Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for August 2008

Injured Cassowary

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FemaleCassowary.jpg

About two months ago, this magnificent adult female cassowary (above) traversed alongside our house with a dreadful limp. At the time, cassowaries had been fighting, so I assumed this one had suffered an injury in such conflict.

However, the big bird was not seen again for about two months and this was remarkable for this well-known inhabitant. She re-emerged late last week with no improvement in her gait, but with a dramatic loss of weight and this has presented an awkward dilemma for the land-manager.

It is pretty obvious that the bird is suffering. Then again, being a declared endangered species under EPBC, different protocols are invoked for response and intervention. She is a dominant female of a population of perhaps fewer than one-hundred birds remaining in the Daintree Cape Tribulation rainforests. She is also a wild animal with really scary feet.

Queensland’s EPA has the delegated authority for such matters. яндекс. For the importance of the bird they are compelled to have the animal assessed by a veterinarian for diagnosis. If it is perceived that the animal is suffering from an infection, strategically placed fruit with antibiotics could be deployed. If the trauma was identified as a dislocation, the animal might be tranquilized or netted for manipulation. On the other hand, if the injury required resetting and immobilization for weeks, say for a broken bone, then the bird would be euthanased.

Trouble is, a vet with cassowary expertise cannot really expect to travel from Cairns or Ingham or wherever, to the Cooper Valley in the Daintree and the expectant arrival of a wild cassowary.

In a stroke of good fortune, a departing client rang through to the office from our entrance courtesy phone, that the injured cassowary was halfway along our driveway. I drove down and managed to get about ten minutes of video of the brid, limping and feeding and hopefully this will allow the vet to make the necessary determination.

A New Plan for The Red Gums of Northern Victoria

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Yesterday I was at the Victorian Parliament in Melbourne to launch a new plan for the management of the River Red Gum Forests of the mid-Murray in northern Victoria.

The comprehensive plan is contained within a 150 page report by the Rivers and Red Gum Environmental Alliance; a group of 25 community and environmental NGOs representing over 100,000 people.

This is what I said:

Ladies and Gentlemen,

What a privilege it is to be here today to launch a comprehensive plan for the river red gum forests along the Murray River; a plan put together with the aim of not only looking after the forests but also the communities who live, work and play in them.

There are some who argue that the only way to look after a forest is to exclude people. But they are wrong and particularly when it comes to river red gum forests.

Red gums are fire sensitive and the large forests along the Murray, including the Barmah Forest, have always been tended by people. The Barmah forest, the largest river red gum forest in the world, is only about 6,000 years old as it came about following a geological uplifting that changed the course of the Murray River.

The wood cutters and cattlemen who now live and work in the region have gone to great lengths to keep fuel-loads in red gum forests low through controlled grazing and the collection of firewood. This, combined with a network of rural fire fighting brigades, has made it possible to stomp out fires started from lightning strikes or camp fires.

And this may explain why some aboriginal elders call river red gums ‘white fella weed’ and why areas which were described by the early explorers as open woodland are now covered in trees including part of Barmah.

Whether open woodland from burning, or dense forest from fire exclusion, bush users, both indigenous and non-indigenous, know that the beauty of what many regard as wilderness is often the consequence of a particular approach to land management.

Indeed the idea of a forest without people is a Romantic European notion of wilderness.

In 1820 English poet and Oxford graduate Percy Shelley wrote,

“Away, away, from men and towns,
To the wild wood and downs,
To the silent wilderness,
Where the soul need not repress
Its music.”

For Shelley, wilderness was a place far away.

The late American writer J.B. Jackson has suggested that once upon a time wilderness was the domain of the nobility, an environment where they alone could develop and display a number of aristocratic qualities and that friction arose between the “peasants” and the “nobles” and persisted as long as the peasants felt excluded from that portion of the landscape they believed their right by heritage.

There are more contemporary notions of wilderness that include ordinary people.

A fellow who comments at my weblog under the pen name Travis has written,

“Wilderness has no gods or one almighty. All is equal in life and death and just simply being. The rich tapestry of a wilderness includes the naked ape – but does not sustain those that want to dominate it. It then becomes something else.”

