Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for August 2007

The politics of environmentalism

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The environmental movement has achieved much over the last few decades. Much of this can be dated from the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, and the formation of Greenpeace in 1971 marks the effective birth of organised, high profile activism. From these beginnings, in less than half a century, environmentalism has become mainstream. In the industrialised world, air and water quality has improved tremendously, recycling rates have steadily improved, and European farmers are paid for conservancy work rather than just growing food. By any standards, this degree of change is a major achievement.

But successful organisations don’t just fold when they have achieved their aims: they find new causes and new goals. Having established their influence, they are loathe to lose it. The original term NGO (Non-Governmental Organisation) has increasingly been replaced by CSO (Civil Society Organisation). Under this guise, these unelected bodies are viewed by politicians as legitimate representatives of public opinion. However, worldwide membership of Greenpeace is believed to be less than 3 million, well down from its peak in the early 90s. The nature conservancy body with by far the largest membership in the UK is the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds), with around one million members. Clearly, these are significant organisations, but such membership numbers still categorise them as minority groups.

But their continued influence belies the figures. In the USA, things are different; business lobbies are very powerful and environmentalists do not take priority. In Europe, this is certainly not the case. The doors of politicians and policymakers are wide open to environmentalists, with businesses often having much less access. And the results are clear to see in the spread of ever more stringent and precautionary legislation.

The furore created over GM crops resulted in a complex and barely-workable legislative framework, with no evidence that the public is any the safer for it. The REACH (Registration, Evaluation and Approval of Chemicals) regulation is a sledgehammer to crack a nut, demanding safety testing of a wide range of chemicals in everyday use (and requiring the use of tens of thousands more laboratory animals). And current proposals for revision of the already tough European directive on pesticides would see decisions being made on the basis of hazard rather than scientific risk assessment. Avoidance of all risk seems to be the aim, with no weighing of this against the benefits. To make matters worse, decisions are made by politicians rather than on the advice of experts.

They have achieved so much in part because they are believers in a cause, and don’t necessarily let facts get in the way of achieving their ends. Greenpeace infamously prevented Shell from doing the environmentally sound thing of sinking the Brent Spar oil rig in the ocean and forced them instead to dismantle it on shore. In this case, they apologised later for giving false information, but were apparently still pleased to have achieved their victory. In the case of agriculture, all sorts of partial, selective or misleading data is quoted while anything not supporting the case is ignored. A prime example was a Greenpeace/Soil Association study claiming that GM crops were a failure in North America, on the basis of interviews with a few dozen disgruntled farmers and activists, while acreage was actually growing rapidly year on year.

The reason we have reached this position is that the values of the environmentalist movement are also part of the makeup of many politicians and civil servants. At the same time, there seems to be increasing distrust of business and the profit motive. No matter that it is overwhelmingly the private sector that creates wealth and – directly and indirectly – funds the revenue streams which governments need, the business lobby is seen as intrinsically selfish and greedy. On the other hand, environmental lobby groups, as well as enjoying their unwarranted position as the voice of public opinion, are deemed to have pure and unselfish motives.

This, of course, is a caricature. In practice, a wary and distrustful population does not believe everything which Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth may say, but they tend to distrust governments and businesses even more, at least according to public opinion surveys. But this imbalance tips the scales in favour of the NGOs (sorry, CSOs) and their influence on policy. We have even seen recently that Friends of the Earth Europe receives half its funding from the European Union, and then spends this money lobbying the very institutions who provided it.

Big Environmentalism represents vested interests every bit as much as does the business lobby. Their motives may be different but they are no purer. At heart, they want power and influence so that they can shape policy to their liking. They are politicians by any other name, but they remain unelected. Despite the good things the movement has helped to achieve in the past, their influence now is surely too strong if we want rational, balanced policymaking to be the norm.

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The Scientific Alliance
St John’s Innovation Centre, Cowley Road, Cambridge CB4 0WS

(Paul Biggs is a member of The Scientific Alliance)

More Stern criticism – a new paper by Roger Pielke Jr.

