Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for January 4, 2007

Polar Bear Facts: Part 1, Numbers Have Increased Dramatically Over Last 30 Years

By

I am no expert on polar bears. In fact I have never been to the Arctic. But I do have an interest in animal conservation, that scientific findings are reported honestly and accurately, and that the general public is not mislead on environmental issues.

Over the Christmas holidays Australians were repeatedly told through news broadcasts that polar bears are already a species in serious decline, in particular that they are seriously threated by global warming.

Earlier in 2006 I spent some time reading technical reports about the relationship between the decline in the extent of sea ice in the Arctic and polar bear ecology. I was surprised to discover as part of this research that polar bear numbers have actually increased over the last 30 years.

The more I read the more it became apparent that polar bear researchers were down playing this good news and promoting any finding that could be interpreted as a “decline” in any population of polar bears. It was also clear that global warming campaigners were keen to sieze on this information, extrapolate and exaggerate a bit more, and then parade it as evidence for a claimed overall decline in polar bear numbers.

Just last week I posted a piece at this blog stating that despite claims in the popular press and scientific literature to the contrary, polar bear numbers are actually increasing. I wrote that numbers have increased from about 5,000 to 25,000 over the last 30 years.

The piece has generated much discussion at this blog, and I have received many ‘hate emails’. I have been accused of all sorts of things, including showing a complete disregard for the hard work of experts in the field. But interestingly no-one has disputed my principle claim: that polar bear numbers have more than doubled over the last 30 years.

A key criticism appears to be that I have not acknowledged that polar bear numbers have been predicted by experts to decline dramatically in the future.

The reasoning from the most shrill of the self-proclaimed experts has been that because there is a likelihood the situation might deteriorate into the future, we can’t acknowledge the good news now.

I completely reject the notion that any scientist, researcher, campaigner, or self-proclaimed expert has a right to withhold good news on an environmental issue of intense public interest because of what may or may not happen in the future.

————————-
In the next installment/next blog post on this subject (Part 2) I will explain why I am skeptical of the claims that polar bear numbers will decline dramatically over the next 50-100 years.

I am happy to publish guest posts that put an alternative perspective, for example, that provide information supporting the contension that polar bears are a truly threatened species, email to jennifermarohasy@jennifermarohasy.com .

Severity of the Current Drought: A Note from Luke

By

Hi Jennifer,

There has been substantial discussion on the blog over the last few months as to the severity of the current drought afflicting much of Australia and its cause. A fair emphasis has been as to whether the current drought is the “absolute worst” on record or whether they have been “historical anecdotes and personal rainfall data sets before sufficient formal Bureau records, or paleological droughts recorded in coral cores” that were worse. Via the Australian newspaper, Barrie Hunt has contributed the results of a 10,000 year Global Climate Model run to further complicate this argument suggesting we only have a narrow view of what our real climate variability involves.

To some extent does it really matter? Is it just a public bar sports debating point. We know that the drought is widespread, severe, entrenched and multi-year in nature. It’s not much fun if you’re in the middle of it. Surely it is “among” the worst droughts on record in many important areas. All droughts have their own unique signatures and different areas show different impacts. It is simply not possible to say whether this drought is other than natural variability – although one can argue there may be climate change aspects or influences exacerbating the situation. We’ll know for sure in 30-40 years time.

What does matter is to whether we are adapting and responding to drought risk, water security, land use and population changes in a more mature manner. This involves seeing drought as part of normal and planning for it appropriately at farm, regional, industry, state and national levels.

Nevertheless I believe we do need a better spatial understanding of this multi-year drought which some have said has been building for 5, 6 or 7 years. A reasonable way to do this is to undertake a decile analysis of rainfall for the Australian rainfall network. We need to examine how bad the sequence of years are for rainfall deficit. The Bureau of Meteorology has come under quite a bit of criticism by blog commentators, but notwithstanding, I asked Dr David Jones, Head of Climate Analysis, from the National Climate Centre to supply a 5 year and a 7 year decile sequence analysis for their reference network which he has kindly provided. Why debate the issue in a data free vacuum when we can make a phone call or email !

