Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

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GM Cotton More Water Efficient: A Note from David Tribe

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Preliminary results from CSIRO research in Narrabri have shown that genetically modified insect-resistant cotton may also be more water efficient.*

Two years of field experiments by CSIRO Plant Industry’s Mr Dirk Richards and Mr Stephen Yeates, show that under normal full irrigation, Bollgard® II cotton used ten per cent less water than an equivalent conventional variety and had higher yields.

Bollgard® II makes up most of the Australian cotton crop and has reduced pesticide use by up to 80 per cent.

Research is now optimising agronomic management of Bollgard® II as it tends to produce bolls earlier than conventional cotton because insect damage does not delay early crop growth.

Bollgard® II and conventional cotton extract soil water at a similar rate, but Bollgard® II has a more compact growing season so uses less water overall for the same or higher yields.

To read more click here: http://gmopundit.blogspot.com/2006/09/gm-technology-improves-water-use.html

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* This text was provided by David Tribe.

The Human Impact On Climate – Additional to CO2: A Note from Paul Biggs

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Paul Biggs from the University of Birmingham, UK, sent me the following summary of a presentation by Roger Pielke Sr. There is so much interesting information on the potential human impact on climate beyond a focus on carbon dioxide:

“Roger Pielke Sr, a respected climatologist of some 30 years, gave an interesting presentation of his perspective on climate science entitled ‘Regional and Global Climate Forcings – The Need to Move Beyond a Focus of the Radiative Forcing of the Well-Mixed Greenhouse Gases’ at the The 2006 Earth’s Radiative Energy Budget Related to SORCE Meeting in Washington.

The general conclusions that I draw from Pielke’s work are as follows:

Humans are significantly altering the global climate, but in a variety of diverse ways beyond the radiative effect of carbon dioxide.

In terms of climate change and variability on the regional and local scale, the IPCC Reports, the CCSP Report on surface and tropospheric temperature trends, and the U.S. National Assessment, have all overstated the role of the radiative effect of the anthropogenic increase of CO2 relative to the role of the diversity of other human climate climate forcing on global warming, and more generally, on climate variability and change.

Pielke calculates the fraction of global warming due to the radiative forcing of increased atmospheric CO2, using the current IPCC framework on climate forcings:
http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/slides/large/06.01.jpg.

This includes new findings on artic ozone, methane, albedo, and aerosols/black carbon with forcing calculated to be about 26.5%. This contrasts with the IPCC view of 48%.

He suggests new or under-recognized human climate forcings including:
biogeochemical effect of CO2, nitrogen deposition, land-use/land-cover change, glaciation effect of aerosols, thermodynamic effect of aerosols, surface energy budget effect.

Global and regional climate models have not demonstrated skill at predicting climate change and variability on multi-decadal time scales.

A postitive feedback is required in order to significantly amplify the radiative forcing of added carbon dioxide.

There is, as of yet, no evidence that atmospheric water vapor concentrations have increased (see http://climatesci.atmos.colostate.edu/2006/04/03/new-global-precip-papers-trend-is-zero-or-positive/).

Moreover, water vapor also changes phase (into liquid and ice clouds and precipitation) which greater complicates the actual climate response to added CO2 and other well-mixed greenhouse gases.

Attempts to significantly influence regional and local-scale climate based on controlling CO2 emissions alone is an inadequate policy for this purpose.

The needed focus for the study of climate change and variability is on the regional and local scales. Global and zonally averaged surface temperature trend assessments, besides having major difficulties in terms of how this metric is diagnosed and analyzed, do not provide significant information on climate change and variability on the regional and local scales.

It is this instrumental data that gives the plot of a hockey stick shape, grafted onto proxy data. Furthermore, if, for example, the temperature of an area of the desert were to increase from plus 40 degrees celsius to 41 degrees, while at the same time an equal area of the Antarctic decreased from minus 40 to minus 41, the average temperature of the earth would stay constant.

However, under the Stephan-Boltzman equation, more radiation would be emitted by increasing the temperature of the desert, than the radiation loss from Antarctica. Pielke will shortly have a paper published in JGR, which introduces this problem.

Global warming is not equivalent to climate change. Significant, societally important climate change, due to both natural and human climate forcings, can occur without any global warming or cooling.

The spatial pattern of ocean heat content change is the appropriate metric to assess climate system heat changes including global warming. Pielke examines the significant upper ocean cooling from 2003 reported by Lyman et al, 2006 (http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2006/s2704.htm) to a depth of at least 750m, which was not predicted by climate models.

He cites 2 papers which support the diagnosis: A 2004 Science article by E. Pallé, P. R. Goode, P. Montañés-Rodríguez, and S. E. Kooninentitled ‘Changes in Earth’s Reflectance Over the Past Two Decades’ and a follow-on 2005 Geophysical Research Letters paper by Pallé E., P. Montañés-Rodriguez, P. R. Goode, S. E. Koonin, M. Wild, and S. Casadio entitled ‘A multi-data comparison of shortwave climate forcing changes’ (http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2005…/2005GL023847.shtml ).