And so the beautiful river red gums forests along the Murray can sustain the communities that currently harvest them, and graze them, and camp in them, as long as no one group dominates.

This is the big difference between the VEAC plan and the community plan; The Community Plan for the Multiple use of Public Lands in the River Red Gum Forests.

VEAC is the Victorian Environmental Assessment Council. The council is comprised of a small group of people without a mandate from the local community and without any particular expertise, who have decided, a little like the English Aristocrat of the 1800s, that the forest is best protected through the exclusion of people. Thus, their plan focuses on changes to land tenure, management and use.

But the problem right now for the forests is water, not ordinary people.

Indeed many of the problems facing the red gum forests along the Murray stem from a chronic lack of water from the protracted drought.

But VEAC, with their outdated European notion of wilderness, seem to think that by excluding people they can somehow make things better; that they can somehow save the forests.

But they can’t. Furthermore the people who know how to practically and efficiently deliver water to the forest are the very people who live and work in the forests and who understand how the forest floods.

Some of the locals know how to piggyback environmental flows on to managed flows for irrigation, they know how to push water down creeks when the Ovens River floods. They know where the on-river regulators are, and they know how the on-river regulators, in conjunction with the distribution works located on flood runners through the forests, can deliver small quantities of water efficiently to the most stressed parts of the forest.

There is a rich oral history within not only the indigenous, but also the white-fella communities along the Murray.

But this potential for ‘within forest’ water management, to efficiently distribute this increasingly precious resource is largely untapped. This is partly because organisations, including VEAC with their outdated European notion of wilderness, falsely assume they can save the environment “naturally” and want overbank delivery of water which is neither practical nor efficient – at least not in these dry times.

In November last year, I stayed with friends on the Murray River. I saw a lot of river red gums – I saw some beautiful old habitat trees, many thickets of young saplings, some healthy forests, some water-stressed forests, some bushfire-damaged forests, some trees ready to be made into railway sleepers, others into veneer.

Some of the forests were suffering from the drought and some of these forests really needed thinning.

Commercial timber production is currently permitted within less than 45,000 hectares of state forest which represents just 16 percent of the total area of public land in the VEAC investigation area.

Environmental flows require a water allocation and the possibility for this are limited until the drought breaks. In the meantime, there is evidence that some forests can be at least temporarily ‘drought proofed’ through thinning.

While VEAC proposes an 80 percent reduction in the area of state forest there is no scientific basis for such a proposal and the benefits of thinning to reduce competition between trees for the limited available water – the benefits of active management – have been ignored.

An Ecological Grazing Strategy was undertaken by the Department of Sustainability & Environment concluding in June 2005 – just two months after the VEAC investigation started – and determined that grazing could be managed to minimise impacts on native flora and fauna while controlling introduced weeds.

A key recommendation in the new community plan is the establishment of Ramsar reserves along the Murray River to provide for sustainable multiple use and bio-diversity protection under the ‘wise use’ principles of the internationally accepted Ramsar Convention.

Ramsar is a term for ‘Wetlands of International Significance’ following an international conference, held in 1971 in Ramsar in Iran. Ramsar provides a practical and internationally recognised mechanism for protecting forest and wetlands. The Ramsar convention endorsed ‘wise-use’ as a key plank in conservation whereby the use of wild, living resources, if sustainable, is an important conservation tool because the social and economic benefits derived from such use provides incentives for people to conserve them.

The recommendation by the Rivers and Red Gum Environmental Alliance, if adopted by government, would create the largest Ramsar reserve in the world; the largest Ramsar Reserve in the world – an area of 104,000 hectares.

In short the Conservation and Community Plan is a well researched and referenced document that provides a credible alternative for government to consider; particularly as it provides a strong focus on bio-diversity conservation and also community well being. In short, the plan is contemporary and practical and rejects outdated notions of wilderness where people are excluded.

The new plan assumes a concept of wilderness which includes people recognising we are a part of the landscape and we can live in harmony with the red gum forests.