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From Benny Pieser’s CCNet:

Mistreatment of the economic impacts of extreme events in the Stern Review Report on the Economics of Climate Change

Abstract

The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change has focused debate on the costs and benefits of alternative courses of action on climate change. This refocusing has helped to move debate away from science of the climate system and on to issues of policy. However, a careful examination of the Stern Review’s treatment of the economics of extreme events in developed countries, such as floods and tropical cyclones, shows that the report is selective in its presentation of relevant impact studies and repeats a common error in impacts studies by confusing sensitivity analyses with projections of future impacts. The Stern Review’s treatment of extreme events is misleading because it overestimates the future costs of extreme weather events in developed countries by an order of magnitude. Because the Stern Report extends these findings globally, the overestimate propagates through the report’s estimate of future global losses. When extreme events are viewed more comprehensively the resulting perspective can be used to expand the scope of choice available to decision makers seeking to grapple with future disasters in the context of climate change. In particular, a more comprehensive analysis underscores the importance of adaptation in any comprehensive portfolio of responses to climate change.

Roger Pielke Jr

Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, University of Colorado, 1333 Grandview Ave, Campus Box 488 boulder, Co 80309-0488, USA
Received 5 March 2007; revised 21 May 2007; accepted 22 May 2007. Available online 15 August 2007.

Global Environmental Change

“In its Chapter 5 the Stern Review concludes, “The costs of climate change for developed countries could reach several percent of GDP as higher temperatures lead to a sharp increase in extreme weather events and large-scale changes.” (Stern, 2007, p. 137). This conclusion cannot be supported by the Review’s own analysis and references to literature. One error is a serious misrepresentation of the scientific literature, and the second is more subtle, but no less significant. The serious misrepresentation takes the form of inaccurately presenting the conclusions of an unpublished paper on trends in disaster losses. The second error is more complex and involves conflating an analysis of the sensitivity of society to future changes in extreme events, assuming that society does not change, with a projection of how extreme event impacts will increase in the future under the integrated conditions of climatic and societal change. The result of the errors in the Stern Review is a significant overstatement of the future costs of extreme climate events not simply in the developed world, but globally-by an order of magnitude.

In light of these errors if the Stern Review is to be viewed as a means of supporting a particular political agenda, then it undercuts its own credibility and this risks its effectiveness. If instead the Stern Review is to be viewed as a policy analysis of the costs and benefits of alternative courses of actions on climate change, then at least in the case of extreme events it has missed an opportunity to clarify the scope of such actions and their possible consequences, and arguably misdirects attention away from those actions most likely to be effective with respect to future catastrophe losses. In either case, on the issue of extreme events and climate change, the Stern Review must be judged a failure. This short paper documents these errors and suggests how an alternative approach might have been structured.”

“Arctic Ocean Getting Warm; Seals Vanish and Icebergs Melt.” A note from Woody.

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Yes, not a recent newspaper article, but the page 2 headline in the Nov. 2, 1922 edition of The Washington Post, discovered by John Lockwood at the Library of Congress in Washington DC – a reminder that the 1920’s and 1930’s were warm. In fact, 1934 has overtaken 1998 as the warmest US year following a recent data correction, with 1921 coming third.

The global cooling of the 1940’s to 1970’s prompted The Cooling World article in Newsweek on 28th April 1975. This all goes to illustrate how lightweight some sections of the media are. The post 1970’s warming is now well established and the media are much more climate aware, so similar scary headlines are now a weekly occurrance, with the Arctic sea ice featuring prominently. However, the Arctic situation represents regional change, rather than global – there is no equivalent loss of sea ice in the Antarctic. Dust, black carbon, aerosols and Ozone are being implicated in Arctic warming, in addition to greenhouse gases.