Finally, I must point out that Pielke says all of this is not a reason not to seek to reduce CO2 emissions.”

Thanks Paul for the summary and also to Luke, for emphasising to me the importance of getting this information up as a new post/thread.

Publish or Perish: A Note from Anthony Gibson

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Nyngan farmer Anthony Gibson, spokesperson for the NSW Regional Community Survival Group, has warned government officials and the public to be aware of Dr Barry Traill’s limited scientific credentials on the ecology of woody weeds.

Following is the rest of the media release from the NSW Regional Community Survival Group:

“An exhaustive search of the world’s premier online scientific publication database, CAB Abstracts, has failed to unearth any examples of refereed published work by the Wilderness Society’s key spokesperson on woody weeds,” Mr Gibson said.

The Community Survival Group is made up of farmers from western NSW who are fed up with ‘green-inspired laws’ that prevent farmers from controlling woody weed infestations that are destroying up to 20 million hectares (an area three times the size of Tasmania) of western NSW.

Mr Gibson said that a comprehensive search of the CAB Abstracts database failed to uncover any trace of published work in refereed (peer-reviewed) international journals by Traill.

CAB Abstracts is the most comprehensive bibliographic, abstracting and indexing database in its field, covering references to journal articles, monographs, conferences, books and annual reports from more than 100 countries.

It covers environmental science and ecology, including soil science, water resources, organic farming, forestry and integrated crop management, environmental pollution and remediation. Issues relating to the conservation of land, forest, soil, biological and genetic resources, and nature conservation are also covered.

Ecological publications within CAB Abstracts searched for articles written by Traill included:

Conservation Biology; Ecological Applications; Ecological Monographs; Ecology; Evolution; Global Ecology and Biogeography; International Journal of Plant Sciences; Journal of Applied Ecology; Journal of Biogeography; Journal of Ecology; Journal of Tropical Ecology; Journal of Vegetation Science; Proceedings: Biological Sciences; Quarterly Review of Biology; and Science.

Mr Gibson said that a PhD alone does not make a scientist an expert – a scientist has to publish his/her work extensively in refereed international journals before they can be considered an authority on an issue; hence the maxim in the academic community of ‘publish or perish’.

“The only published material by Traill unearthed was a 2001 review titled ‘The Nature Conservation Review’, a publication produced by the green group The Victorian National Parks Association, and a couple of unrefereed conference papers.”

“Barry Traill is entitled to an opinion on how woody weed infestations should be managed in western NSW but government officials and the public should be warned not to consider him an authority on the issue.

“The NSW Government must start to listen to the local knowledge and experience of Aboriginal Elders, community leaders and farmers on how best to control the destructive affects of woody weeds – people who deal with the problem every day – not political activists like Traill,” ended Mr Gibson.“

What’s Australia’s Carrying Capacity?

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Mitchell Porter sent me a note some time ago that began:

“There is a thought I had a long time ago when talking with some zero-population-growth advocates, maybe your readership can shed some light on this. They were saying Australia was already near its human carrying capacity, and I remembered reading that Australia has a population of about 100 million sheep. Now granted, sheep are metabolically different from humans in a number of ways, but still, the bare fact that this continent can support that many large mammals in addition to its 20 million humans suggests to me that the human population here could be considerably larger…”

Now I hadn’t got around to putting this information with some information I have some where on numbers of sheep in Australia and how they are a species in decline … so Mitchell took the initiative of posting it at the Wiki:
https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/wiki/Australian_carrying_capacity .

Thanks Mitchell. You’re hopefully a trend-setter!

Mine Your Own Business: Anti-Activist Film

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Jennifer,

The readers of your blog may be interested in the new anti-activist movie, ‘Mine Your Own Business’. The page loads slowly, but patience will be rewarded with the film trailer: http://www.mineyourownbusiness.org/index.htm .

Schiller.

And this is what the Director of the movie had to say:

“I remember a time, not so long ago, when the man with the sandwich board warning the world that the end is nigh was a comic figure. He appeared in cartoons and comedy sketch shows as the clownish, nerdish figure that others made jokes about.

Similarly it is not long ago that the bearded man, with the religious collar and evangelical zeal, warned us to change our ways or we would be visited by plagues and pestilence was viewed as a throwback to a conservative, less sophisticated past.

Most educated westerners feel that no longer believing these spreaders of doom and apocalypse is a sign of progress and how our society has matured.