So without further ado, let me declare

“A Community Plan for the Multiple Use Management of Public Lands in VEAC’s River Red Gum Forests Investigation Area” launched.

Thank you.

Launch of Conservation and Community Red Gum plan 037 blog ver 2.jpg
Members of the Rivers and Red Gum Environment Alliance Outside the Victorian Parliament House, Melbourne, Thursday July 31, 2008. Photographed by Jennifer Marohasy. Members of the Alliance in the photograph from left to right are: Jodie O’Dwyer, Paul Madden, Rod Drew, Max Rheese, Barrie Dexter, Ian Lobban, Sandy Atkinson, Marie Dunn, Colin Wood, Peter Newman, Shelley Gough. In the background you can see members of the Rheese family from Benalla – Kyra, Michael and Samuel – cheering.

Ice Scare Goes Wong

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DAILY, new evidence emerges to demonstrate that Climate Minister Penny Wong is wrong.

The latest blow to the Government’s apocalyptic prophet is news from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute that there is more ice than normal in the Arctic waters north of the Svalbard archipelago.

According to the Barents Observer there are open areas in this area in most years during July – but this year the area is covered by ice.

A fortnight ago a Norwegian research ship, Lance, and a Swedish ship, MV Stockholm, got stuck in the ice in the area and needed to be freed by the Norwegian Coast Guard.

While one ice floe does not amount to a mini-ice age, the dramatic evidence runs counter to the mantra of the climate warming cult which has claimed the Arctic is becoming progressively free of ice.

The Daily Telegraph, Piers Akerman: Icy reality cools the climate cultists

The New York Times Magazine published a story “Ice Free” by Stephan Faris, hawking his new book “Forecast: The Consequences of Climate Change, From the Amazon to the Arctic, From Darfur to Napa Valley”, to be published in January.

In the article, Faris notes “Greenland’s ice sheet represents one of global warming’s most disturbing threats. The vast expanses of glaciers- massed, on average, 1.6 miles deep – contain enough water to raise sea levels worldwide by 23 feet. Should they melt or otherwise slip into the ocean, they would flood coastal capitals, submerge tropical islands and generally redraw the world’s atlases. The infusion of fresh water could slow or shut down the ocean’s currents, plunging Europe into bitter winter.”

There is little recognition in the media and by the author of history. Greenland actually was warmer in the 1930s and 1940s than it has been in recent decades. For the period from the 1960s to the 1990s, temperatures actually declined significantly as the Atlantic went through its multidecadal cold mode. The temperature changes up and down the last few centuries were closely related to these multidecadal ocean cycles.

Shown below is the temperature plot for Godthab Nuuk in southwest Greenland. Note how closely the temperatures track with the AMO (which is a measure of the Atlantic temperatures 0 to 70N). It shows that cooling from the 1940s to the late 1990s even as greenhouse gases rose steadily, a negative correlation over almost 5 decades. The rise after the middle 1990s was due to the flip of the AMO into its warm phase. They have not reached the level of the 1930s and 1940s.

GreenlandvsAMO.jpg

Temperatures cooled back to the levels of the 1880s by the 1980s and 1990s. In a GRL paper in 2003, Hanna and Cappelen showed a significant cooling trend for eight stations in coastal southern Greenland from 1958 to 2001 (-1.29ºC for the 44 years). The temperature trend represented a strong negative correlation with increasing CO2 levels.

Many recent studies have addressed Greenland ice mass balance. They yield a broad picture of slight inland thickening and strong near-coastal thinning, primarily in the south along fast-moving outlet glaciers. However, interannual variability is very large, driven mainly by variability in summer melting and sudden glacier accelerations. Consequently, the short time interval covered by instrumental data is of concern in separating fluctuations from trends. But in a paper published in Science in February 2007, Dr. Ian Howat of the University of Washington reports that two of the largest glaciers have suddenly slowed, bringing the rate of melting last year down to near the previous rate. At one glacier, Kangerdlugssuaq, “average thinning over the glacier during the summer of 2006 declined to near zero, with some apparent thickening in areas on the main trunk.”

