Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

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Ecology is Not a Branch of Biology: Davey

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“Human Ecology is the study of interactions between human society and nature. Despite a rocky start in the 1920s, when it got muddled up with some dodgy sociology, it now enjoys a common syllabus at a network of universities in Europe, Scandinavia and USA.

Even Australia has, at last, come on board, with the Australian National University offering a course in Human Ecology.

Trying to ‘save nature’ by ignoring human needs is plain silly, and won’t work. Humans are at the core of the problem, and are also the solution.

Despite pretentious claims by some biologists, hoping to be eco-gurus, ecology is not a branch of biology. Biology is a root discipline of ecology, together with meteorology, climatology, chemistry, mathematics, sociology, politics, law, psychology, history etc.

How about calling those who want to find real solutions, involving both nature and society, Human Ecologists? I think H.G. Wells made that suggestion many years ago.

I would vote for a political party which made Human Ecology a main plank in its policy.“

This comment was made by a regular commentator at this blog who uses the pen name ‘Davey Gam Esq’. I think it is correct to note that he is an ecologist from WA? The comment was originally made at the long thread following my recent blog post titled ‘Join the Revolution’ which is about the first Australian Environment Foundation Conference in Brisbane on 23rd September.

Saving Tigers from Bushmeat

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According to Mike Archer, Dean of Science at the University of NSW, if we are to save the Australian environment we must “think ourselves into the country” and change our ideas about farming, urbanisation and conservation. Professor Archer believes in giving wildlife a commercial value and has written that:

“We must learn how to raise gum trees alongside sheep, graze kangaroos amid our cattle, grow finger licken’ bustard as well as chicken, and plant mallee trees alongside our wheat.”

So is it OK to farm tigers in China?

There was an article advocating the application of these “free-market principles” for the survival of endangered species in the New York Times earlier this week titled ‘Sell the Tiger to Save it’. The author, Barun Mitra, wrote:

“China joined the international effort to protect the tiger in 1993. But today there is a growing recognition among many Chinese officials that a policy of prohibition and trade restrictions has not benefited the tiger as much as it has helped poachers and smugglers of tigers and tiger parts.

Conservationists say the worldwide illegal trade in forest products and wildlife is between $10 billion and $12 billion, with more than half of that coming from Asia.

…But like forests, animals are renewable resources. If you think of tigers as products, it becomes clear that demand provides opportunity, rather than posing a threat. For instance, there are perhaps 1.5 billion head of cattle and buffalo and 2 billion goats and sheep in the world today. These are among the most exploited of animals, yet they are not in danger of dying out; there is incentive, in these instances, for humans to conserve.

So it can be for the tiger. In pragmatic terms, this is an extremely valuable animal. Given the growing popularity of traditional Chinese medicines, which make use of everything from tiger claws (to treat insomnia) to tiger fat (leprosy and rheumatism), and the prices this kind of harvesting can bring (as much as $20 for claws, and $20,000 for a skin), the tiger can in effect pay for its own survival. A single farmed specimen might fetch as much as $40,000; the retail value of all the tiger products might be three to five times that amount.”

I have an aversion to the idea of caging a wild animal and so the idea revolts me. But how do I justify my aversion? Is it cultural? Is it rational? Is it helpful?

A couple of weeks ago Libby Eyre sent me some links to article about the bushmeat trade in Africa*. Over-hunting to supply the increasing demand for this meat is apparently seriously threatening the survival of many species of forest animal including chimpanzees and gorillas. Bushmeat is even finding its way to downtown markets in New York and Paris. Libby commented:

“It is interesting to look at the bushmeat consumption in the west and compare to say the taste for whale or dog meat that some countries have. For example, in Australia we may not relish the thought of chowing down on a chow or chimp or minke (damn, doesn’t fit the alliteration), but some think it is OK to do so and perhaps even hip to eat something off the IUCN red list.

My comment here is more about how we perceive wildlife, social trends and conservation, rather than pointing a finger at any certain culture. There are the inevitable discussions about sustainability and wildlife management that spring from this too, but I was intrigued by the thought of a wealthy, well-educated Parisian woman serruptitiously purchasing a bushbuck burger because it was the next big thing that one has to have.”