The analyses are included as maps below.

The maps represent a 5 and 7 year decile analyses based on the sequence of 1900 till now. For example – where does the recent 5 or 7 annual rainfall sequences fit into any of the sequences since 1900.

Anyone can easily do these analyses for a single station or stations – you just need to do the mathematics of adding up the year-totals in a running mean fashion and grouping your data into decile bins. So for the five year decile – arrange your data from earliest to latest records, add up the first 5 years in the record and record the total, move the band along one on the rainfall record sequence and do it again, and so on and so on. When all done, rank the new totals highest to lowest in decile bins (0-10%, 20-30%, 30-40% and so on). You can then see where any individual sequence, or the last 5 years in this case, fits in the distribution of all 5 year sequences. Or in fine detail the lowest and highest on record.

Similar logic for the 7 year analysis.

But as you may appreciate a lot of work to do spatially and interpolate the results.

And it is important that it is done as a sequence of years – one cannot add the individual year deciles/percentiles together.

drought_bom_jan07.JPG

drought_bom_jan07 graph 2.JPG

The maps unlike the time series show we live in two Australias – one wetter and one drier. In the majority of areas where we have major agriculture or urban populations we have drought issues – some moderate – some severe in parts. Meanwhile life in the Gibson desert is pretty good (relatively speaking). This why the times series data are not helpful – the addition of real good and real bad = average which doesn’t represent reality

Of course this is only rainfall – there are obvious issues of pattern and intensity of rainfall, how plants and soil respond, and antecedent conditions (i.e catchments currently dry as a chip) – if we’re debating streams and rivers I really think one needs the same analysis but on streamflow.

Similarly one can use a pasture or crop model to get decile crop yields or pasture biomass (decile of wheat and grass!) However experience suggests that often these further analyses amplify effects and it will look worse for drought. Usually same with streamflow.

I understand the Bureau will be undertaking some more work on this issue in coming months.

I encourage any readers to do their own numbers with their own data – but please explain what you have done so we’re all clear.

Cheers,
Luke.

PS obviously where station density is low – i.e. central Australia and central WA the spatial interpolation is only as good as the data point grid. But I believe we have a sufficient grid for some intelligent analysis in areas that people live or major agriculture occurs. One could obviously argue the spatial interpolation mathematics and accuracy in fine small areas (i.e. SE Qld). The data do not start in the 1890s and the Bureau do have issues with station quality before 1900. The data are of mixed quality.

Best Blog Posts of 2006

By

Popular e-journal On Line Opinion will be publishing what they consider to be the best Australian blog posts from 2006 during January 2007 at the rate of about 2 per day. The list of 40 has been essentially compiled by Club Troppo bloggers Nicholus Gruen and Ken Parish.

Apparently some bloggers were asked to nominate their better posts in December, but I didn’t find out about it all until after the 40 had been selected.

Anyway, on Tuesday Ken Parish contacted me suggesting it was not too late to nominate one or two posts. My initial reaction was to decline the invitation. But on reflection I was perhaps just turning down an opportunity for posts like ‘Déjà vu on the ABC’ by Roger Underwood to be read by a wider audience – or at least Ken Parish and Nicholus Gruen.

Anyway, I’ve had a look through this site for posts that might fit the request. That is posts between 500 and 1500 words, not including large slabs of quotation and having something that renders them of enduring interest to the non-specialist.

I was actually surprised at what little potentially good material there is here.

Guest posts over the last year that continue to be significant to me, include ‘My Aversion to Whaling is Not Cultural’
by Libby Eyre, ‘Iceland to resume commercial whaling’ by George McCallum and ‘Hockey Sticks and Ancient Pine Trees’ by Paul Williams. But these posts are perhaps unlikely to resonate with the average person or ‘literary type’? In particular the blog posts tend to address a specific issue in a slightly technical way and would not necessarily effectively stand alone? They have been written in the context of this blog and for this blog’s audience?

