Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

jennifer

After 10 Years, Still No Evidence to Convict Herbicide in Mackay Mangrove Dieback

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About 10 years ago the Pioneer River which runs through the North Queensland town of Mackay flooded and some mangroves died.   A few years later the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) launched its ‘Save the Reef’ campaign focusing on claimed impacts of farming on the Great Barrier Reef and an academic at the University of Queensland, Norm Duke, released a report implicating cane farming in the mangrove dieback at Mackay in particular farm runoff containing the herbicide Diuron.  

The WWF campaign generated political momentum for some sort of action and a Reef Taskforce was formed to advise government.  At the time I was working for the Queensland Sugar Industry and made a member of the Taskforce.  It was clear that there was no substantial evidence for an impact from farming on the reef, but the government had committed itself to there being a problem and the Taskforce was to conclude as much.   

Dr Duke’s unpublished report to the Queensland Fisheries Service became a key document for the Taskforce, purportedly providing evidence for “localized deterioration on individual nearshore reefs” from farm runoff.  

At the time I explained that the Duke report, and the hypothesis that the dieback was a consequence of the herbicide Diuron, had some major flaws, including: “Only four of 21 potential sites were tested for Diuron. Traces of Diuron were found in the sediment at all four sites. This included the control site at which there was no mangrove dieback. In other words, Diuron was found at one site where there was no mangrove dieback as well as at three sites where there was mangrove dieback. No evidence was presented to indicate that the levels of Diuron at any of the sites were herbicidal.”

But the campaign against the farmers supported by a compliant media rolled on, politicians were elected on the basis they cared about the reef including mangroves, plans were developed to save the reef from farming, hundreds of millions of dollars provided for research programs to save the reef from farming.    Indeed there is now a large bureaucracy including academics and sugar industry personnel associated with saving the reef.

There is ongoing monitoring of the stands of mangrove in the vicinity of Mackay but there is still no evidence implicating the herbicide Diuron in the mangrove dieback.      

Indeed today I was assured by those who have spent years monitoring the mangroves that diuron can still be found in sediment, but it doesn’t seem to be affecting the mangroves that “there is no indication that the herbicides at the levels detected in the Pioneer River estuary have impacted on the health of the mangroves.”

I had a wander around the mangroves, including in the Bassett Basin near Barnes Creek, today with Carl Mitchell from Reef Catchments and John Abbot from the University of Queensland. 

 

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Additional reading:
Jennifer Marohasy & Gary Johns, 2002, WWF Says ‘Jump!’, Governments Ask ‘How High?’ Institute of Public Affairs, Occasional Paper

Better Reason Than ‘Climate Change’ for Eating Kangaroo

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The Australian government’s climate change advisor, Professor Ross Garnaut, has suggested that reducing sheep and cattle numbers and replacing them with 175 million farmed kangaroos would help to dramatically reduce Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions. Read more here. 

Yep.  The concept of a climate crisis can be used to justify all sorts of things.  

A problem for the kangaroo industry has been the lack of a reliable market in large part because of animal rights campaigning against the killing of this Australian icon, and cute and cuddly.  

The late Steve Irwin was against the idea of farming Australian native animals and supported a campaign that forced David Beckham to stop wearing kangaroo skin soccer boots.

There are better reasons than ‘climate change’ for eating what I have called ‘Nature’s natural bounty’ including kangaroo and also whale.  But we first need to overcome some of our cultural aversions.  Read more here.

Key Australian Government Advisor Hands Down Final Report on Climate Change

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The Australian Government’s climate change adviser, Professor Ross Garnaut, says a global agreement must be reached to successfully reduce the world’s carbon emissions and has urged action without delay.  Indeed Professor Garnaut went so far as to suggest in a televised address that, “On a balance of probabilities, the failure of our generation on climate change mitigation would lead to consequences that would haunt humanity until the end of time.”

 

On the issue of the need for a worldwide response Professor Garnaut suggested:

1.     An International Adaptation Assistance Commitment would provide new adaptation assistance to developing countries that join the mitigation effort

2.     Early sectoral agreements would seek to ensure that the main trade-exposed, emissions-intensive industries face comparable carbon prices across the world, including metals and international civil aviation and shipping

3.     A World Trade Organisation (WTO) agreement is required to support international mitigation agreements and to establish rules for trade measures against countries thought to be doing too little on mitigation

 

On the issue of an Australian emissions trading scheme, the Professor suggested:

1.     The Establishment of an independent carbon bank with all the necessary powers to oversee the long-term stability of the scheme

2.     Implementation of a transition period from 2010 to the conclusion of the Kyoto period (end 2012) involving fixed price permits

3.     Credits to trade-exposed, emissions-intensive industries to address the failure of our trading partners to adopt similar policies

4.     No permits to be freely allocated

5.     Scheme coverage that is as broad as possible

 

Such a trading scheme would be very different to the European Model where I understand credits have been freely allocated and petrol, for example, is exempt.

 

Professor Garnaut has accepted the science of climate change as explained by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and  sections of his earlier reports read like oversimplified versions of the IPCC reports.    

 

Professor Garnaut is close to Australia’s Rudd Labor Government and this final report is likely to reflect Australian government thinking on this issue.   The Australian Prime Minister, Kelvin Rudd, and his Climate Change Minister, Penny Wong, have both used climate change as a vehicle for self promotion nationally and internationally and are deeply committed to the idea of a climate crisis.