Parliaments Review the Evidence on Global Warming: A Note from Bob Carter

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Parliamentary legislatures around the world, diverse though they are, generally all share a committee system of review. The review process usually consists of either ad hoc or standing committees that are convened to discuss particular issues or draft pieces of legislation.

Thus in the United States, until recently, members of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works under the chairmanship of Senator Inhofe – ignoring political blandishments and distorted science alike – have trail-blazed a path of sensible and moderate commentary on the vexed issue of dangerous human-caused climate change.

Similarly, in the United Kingdom, in 2005 the powerful Select Committee on Economic Affairs of the House of Lords conducted an investigation into the economics of climate change, concluding that “the scientific context (of climate change) is one of uncertainty” and that IPCC procedure “strikes us as opening the way for climate science and economics to be determined, at least in part, by political requirements rather than by the evidence. Sound science cannot emerge from an unsound process

Now a third parliament has chimed in, this time in the Australian lower house. There, a committee under the leadership of government MP Petro Georgiou was asked to advise the Howard government regarding the feasibility and costs of sequestration of carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. In a politically bizarre development, Mr Georgiou – whose view is that “there is now compelling evidence that human activity is changing the global climate”, and who insisted on making clear reference to this view in his sequestration report – needed the support of the Labor party opposition members of the committee in order to produce a majority report. And four of Mr Georgiou’s government colleagues, led by Dr Dennis Jensen, issued a separate minority report which provides a restrained, rational and sensible discussion of the climate change issue.

Dr Dennis Jensen is that rare animal, a politician who is both a PhD-trained scientist and an experienced researcher. Dr Jensen, who represents a West Australian seat in the Canberra Senate, has worked for two of Australia’s premier research organizations, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Organisation (CSIRO) and the Defence Science and Technology Organization (DSTO).

His minority report points out that the widely promulgated and alarmist British Stern Report has been “thoroughly debunked”, and that “most of the public statements that promote the dangerous human warming scare are made from a position of ignorance – by political leaders, press commentators and celebrities who share the characteristics of lack of scientific training and lack of an ability to differentiate between sound science and computer-based scare mongering”.

With delicious irony, such a diagnosis encapsulates exactly the astonishing and fierce reaction that release of the minority report provoked from the majority members of the committee, other politicians and the press. Chairman Georgiou averred that Jensen was wrong because 43 out of the 46 submissions that the committee had received said so, apparently being unaware that matters of science are not decided by unrepresentative and unqualified consensus. Deputy Chairman Harry Quick badged Jensen’s report as “philosophical waffle”. Labor’s environment spokesman, former rock musician Peter Garrett, wondered out loud in parliament “What planet are these government MPs on?”, and Greens senator Christine Milne called Dr Jensen “a dinosaur”. Finally, The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper referred to the group of four dissentient MPs as the “Flat Earth Four”, and their reporter described one of them, Danna Vale, as simply “daffy”.

What’s remarkable about that, I hear you thinking? Politics is politics. Well, yes it is, and so is science. Dennis Jensen’s minority report contains a careful and accurate assessment of the science relevant to the global warming issue, and advances logical argument and facts in support of the view that human-caused warming is not proven, nor likely, to be dangerous. Yet not one other Australian politician, scientist or media reporter is prepared to discuss any of the science issues, let alone to try to show where Dr Jensen might have erred. Instead, en masse, the commentariat have scorned and abused him for daring to challenge the mighty shibboleth of human-caused global warming.

Of course, Prime Minister Howard – whose government is well behind in the opinion polls and who faces an election in the next few months – is in a politically exposed position regarding climate policy. Recent informal polls suggest that as many as 75% of Australian voters remain unconvinced of the danger of human-caused warming. Nonetheless, with strong bias the media continue to promulgate the shrill climate alarmism of extreme groups like the IPCC, NGOs such as the World Wide Fund for Nature and the Australian Conservation Foundation, and the Labor and Green political parties, and this has forced the Liberal government to make an in principle commitment to the future introduction of a carbon trading system.

