Europe’s environment chief has admitted that the EU did not foresee the problems raised by its policy to get 10% of Europe’s road fuels from plants.
Recent reports have warned of rising food prices and rainforest destruction from increased biofuel production.
The EU has promised new guidelines to ensure that its target is not damaging.
BBC Website: EU rethinks biofuels guidelines
I have previously blogged about the UK High Court finding 9 errors in Gore’s movie AIT, which resulted in the High Court ruling that: Schools Must Warn of AIT Film Bias.
Now we have an admission over at Climate Audit:
Sticking Thermometers In Places They Don’t Belong
In earlier posts, we observed that Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth claimed that “Dr Thompson’s thermometer” confirmed Michael Mann’s hockey stick, but, when analysed, what Gore described as “Dr Thompson’s thermometer” merely proved to be Michael Mann’s hockey stick mis-identified. No wonder it resembled Mann’s hockey stick – or, to use the phrase more common in climate science, no wonder there was a “remarkable” resemblance.
Hu McCulloch of Ohio State University now writes about a recent encounter with Lonnie Thompson, the serial ice core non-archiver and male nurse for the thermometer:
“On January 11, Lonnie Thompson gave a talk on Climate change at Ohio State. After his talk, I asked him if the graph identified by Al Gore as “Dr. Thompson’s Thermometer” in his book and film was really based on his ice core research.
Thompson admitted that an error had been made, and even had a slide ready that showed the data of the Mann Hockey Stick plus Jones instrumental data that Gore’s figure was based on, alongside an average of dO18 z-scores from 6 of his Andean and Himalayan ice cores, similar to the 7-series graph that appeared in his 2006 PNAS article. He stated that he recognized the error right away, and even sent Gore (and Mann, as I recall) an e-mail pointing out the mistake.
When I pressed him if it wouldn’t be appropriate to make a more public announcement, given the high-profile nature of the error, Ellen Mosley-Thompson, his wife and co-author, stood up and offered that it was Gore’s error, not theirs, so that they had no responsibility for it, and that in any event there was no forum in which to make a correction.
I suggested that since OSU’s Byrd Polar Research Center has a website with a News page, it would be trivial and virtually costless to post a press release clarifying the matter for the millions of readers and viewers of Gore’s book and film who are not on Thompson’s e-mail list. ”
“No forum”. “No responsibility.” No shame.
Claims that tropical forests are declining cannot be backed up by hard evidence, according to new research from the University of Leeds.
This major challenge to conventional thinking is the surprising finding of a study published today in the Proceedings of the US National Academy of Sciences by Dr Alan Grainger, Senior Lecturer in Geography and one of the world’s leading experts on tropical deforestation.
In the first attempt for many years to chart the long-term trend in tropical forest area, he spent more than three years going through all available United Nations data with a fine toothcomb – and found some serious problems.
Read the entire EurekAlert write up here.
Philip Stott also has a good write up here.
The abstract from the paper is below:
Difficulties in tracking the long-term global trend in tropical forest area
Alan Grainger*
School of Geography, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, United Kingdom
Edited by B. L. Turner II, Clark University, Worcester, MA, and approved December 3, 2007 (received for review April 3, 2007)
The long-term trend in tropical forest area receives less scrutiny than the tropical deforestation rate. We show that constructing a reliable trend is difficult and evidence for decline is unclear, within the limits of errors involved in making global estimates. A time series for all tropical forest area, using data from Forest Resources Assessments (FRAs) of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, is dominated by three successively corrected declining trends. Inconsistencies between these trends raise questions about their reliability, especially because differences seem to result as much from errors as from changes in statistical design and use of new data. A second time series for tropical moist forest area shows no apparent decline. The latter may be masked by the errors involved, but a “forest return” effect may also be operating, in which forest regeneration in some areas offsets deforestation (but not biodiversity loss) elsewhere. A better monitoring program is needed to give a more reliable trend. Scientists who use FRA data should check how the accuracy of their findings depends on errors in the data.
Take a long look into the face of the world’s largest two-dimensional wheel-web weaving spider: The Golden Orb-weaver (Nephila pilipes).
The red appendages, projecting forward from the head region, are sensory organs called palps. They detect scent, sound and vibration. Between them are the powerful chelicerae; made up of the base segment and the fangs. Above, the cephalothorax houses six eyes with a three-dimensional outlook.
Gigantism in these animals correlates with increased temperature, so I suppose it is inevitable that we should all enjoy a closer familiarity in this anthropogenically-exacerbated interglacial warming period.
The UK Government’s former chief scientific adviser has accused green activists of putting the fight against climate change at risk by wanting to take society back to the 17th century.
He said: “There is a suspicion, and I have that suspicion myself, that a large number of people who label themselves ‘green’ are actually keen to take us back to the 18th or even the 17th century.
Sir David’s comments were made in an interview in The Guardian.
Reports in Australian Cotton Outlook that India is on the cusp of a “White Gold Revolution” have prompted renewed calls from for all Australian farmers to be given the right to participate in the biotech revolution.
India has progressed from an importer of cotton to become the world’s second largest exporter, and in just four years production has risen from 17.9 million bales to 31 million bales in 2007-08 with the help of GM cotton.
NSW Convener of the Australian bioadvocacy group Producers Forum Maree McKay is pleased with the easing of NSW and Victorian moratoria, saying Australian growers will now be able to choose to use the technology.
“Canadian GM canola growers have been benefiting at our expense for over a decade. At last we now have the opportunity to compete on a level playing field,” Mrs McKay said.
“Maybe in a few years time the headlines will be: Australian Farmers Experience Yellow Gold Revolution.”
However South Australian Convener, Heather Baldock, is looking forward to the South Australian government announcing the decision of its moratorium review and enabling South Australian growers to take advantage of the economic gains.
“It is farcical that in an attempt to coerce the state government into keeping the GM moratorium, the anti-GM groups are still publicly stating that GM cotton has been a disaster for Indian farmers. If that’s a disaster, I’ll have it any day,” Ms Baldock.
“In fact the reports from India support the Australian experience where cotton growers have reduced pesticide usage by 85 percent, and increased production of food and fibre with less water, less acreage, and a lower greenhouse footprint.”
A recent report in the New Scientist magazine stated that a new generation of GM crops could reduce greenhouse emissions by more than grounding all the aircraft in the world.
National Convener Jeff Bidstrup, himself a GM cotton grower, said the debate from the opponents of GM canola is at odds with the reality. “We have all been eating GM foods for over a decade with nothing but positive benefits for human health,” Mr Bidstrup said.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD has worked in industry and government. She is currently researching a novel technique for long-range weather forecasting funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation.
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