My posts tend to be short and include a slab of information from somewhere else. I then sometimes develop these into longer pieces for publication elsewhere.

So unless anyone has any additional suggestions, I will just nominate the blog post by Roger Underwood which I reproduce in full below. Roger has agreed for it to be nominated.

Anyway, I gather On Line Opinion are going to run ‘the competition’ again next year and it would be good if over this year I/we think about getting a few good ‘self contained’ blog posts on important environmental issues written and published?

And while this blog site may not contain lots of great prose yet, it already contains some great information which is perhaps why it has one of the best Alexa ratings of any Australian political blog at 129,000. By comparison Club Troppo has a rating of 282,000, Larvatus Produs 305,000 while John Quiggin is sitting at 349,000. The lower the rating the more traffic a blog is thought to enjoy, so I have a better Alexa rating than most other popular political blogs.

———————————

September 14, 2006
‘Déjà Vu on the ABC’
by Roger Underwood

What happens to ABC journalists found to have performed unprofessionally?

In August 2006, a Four Corners program on forestry in Tasmania was found by the The Australian Communications and Media Authority to be bias and inaccurate. This program attacked the management of Tasmania’s forests and timber industry. Lords of the Forest was found by the independent adjudicators to fail almost every test of professional journalism; it did not even meet the ABC’s own Code of Practice on impartiality and accuracy in current affairs reporting.

Subsequent to the ACMA findings, I have been asked by several people: “What will now happen to the journalist in question Tikki Fullerton?”

Well might they ask. If history is any guide, she will probably go on to stardom.

Sixteen years ago, Four Corners made an equally clumsy foray into Western Australian forest management. This was The Wood for the Trees, broadcast by ABC TV on June 18th, 1990. I was then a forester working for the WA Department of Conservation and Land Management (CALM), also a senior officer of the department.
CALM had recently published management plans which provided for the full balance of forest uses from “locked away” nature reserves, to National Parks, to State forests where timber cutting and regeneration were permitted. We also had significant programs of plantation development and wildlife management, and we provided extensively for forest visitors and recreationists. Our forestry work in those days was fully endorsed by State and Federal governments and by the Western Australian Environmental Protection Authority. This will surely resonate with Tasmanian foresters in 2006.

In spite of all this, CALM was deeply unpopular with extreme environmentalists. Four Corners were sooled onto us by Perth green activists, who saw this as a way to discredit us nationally, and tip the political balance against the timber industry and the forestry profession. One of WA’s most rabid environmentalists admitted subsequently in a radio interview that she had mapped out the Four Corners interview schedule for their program. It became obvious later that the activists not only suggested the interviewees, but also the lines of questioning and field stops. Four Corners worked in WA with them for some weeks before even contacting anyone in CALM. When eventually they did meet up with us it was clear that their position had been rigidly determined. They were out to get us.

The resulting program was diabolical, even worse than Lords of the Forest. All the most reprehensible traits of agenda-driven journalism emerged: the presentation of unsupported and incorrect statements by environmentalists as if they were indisputable facts; failure to check statements by our critics, or to show our refutation of them; uncritical acceptance of the most palpably absurd assertions made by political activists; and failure to interview anyone (including CALM scientists) who might have provided an alternative view to some of the most outrageous claims. One of the guest interviewees was the owner of a small art gallery. Another interviewee given plenty of air-time was a small-time disgruntled sawmiller, who (surprise, surprise) was uncomplimentary about CALM’s allocation of logs, just possibly because of our failure to allocate a large number of really good ones to him. Two Canberra CSIRO botanists were also interviewed, and the journalist cleverly made out that they were critical of CALM’s system for protecting rare and endangered plants, although what they actually said was totally innocuous.

I later met these two botanists and they were disgusted at the way the journalist had manipulated them.
I was present in the room when the Four Corners journalist interviewed CALM’s Executive Director, Dr Syd Shea. The interview lasted nearly four hours without a break. In the broadcast this was reduced to a few minutes of carefully selected snippets. The journalist was aggressive and unrelenting throughout.