It surprised no-one, therefore, that Mr Howard’s comment on the Jensen minority report was “No, I don’t agree with their views”. Pragmatism, after all, is what wins most elections.

The reality is, however, that over the last few years, the legislatures of the U.S., U.K. and now Australia – all, incidentally, nations with strong scientific credentials – have given independent assessments of the in-vogue claims of climate change disaster, and each has found them wanting.

The Jensen group’s third review, launched in Australia this week, closely follows several other sensational revelations that undermine even further the already very weak case for dangerous human-caused global warming.

First, that bastion of warming alarmism the British Hadley Centre has finally faced reality by publishing a computer model which acknowledges that warming has not occurred since 1998 (and conveniently threatens “but just you wait until 2014”!). Having ignored natural climate variability for 15 years, the modelers now take it into account and discover – guess what – that climate varies.

Second, earlier British research which suggested that the late 20th century warming of the ground temperature record was not due to urban heat island effects was found to be unrepeatable, and therefore must be discarded. This calls into question the accuracy and usefulness of all thermometer-based surface temperature data.

Third, NASA acknowledged that since 2000 its much-reproduced US temperature record has been inaccurate because of a computer programming error. After appropriate corrections, it turns out that 1934, not 1998, was the hottest year of the century in the US, and that only four of the hottest ten years on record occurred around the turn of the 21st century.

Finally, and fourth, an in-progess audit of the quality of the Global Climate Network of weather stations maintained by NOAA is showing that many stations are sited in unsatisfactory locations. This revelation shows, once again, that the ground-based thermometer stations provide unreliable data. Perhaps even more serious, it shows that major government and international climate agencies have been, at best, asleep on the job

The wise men and women of our three houses of parliament may mostly be professional politicians, but nonetheless they have discerned correctly the non-alarmist nature of contemporary climate change. The world has many more pressing problems to deal with than quixotically reducing carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere in order to feel good. The global warming scare campaign needs to be recognized as such, badged as such, and then disregarded as such – and in short order.

Bob Carter

New Future for the Last Great Savanna: A Note from Luke Walker

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A new report The Nature of Northern Australia** advocates responsible conservation and development of one of the world’s great ecological treasures – the northern Australian tropical savanna. This vast area represents some 25% of the world’s remaining tropical savanna woodlands and is still in good ecological condition, some 1.5 million km2 extending from Cairns and the Cape York Peninsula, through the Northern Territory to the Kimberley in north west Western Australia.

The Nature of Northern Australia is the result of almost three years of intensive research by authors Dr John Woinarski, Professor Brendan Mackey, Professor Henry Nix and Dr Barry Traill

Not only does the north have two thirds of Australia’s freshwater resources, it also contains abundant minerals, energy, unique iconic landscapes, including Kakadu and the Kimberley and unique aboriginal heritage.

Some of Australia’s largest, most undisturbed rivers, an abundance of plant and animal species not found anywhere else in the country, and nationally important areas of rainforest, mangroves and tropical heath lands are also located in the north.

Recent pressures with water supply and drought in southern Australia have refocused national development attention again on the north with a joint government and industry taskforce reviewing options for the future.

“In other parts of the world, tropical savanna is in decline due to land clearing, unsustainable grazing regimes and over population, but this vast area of northern Australia is remarkably intact,” co-author Professor Brendan Mackey from The Australian National University said.

However, there are mounting concerns about the biodiversity assets of this region documented in surveys in the report. Ecological threats such as changing fire regimes, overgrazing, feral animals, exotic weeds and climate change remain unresolved issues.

Scientists have singled out cattle grazing, above climate change and mining, as the most threatening process to northern Australia.

In an ABC interview Professor Brendan Mackey said 70 per cent of northern Australia is held under pastoral lease and cattle stations should do more to protect the ecology of tropical savannas.

“So what pastoralists do or choose not to do will have enormous bearing on the environmental health of northern Australia and its wonderful globally significant natural assets,” he said.

“What we are asking for is for what we call best management practice.”