 

The Garnaut Climate Change Review was commissioned by Australia’s Commonwealth, state and territory governments to examine the impacts, challenges and opportunities of climate change for Australia. A Draft Report was released on 4 July 2008. The Supplementary Draft Report Targets and trajectories was released on 5 September 2008. The Final Report was released yesterday on 30 September 2008.   All documents can be downloaded from the Garnaut Review website.

http://www.garnautreview.org.au

Financial Crash, Not Good for Concept of Carbon Trading

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The proposed $700 billion bailout of Wall Street failed to pass the US Congress last night.   Across the world disappointed investors are now fleeing stock markets as the global economy teeters on ruin.

 

With the likely arrival of more austere times it is unlikely national governments will have a lot of time or interest in environmental issues, including global warming. 

 

The belief that Australia may be somehow immune from hardship because of our mineral wealth and proximity to China is likely to be challenged, along with the idea that we can forge ahead with an Emissions Trading Scheme.  Indeed it is resource shares that have been most affected this morning. 

 

During this period of intense market instability, it is likely to be increasingly difficult to justify any additional stresses to the economy particularly one based on the idea of trading a commodity, carbon, for which there is no real market.

More Problems with Computer Models: Our World is One of Novelty and Change

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The risk of a climate crisis, like the risks associated with sub-prime mortgage securitisation, are calculated using complex computer models and both are too complex for the average punter to understand.  

 

As Graham Young wrote last week in a blog post entitled ‘Sub-prime and climate change’, these models were created by clever people with PhDs in maths and physics, but they are only as good as the information feed into them.  GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) is how he described both the climate models and the models that helped created the current credit crisis.   

 

 

According to Richard Mackey, a sceptic from Canberra, also writing on the issues of climate change and financial systems, a key limitation with both financial and climate models is the underlying false assumption that economic and climate systems are ergodic systems – that is they normalise to an equilibrium state. 

 

Richard Mackey wrote:

“One of the lethal critiques of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) models is that the climate system can never be at anything like an equilibrium state. 

 All the models assume that the climate system normalises to an equilibrium state, the state modelled.  As the natural processes of the climate system are non-linear and non-ergodic, small variations may result in large changes. There are negative and positive feedback loops.  There is randomness in the system. As a result, the simple deterministic computer simulations on which all climate change projections are based will have little to do with the real world.

 

The econometric models of the Treasury are also equilibrium models.

 

They too assume that the economic system normalises to an equilibrium state, the state modelled by those models.

 

As Nobel Laureate, Douglass North, has demonstrated, the real world is vastly more complex that the simulated world of the models and is never in an equilibrium state, more precisely, never anywhere near such a state.

 

He argued that we live in a non-ergodic world and explained that an ergodic phenomenon has an underlying structure so stable theory that can be applied time after time, consistently, can be developed. 

 

In contrast, the world with which we are concerned is continually changing: it is continually novel. Inconsistency over time is a feature of a non-ergodic world.  The dynamics of change of the processes important to us are non-ergodic.  The processes do not repeat themselves precisely.  Douglass North argued that although there may be some aspects of the world that may be ergodic, most of the significant phenomena are non-ergodic.

 

Douglass North stressed that our capacity to deal with uncertainty effectively is essential to our succeeding in a non-ergodic world.  It is crucial, therefore, that the methodologies we use to understand the exceedingly complex phenomena measured in our time series, correctly inform us of the future uncertainty of the likely pattern of development indicated by the time series.” [end of quote]

 

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Additional Reading

 

 

 

In 1993 Douglass North, along with fellow economic historian, Robert W. Fogel, received the Noble Prize for Economics for pioneering work which resulted in the establishment of Institutional Economics, now a central school of modern economics.  There is a substantial economic literature that identifies the fatal flaws in the neoclassical deterministic equilibrium models that the Commonwealth Treasury uses and that Ross Garnaut will rely on to tell the Australian Government of the (almost certain) economic consequences of the (almost certain) predictions of the equilibrium climate models. 

 

North, D. C., 1999. Dealing with a Non Ergodic World: Institutional Economics, Property Rights, and the Global Environment. Duke Environmental Law and Policy Forum Vol 10 No. 1 pps 1 to 12.

 

Professor North’s opening address at the Fourth Annual Cummings Colloquium on Environmental Law, at Duke University, April 30, 1999, is available on line here: Global Markets for Global Commons: Will Property Rights Protect the Planet?   

 

Classical time series analysis that features in the reports of the IPCC necessarily underestimates future uncertainty. Of great relevance here is that two scientists at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering University of Melbourne, Dr Murray Peel and Professor Tom McMahon, have recently shown that randomness in the climate system has been on the rise since the 1950s.  The authors used the time series analysis technique, Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD), to quantify the proportion of variation in the annual temperature and rainfall time series that resulted from fluctuations at different time scales.  They applied EMD to annual data for 1,524 temperature and 2,814 rainfall stations from the Global Historical Climatology Network.

 

Peel, M and McMahon, T. A., 2006. Recent frequency component changes in interannual climate variability, Geophysical Research Letters, Vol.33, L16810, doi:10.1029/2006GL025670

 

Richard Mackey’s submission to the Garnaut Climate Change Review is entitled ‘Much more to the Earth’s climate dynamics than human activity’ and can be read here.