If the bushmeat trade was legalized and regulated, would it really make a difference? Could it really help save chimpanzees and gorillas? Surely there is a better way!

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*The email from Libby came with these links:
http://www.wildsingapore.com/news/20060708/060705-6.htm
http://www.bushmeat.org/index.htm
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050226/bob9.asp
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/11/1111_041111_bushmeat_fishing
.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4003859.stm
http://www.seaaroundus.org/OtherWebsites/2004/AfricanBushMeattrade.pdfhttp://news.mongabay.com/2006/0706-bushmeat.html

Hocky Sticks & Ancient Pine Trees: Paul Williams

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I received the following note from Paul Williams. It is an interesting critique of the use of bristlecone pines as an indication of past temperatures. In the note, Williams explains the pines may be a better proxy for carbon dioxide (CO2) than temperature. So, Williams concludes, the famous hockey stick graph may not be a ‘temperature hockey stick’, but rather a ‘CO2 Hockey Stick’:

“The “Hockey Stick” is the famous graph showing the results of studies done by Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes.

Mann, ME; Bradley, RS; Hughes, MK: ‘Global-scale temperature patterns
and climate forcing over the past six centuries’, NATURE |VOL 392 | 23 APRIL 1998

Mann, ME; Bradley, RS; Hughes, MK:‘Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations’, Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 26, No. 6, 1999

These papers are often called MBH98/99.

The Hockey Stick depicts relatively constant temperatures from 1000AD up to 1900, (the shaft of the “hockey stick”), followed by a sharp rise in temperature, (the “blade”). This graph is used extensively to support the argument that humans are causing global warming by emitting large quantities of CO2 and other “greenhouse gasses” into the atmosphere.

Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, (MM), challenged the statistical basis of MBH98/99, claiming that the conclusion, (that the 1990s were likely to have been the warmest years in the last millennium), was not supported by the data and statistical workings described in the papers.

Subsequently, MMs claims were verified by independent statistical analysis, as detailed in the Wegman Report and summarised in a Factsheet.

One of the aspects of MBH98/99 that the Wegman Report touched on, was the use of Bristlecone pines as indicators of temperature, or “temperature proxies”.

I have no expertise or qualifications in this field, but the use of bristlecones can be understood without knowing maths and statistics, and it is one of McIntyre and McKittrick’s main objections to the hockey stick, yet it gets little discussion compared to the obscure statistical arguments.

Bristlecones are pine trees living at altitudes up to about 4,000 metres in the dry mountains of California and Utah. Some of them are very old, over 4,000 years. They live in soils that are very low in nutrients, in areas with low precipitation. They have developed a survival system known as “dieback”. When a tree is stressed due to lack of nutrients or moisture, part of the tree will die, thus lowering the requirements for the nutrients or water for the tree as a whole. The tree survives by maintaining a strip of viable bark that carries nutrients to the surviving branches and canopy. Thus a large, old tree 18 metres tall, may be sustained by a 40cm strip of bark up one side.

Because of their great age, Bristlecones tend to dominate dendrochronologies, or climate records based on tree rings, that extend back in time for long periods. So they are very important in the data that MBH98/99 used to draw their conclusions. They are also important in some of the other studies that support the Hockey Stick. As the “Hockey Team” said in their post at Real Climate, “The Missing Piece at the Wegman Hearing”, in which they show that doing the statistics differently still leads to a Hockey Stick shape,

“Why doesn’t it make any difference? It’s because the PC analysis was used to encapsulate all of the statistically relevant information in the N. American tree ring network and so whatever patterns are in there they will always influence the final reconstruction.”

But is the pattern that’s in the Bristlecones a true reflection of temperature? As Wegman mentions, it is known that Bristlecones have reacted to increased atmospheric CO2 since about 1850. This CO2 fertilisation was allowed for in MBH99, but only by using the 19th century CO2 figures, as though the increase in CO2 that happened in the 20th century had no additional effect on the Bristlecones. This may in fact be correct, as they react more to CO2 increases at lower levels than at higher, but it is a point that needs to be verified.