But remove the glasses and the grubby raincoat from the man with the sandwich board and replace it with an ethnic shirt, maybe a pair of sandals and write on the sandwich board that we are all going to be damned because the oil will run out, Or maybe the message is that we are all going to be doomed because we have cut down the forests or because of global warming and suddenly we take the man with the sandwich board very seriously indeed.

Similarly remove the collar from the man with the evangelical zeal and make him a member of an environmental organisation and suddenly we start paying serious attention to these modern day prophets of doom.

Once, according to our religious leaders, it was our sins that were leading us to damnation. Now, according to our environmental leaders, it is polluting actions of man that will lead to our damnation.

How little we have all progressed and how we still love to listen to harbingers of doom would be mildly amusing if it were not for the pernicious effects of such beliefs on the poorest people in some of the poorest countries in the world.

Hundreds of years after we have become rich and comfortable by removing our forests and exploiting our natural resources such as coal, oil, and gold we are now going to the poorest countries on the planet to prevent them from doing what we did and having what we have. We want them to stay as ‘traditional peasants’ forgetting all the while that the poor people desperately want progress and desperately want to enjoy the good, healthy and long life we in the west take for granted.

‘Mine Your Own Business’ will make a lot of comfortable western people very uncomfortable indeed. It will show them the consequences of their blind faith in our new religion-the religion of environmentalism.

Phelim McAleer
July 2006″

George McCallum

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George McCallum is a regular reader and sometimes commentator at this blog. He has been based in Berlin for the last 9 years, working as a freelance wildlife photographer, marine mammal observer, freelance field researcher, chief cook and bottle washer. He also runs his own one man company, Whalephoto.

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George has just returned from the Arctic and is working on the 20,000 or so digital images he has shot this year as well as preparing a poster/paper for the upcoming European Cetacean Society conference in San Sebastian, Spain. The conference is in early 2007 and George will be speaking on the use of flash equipment in low light and backlit conditions.

And George has found time to send us information about himself for the people category at this blog:

“I’ve been an ID photographer/observer on Norway´s whale population surveys since 1995, team leader on same last year, team leader/ID photographer of whale observers on some ecosystem surveys also last two years, also in arctic Norway, North and North East Atlantic areas.

Previous and concurrent to this, I have worked as a field researcher volunteer/ID photographer from both commercial whale watching boats and hired vessels off Andenes in Arctic Norway between 1995-2000, occasionally as a guide on one of the whale watching boats. Also worked as a field researcher/volunteer/ID photographer with T.Simila´s killer whale project in Arctic Norway from 1993 onwards. I also spent a number of winter seasons in Tysfjord working with and for various TV and film crews who had come to Tysfjord to film the local killer whale population as either vessel driver, local expert and once or twice as the subject being a prat for the cameras.

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Its a kittiwake on his head.

I’ve spent 6 months in the Canary islands off the north African coast as a research assistant on a boat studying Short-finned Pilot whales, basic ID work and collecting data on the effects of whale watching boats on the local Pilot whale population.

Prior to that, I studied in Scotland for 5-6 years at University as a mature student. I studying biology, but dropped out before my final year after a few field trips led me to the realization that the field researchers had most of the fun and aimed myself in that direction.

For the ten years before that, I worked as a marine mammal trainer (with dolphins, seals, sea lions, sea elephants, killer whales etc.) for around ten years in various marine parks and establishments throughout Europe.

I’ve also worked as a barman, driven a delivery truck, worked on a farm, trained Macaws, penguins and a herring gull (strange but true) as well as working in a commercial slaughterhouse for 6 months or so.

Other experience includes using pax arms (modified DNA sampling rifles used to take a plug of blubber from marine mammals) maintaining and operating high frequency sonar equipment, conning various sea vessels of various sizes, and trying to fix various bits of equipment in the field when it goes up the creek without a paddle.

I speak three languages fluently and get by in two others and I can stutter around in French.

Hobbies include hassling and being hassled by airport security/airline check-in folk whilst traveling with 25 kg or more of assorted photographic equipment and having a once fortnightly malt whisky tasting session in the best stocked Malt whisky bar in the world in Schoneberg. The bar has over 700 different malts so my journalist friends and I foresee a number of years further research before we can give a final opinion on which is best.

Best regards from sunny 28C Berlin.
George

PS. Have you seen this, Greenpeace taking a pasting again:

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Home/29C5599A-FCD8-4E30-9AD5-5497999ABA1B.html

and this:
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Home/ABC6DFDA-9DE9-4EA8-A269-65EAAB628676.html.“

Thanks George for sharing this information about yourself with us … and for the great images!

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As a reader and/or commentator at this blog you may like to tell us something about yourself. Contributions encouraged please email to jennifermarohasy@jennifermarohasy.com. I’ve just also received some great photographs and information from Walter Starck which I will upload soon with a link to his paper from the recent AEF conference.

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More wildlife photographs at Whalephoto.com.