Dr. Howat in a follow-up interview with the New York Times went on to add: “Greenland was about as warm or warmer in the 1930’s and 40’s, and many of the glaciers were smaller than they are now. This was a period of rapid glacier shrinkage world-wide, followed by at least partial re-expansion during a colder period from the 1950’s to the 1980’s. Of course, we don’t know very much about how the glacier dynamics changed then because we didn’t have satellites to observe it. However, it does suggest that large variations in ice sheet dynamics can occur from natural climate variability.” For more on this issue see this full post here. SPPI has also posted a response here. EPW compiled a series of papers here.

Icecap: Greenland Again

During our last check in, we had a look at northern Canada from the Arctic Circle to the North pole, and found we had quite a ways to go before we see an “ice free arctic” this year as some have speculated.

Today I did a check of the NASA rapidfire site for TERRA/MODIS satellite images and grabbed a view showing northern Greenland all the way to the North Pole.

There’s some bergy bits on the northeastern shore of Greenland, but in the cloud free area extending all the way to the pole, it appears to still be solid ice.

With more than half of the summer melt season gone, it looks like an uphill battle for an ice-free arctic this year.

This dovetails with a press release and news story about more ice than normal in the Barents Sea:

The Barents Observer:
http://www.barentsobserver.com/?cat=16149&id=4498513

The Meteorological Institute writes in a press release:

The ice findings from the area spurred surprise among the researchers, many of whom expect the very North Pole to be ice-free by September this year.

Watts Up With That: Polar Ice Check – Still a lot of ice up there

Bernie draws our attention to an article in the Globe and Mail on another break-off of the Ellesmere Island ice shelf:

The Globe and Mail has an excellent map of the “collapse” of this ice sheet. Apparently its collapse has been proceeding for about 100 years.

Update- The break is said to be unprecedented since as long ago as 2005:

Scientists say the break, the largest on record since 2005 but still small when compared with others

This topic is in the news from time to time – there was another similar story in a couple of years ago. At the time, I looked into the matter and wrote several posts on the topic of Ellesmere Island ice shelves, which people interested in this topic may wish to re-visit.

Climate Audit: Ward Hunt Island: Unprecedented since 2005

Nothing to Hide, Nothing to Fear: Tree Ring Data Stonewall to be Breached?

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Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit continues his quest for unarchived and therefore unverifiable data that has been used in numerous millenial temperature reconstructions that produce a ‘Hockey Stick’ shape:

In 2000, Keith Briffa, lead author of the millennial section of AR4, published his own versions of Yamal, Taymir and Tornetrask, all three of which have been staples of all subsequent supposedly “independent” reconstructions. The Briffa version of Yamal has a very pronounced HS and is critical in the modern-medieval differences in several studies. However, the Briffa version for Yamal differs substantially from the version in the publication by the originating authors (Hantemirov, Holocene 2002), but is the one that is used in the multiproxy studies (though it’s hard to tell since Hantemirov is usually cited.) Studies listed in AR4 that use the Briffa versions include not just Briffa 2000, but Mann and Jones 2003, Moberg et al 2005, D’Arrigo et al 2006, Hegerl et al 2007, as well as Osborn and Briffa 2006.

Of the 8 proxies shown in the proxy spaghetti graph (as opposed to the reconstruction spaghetti graph), 3 are from the Briffa 2000 study (called NW Russia, N Russia and N Sweden) but demonstrably the Briffa versions of these sites.

An important characteristic of tree ring chronologies is that they are sensitive to the method used. Chronologies can be quickly and easily calculated from measurement data. Rob Wilson, for example, will nearly always run his own chronologies from measurement data so that he knows for sure how they were done and so that they are done consistently across sites.