It’s worth noting that MBH98 was the first “multi proxy” temperature reconstruction to include Bristlecones. Several of the following studies that support the Hockey Stick also use Bristlecones. Before MBH98, Bristlecones were not considered useful for temperature reconstructions.

Thus Bristlecones react strongly to atmospheric CO2 levels. They may be a better indicator of CO2 than of temperature. So the underlying pattern is a Hockey Stick, but not a temperature Hockey Stick, instead it is a CO2 Hockey Stick. And this pattern shows up in other studies that use them.

Disclaimer:

Much of this material I gleaned from Steve McIntyre’s site, Climate Audit.org. I could find literally no discussion about Bristlecones on Mann’s site, Real Climate.org.

Additional links:

Ross McKitrick’s presentation to the Australian APEC Study Group, 2005. A non-technical summary of the main issues that McIntyre and McKitrick have raised about the Hockey Stick.
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/McKitrick-hockeystick.pdf

Climate Audit website. (Steve McIntyre)
http://www.climateaudit.org

RealClimate website. (Michael Mann and others)
http://www.realclimate.org/

Bristlecones
http://www.sonic.net/bristlecone/home.html

Tree rings
http://web.utk.edu/~grissino/default.html“

Join the Revolution

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I’ve heard environmentalism described by Walter Starck as a quasi-religious blend of new-age nature worship, junk science, left-wing political activism and anti-profit economics.

While this description may apply to some deep green activists, it’s also true to say that we are all environmentalists now.

But most Australians have little say in the environmental policies being put to government. These policies are almost exclusively the domain of a tight network of conservation groups with a particular world view.

But the Australian Environment Foundation (AEF) is different.

At the first Conference and AGM for the Australian Environment Foundation, Mike Archer will plead for, what he describes as the revolution we must have – between the ears and on the land – in our approach to sustaining environments as well as rural and regional communities in a changing world.

Now, do your bit for the environment, copy this image to your website or blog:

AEF_conf_ad_island_all_hotspot.gif

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I’m a director of the AEF.

Forget Ethanol, Let’s Make Environmentally Friendly Diesel & Petrol: Ray Wilson

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Yesterday the Prime Minister John Howard announced a $1.576 billion funding package over eight-years to promote alternative fuels. The package included rebates for converting cars to LPG and $17 million over three years for petrol stations to install new pumps or convert existing pumps to E10 blends and to encourage sales of E10. E10 is an ethanol-blended fuel.

And yesterday I received an email from Ray Wilson with the comment:

“I read a lot about the production of ethanol by agriculture. Ethanol is not a good fuel because a standard petrol engine needs to be extensively modified to use 100% ethanol as it has only half the energy density of petrol.

However, just as one can produce petrol and diesel from coal using the Fischer-Tropsch process, one can use cellulosic (Wood, leaves, grass, grains, etc) matter too to make petrol and diesel by this method. This can be done profitably and the process is well-known.

So instead of setting up plants to make ethanol why not set them up to make diesel and petrol instead?

I would do this myself, but I lack the basic access to funds to do much. However, perhaps there are farmers or other industrialists who may be able to use the information, to the benefit of our country and the environment.

I would very much like to ensure too that anyone who is intending to produce ethanol is aware that the technology already exists to make environmentally-friendly diesel and petrol before they take the step to go ahead and make ethanol. I believe they would be making a mistake.”

I responded suggesting that it was presumably uneconomic, and Ray emailed back:

“Strangely enough, the Fischer-Tropsch process used to convert cellulosic matter into diesel and petrol has not been mentioned by anyone that I know about. I hear no debate about it at all.

I think the reason for this is simply that it has not occurred to anyone yet. I would like to at least ask the people who are thinking of making ethanol whether they have considered this process. But I do not know who they are or how to contact them.

The Fischer-Tropsch process is normally used to convert coal to fuels, but it works equally well with cellulosic matter as a feedstock.

So instead of just using the sugar cane juice to make ethanol and discarding the residue, one can convert the entire plant into diesel and petrol and discard very little. Any plant material will do too.

The subsides are available for anyone who wants to proceed with this R&D and the project itself, provided one has the collateral to cover 50% of the Federal loan. I do not have this, so it is very difficult for me to do anything myself. I actually looked into this in some detail recently.