It was the first time I had watched a current affairs journalist at work. The first thing that struck me was that he had already made up his mind. The second was that the purpose of the interview did not appear to be to gather information or seek understanding, but to attack a person and an organisation. He would ask the same question over and over, but every time he would phrase it in a slightly different way. And he would keep coming back to issues already discussed to probe them yet again, searching for a weakness or something he could later portray as a damning admission.

It would be too much to hope that Tasmania’s forestry people had time to marshal media resources, but we were fortunate – we managed to make our own video of the interview. This allowed us later to compare the actual questions and Dr Shea’s answers with the massively edited version eventually shown by Four Corners. All the journalist’s and editor’s stratagems were thus dramatically exposed. Anything said by Dr Shea which did not fit the journalist’s predetermined position was edited out, while any slight slip or ambiguity was highlighted. Later, the journalist ridiculed Dr Shea as a ‘baby-kissing politician’, while showing a shot of Shea kissing a baby. The journalist neglected to mention that the baby shown was Dr Shea’s daughter.

Dr Shea was not a man to take this sort of personal insult lying down, any more than he would accept the unjust assault on his agency. With the full support of Premier and Minister, he strongly counter-attacked the ABC. A wide range of State and Federal politicians were briefed and their support obtained. An official complaint was written up and published in a substantial document. This included the transcripts of both films – ours and the one shown by Four Corners – of the same interview. A total of 44 separate instances of factual error, misrepresentation, bias and selective editing were described. The document also set out the secretive comings and goings of the Four Corners team in the field, where they had the gall to behave as if CALM was some sort of dangerous terrorist organisation.
Tasmanians who are still fighting the ABC over Lords of the Forest will be pleased to hear that in the end Syd Shea had a win. ABC management was repentant. Four Corners presenter Andrew Olle broadcast an apology in which the litany of false assertions and incorrect statements in The Wood for the Trees was admitted.

But Tasmanians may not like to know the following. Despite the apology, the Four Corners journalist who anchored the program, Mark Colvin, was subsequently given a series of plum overseas assignments. Today he is one of Australia’s most prominent journalists, the host of the ABC’s flagship current affairs radio program PM.

Tikki Fullerton, the journalist from Lords of the Forest, has re-appeared many times as a front-line journalist for the ABC since Lords caused such a storm of anger. As far as I can determine (from letters to the ABC’s Managing Director) she has not even been reprimanded. Nor, to my knowledge, has the ABC ever apologized over the Fullerton program. There is clearly a culture within the ABC, or at least among its journalists, that they are above criticism.

Unfortunately, any apology and adverse finding will always be too late. As the extreme environmentalists know who cook up these programs in the first place, what matters is the initial impression. What they count upon is the gullibility of television viewers, especially those who watch the ABC, live in the leafy suburbs and don’t know anything about forestry, but like to indulge in trendy arms-length environmentalism. Thus, cruel damage is done – irreparably in WA, as it turned out.

Sixteen years after The Wood for the Trees program I am still unable to watch Four Corners; indeed I have not been able to watch any television current affairs programs since then without a feeling of betrayal. I have seen how the journalists work, experienced first-hand the editorial trickery, the deep bias, the loaded questions, the uncritical acceptance of absurd nonsense from people with the ‘right’ ideology, and the selective interviewing.

For me, the Four Corners attack on forestry in WA was the moment when ABC current affairs journalism lost its credibility. I realised then that a ‘crusading’ journalist was one who closes one eye in order to see better with the other. From this perspective, even though it hurts to admit it, Lords of the Forest was simply déjà vu.

Roger Underwood was former General Manager of the Department of Conservation and Land Management in Western Australia, a regional and district manager, a research manager and bushfire specialist. Roger now directs a consultancy practice with a focus on bushfire management. He still lives in Perth, Western Australia.