Osborn and Briffa 2006 was published in Science, which has a policy requiring the availability of data. It used Briffa’s versions of Yamal, Taymir and Tornetrask. At the time, I requested the measurement data, which had still not been archived 6 years after the original publication of Briffa 2000, despite the availability of excellent international archive facilities at WDCP-A (www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo). Briffa refused. I asked Science to require Briffa to provide the data. After some deliberation, they stated that Osborn and Briffa 2006 had not used the measurement data directly but had only used the chronologies from an earlier study and that I should take up the matter with the author of the earlier study, pointedly not identifying the author, who was, of course, Briffa himself. I wrote Briffa again, this time in his capacity as author of the 2000 article in Quaternary Science Reviews and was blown off.

So years later, the measurement data for key studies used in both canonical multiproxy studies and illustrated in AR4 Box 6.4 Figure 1 (along, remarkably, with Mann’s PC1), remains unarchived, with Briffa resolutely stonewalling efforts to have him archive the data.

But has Briffa, after all these years, finally made a misstep?

Maybe.

Recently Briffa published Briffa et al 2008 in Phil Trans Roy Soc, a journal with a long history, and with a life outside IPCC. A reader drew my attention to the fact that Phil Trans Roy Soc has a clear and forthright policy. As I reported a little while ago, I wrote to them observing that Briffa had not observed their requirements on data availability and that their editors and reviewers had failed to require observance of a data archiving policy that would require provision of a url as a condition of publication. My letter was as follows:

Dear Sirs,

Your policy on data availability as stated at: publishing.royalsociety.org/index.cfm?page=1684#question10 states:

“As a condition of acceptance authors agree to honour any reasonable request by other researchers for materials, methods, or data necessary to verify the conclusion of the article.

Supplementary data up to 10Mb is placed on the Society’s website free of charge and is publicly accessible. Large datasets must be deposited in a recognised public domain database by the author prior to submission. The accession number should be provided for inclusion in the published article.”

Briffa et al failed to comply with your requirement that “large datasets must be deposited in a recognised public domain database by the author prior to submission” and your editorial staff and reviewers failed to ensure that the article included an accession number for such deposit.

In particular, Briffa et al. 2008 discussed the following tree ring measurement data sets which have not been archived at the International Tree Ring Data Bank or other public domain data base (other than a small subset of the Tornetrask data set.) Would you therefore please provide me with either a URL or the complete tree ring measurement data sets in digital form for all data sets discussed in Briffa et al 2008, including Yamal, Tornetrask, Taymyr, Bolshoi Avam and Finnish Lapland, together with digital versions of the individual reconstuctions referred to in Briffa et al 2008, including, without limitation, the reconstructions for each of the above sites and the composite regional reconstructions referred to in the article. This informaiton is necessary to “verify the conclusion of the article”.

Yours truly,

Stephen McIntyre

Last week, I received a cordial replying undertaking to look into the matter and stating:

“We take matters like this very seriously and I am sorry that this was not picked up in the publishing process.”

Imagine that. A journal that seems to have both a data policy and that takes it seriously. Unlike, say, Science or Nature, which have refused to make similar requirements of IPCC authors. On the face of it, a real science journal. That’s right: Real. Science.

However, Briffa is a wily data stonewalling veteran and may yet outwit the editors of Phil Trans Roy Soc. We shall see.

I suspect that Briffa won’t be able to pull off the same stunt that he pulled at Science, where he was able to use the prior publication of the data elsewhere as a pretext for not archiving the data in accordance with Science’s policies. Look at what Phil Trans Roy Soc says about publishing data in more than one place:

“It is important to ensure that research work is only published once. If it is published more than once, the scientific literature can be unjustifiably weighted by the appearance that one study has been replicated. It might also mean that the study is inadvertently entered twice into a meta-analysis, for example, or cause problems in systems which use the number of publications to assess an individual’s or an institute’s research output.”

There may be situations (e.g. review articles) where previously published work can be included in summary form, but it must be made clear to the Editor on submission that this is the case.

Imagine if that policy were applied in paleoclimate. How many times have we seen the same proxies re-cycled as a supposedly “independent” result. Look at the above sentence:

“If it is published more than once, the scientific literature can be unjustifiably weighted by the appearance that one study has been replicated.”

Precisely. If that were applied to the Team (Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick Team), they’d be out of business.

Climate Audit: Is Briffa Finally Cornered?