Despite the difficulties associated with pastoralism in the north the report documents exciting developments at Trafalgar, at Charters Towers.

Joe Landsberg is demonstrating the benefits of ecological grazing in a most difficult environment. He says “we reduced our stocking rate by 60%. Then by spelling at least 20% of the property every wet season, we were able to restore native pasture species to greater than 80% within a few years. These lessons have now led us to our current management regime, where spelling 20% of the property annually, strategic use of small areas of exotic pasture, conservative stocking rates and intensive herd management have increased our productivity (i.e. higher calving rates, earlier and heavier turn-off weights, better meat quality) and therefore profit. Monitoring sites on the property also confirmed the improvement in pasture quality, soil health and water quality. We also have an annual control program for exotic weeds. Current research in natural resource management also confirms these strategies lead to improved biodiversity and ecosystem health. “

Premonitions of intensive irrigated agriculture development in the north have brought back memories of insect plagues and high pesticide use in the sensitive tropical environment.

Professor Henry Nix, another of the authors behind the report with Professor Mackey, says critics of the cotton industry are not aware genetically modified cotton has overcome challenges faced over a decade ago.

He says genetically modified cotton has proved it is sustainable.

“Cotton is regarded as a monster, and it certainly was 10-15 years ago, because of the very large amounts of chemicals – 17, 18 sprays per crop,” he said.

“Now that’s down to as low as one spray. Eighty per cent of their cotton crop is now a GMO crop.”

CSIRO has developed an entirely new 21st century agronomic package for cotton production in the Ord irrigation area using off-season production, transgenic cotton and beneficial insects

Another remarkable innovation for use of the savannas is a practical reduction in greenhouse emissions from a modified fire regime that reduces high intensity late season burning.

The SMH reports that Conoco, which operates a liquefied natural gas plant in Darwin, had entered into an agreement to offset some of the greenhouse gas emissions produced at its plant. In return for carbon credits, Conoco pays the West Arnhem Land Fire Abatement partners more than $1 million a year. Some 100,000 tonnes a year of greenhouse gas emissions can be saved by this approach which is verified by satellite monitoring.

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** The Nature of NorthernAustralia – Natural values, ecological processes and future prospects
By John Woinarski, Brendan Mackey, Henry Nix & Barry Traill
2007 ANU E Press Australian National University E Press
ISBN 9781921313301 (pbk.) ISBN 9781921313318 (online)
Read the e-book here: http://epress.anu.edu.au/nature_na/pdf/whole_book.pdf

Giant ocean current discovered around Australia and Tasmania

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Thanks to Luke for alerting us to this new research.

Following hot on the heels of recent climate revelations, such as the warming aerosols of Asian Brown Clouds, Climate Shifts, 1934 replacing 1998 as the warmest recorded year in the USA, and the new evidence for a large negative feedback due to the thinning of heat trapping clouds, Australian scientists at CSIRO have discovered a previously unrecognised deep ocean pathway linking the 3 southern hemisphere ocean basins, which is part of the global conveyer belt, or thermohaline circulation. Very important to global climate.

This is where I came in to the climate debate by initilally believing scare stories that the Gulf Stream was about to shut down and give europe a climate similar to Alaska. It turned out that the slowing down was a mis-calculation, plus ‘mean wind advection’ and the earth’s rotation are important factors in driving ocean circulations, according to Carl Wunsch.

The CSIRO news release is here:

Ocean ‘supergyre’ link to climate regulator

Also on CNN who unfortunately saw fit to introduce the now customary alarmism:

“The best known of the global ocean currents is the North Atlantic loop of the Great Ocean Conveyer, which brings warm water from the Equator to waters off northern Europe, ensuring relatively mild weather there. Scientists say if the conveyor collapsed, northern Europe would be plunged into an ice age.”

Of course, this new ocean ‘supergyre’ will have to be incorporated into those diagnostic tools known as ‘climate models,’ along with the results of other recent research.