10,000 kms in search of food for their chick.

The key message at the site is that albatrosses are at risk of extinction from long-line fishing boats particularly in the South Atlantic with the figure of 100,000 birds killed each year repeated.

I wonder how this figure was arrived at. While there are testimonials from celebrities at the site, it would be good if there was also some data from the various reports and studies referred to. For example, according to the BBC:

“Albatrosses on islands in the South Atlantic are being pushed to the brink of extinction, according to research. Populations of three species breeding on South Georgia and outlying islands have declined by about a third in the past 30 years.

Conservation groups say the major threat to the birds’ future is deep-sea fishing using a line with a number of baited hooks attached to it.

Up to 100,000 albatrosses a year drown on longline fishing hooks, they add.”

Why not provide a link to “research”?

According to www.savethealbatross.net the most threatened species is the Amsterdam Albatross with only 17 breeding pairs left on Amsterdam Island in the southern Indian Ocean. That’s not many birds!