Plant oils are suitable for use as a diesel fuel, but the rest of the plant is discarded as waste. For example, oil-palm nuts are crushed to yield their oil, but the pulp is discarded. Not very efficient.”

Wilderness Society Should Acknowledge Woody Weed Problem: Doug Menzies

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Last week on Channel 9’s Sunday Program, Reece Turner from The Wilderness Society stated: “We haven’t seen any scientific evidence to show that biodiversity is being impacted negatively by these woody weeds.”

Sunday reporter Ross Coulthart then asked Turner, “Do you accept that there are woody weed areas causing major environmental damage?” Turner’s response to the question was: “No. We don’t accept there are major environmental damages being caused by woody weeds.”

Mr Doug Menzies, in a media release from NSW Regional Community Survival Group, said that The Wilderness Society needs to drop its emotive rhetoric on land clearing in western NSW and urgently review the scientific literature on how infestations of woody weeds degrade the landscape.

The media release continued:

“The Channel 9 footage showing vast tracts of land degraded by woody weeds clearly showed how little understanding Reece Turner has on this issue. Turner needs to get off his bum and make the effort to review the scientific literature that details the negative environmental impacts of woody weeds,” Mr Menzies said.

Below are just some of the published scientific journals and reports that confirm the destructive impact of infestations of woody weeds on the environment:

Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Scrub and Timber Regrowth in the Cobar-Byrock district and other areas of the Western Division, NSW. February 1969.
“The density of timber and scrub regrowth on level loamy soils, which would normally run little water, is such that the small open spaces between clumps are completely bare and becoming wind sheeted and water sheeted. This class of country thus becomes a mosaic of bare, wind and water sheeted patches on which nothing can grow, interspersed with small clumps of thick scrub.”

Alchin, B.M., Proude, C.K., and Condon, R.W. (1979). Control of Woody Weeds in Western NSW. Proceedings of the 7th Asian-Pacific Weed Science Conference.
“Regrowth of woody weeds is a major problem over millions of hectares on the rangelands of western NSW. The regrowth reduces pasture growth, increases management costs and results in soil erosion.”

Control of Woody Weeds. Woody Weeds Taskforce. Information Sheet 5. September 1990.
“Woody weeds are native shrubs which have encroached formerly open lands of western NSW. The encroachment has lowered pastoral productivity, reduced botanical and faunal diversity, reduced land values and increased the risk of water and wind erosion. Much of the area has now changed and is dominated by a dense understorey of shrubs. It has been estimated that 20 million hectares of western NSW are either already encroached or highly susceptible to woody weed encroachment.”

Booth, C.A., King, G.W., and Sanchez-Bayo, F. (1996). Establishment of woody weeds in western NSW. 1. Seedling emergence and phenology. Rangeland Journal. Vol. 18, Issue 1. pp 58-79.
“While the semi-arid range lands of Australia have historically been regarded as amongst the nation’s greatest assets, millions of hectares have unfortunately deteriorated considerably due to the spread of unpalatable native shrubs on open grazing lands. As a consequence of the reduced feed available on infested land, livestock and native animals graze more heavily on unaffected areas, which in turn become more susceptible to erosion and to further invasion by shrubs.”

Daly, R.L., and Hodgkinson, K.C. (1996). Relationships between grass, shrub and tree cover on four landforms of semi-arid eastern Australia, and prospects for change by burning. Rangeland Journal. Vol. 18, Issue 1. pp 104-117.
“The range of grass, shrub and tree levels present in the Louth region of western NSW was determined in an area where woody weeds are considered to be rampant, and the prospects for change by burning were evaluated. The survey confirmed the perception of pastoralists, administrators and scientists that shrub cover is unacceptably high for pastoralism throughout much of the region. Additionally, the perennial grass cover was very low and this would increase the instability of forage supply to pastoral herbivores.”

CSIRO. Media Release – “No Half Measures to Deal with Woody Weeds.” May 15, 1998.
“Woody weeds have been a problem for more than a century. Since the first two decades of pastoral settlement, there has been a vast area affected by increasing density of the shrubs, largely as a result of declining fire frequency. Some 35 million hectares or 25 per cent of NSW is affected.” Dr Jim Noble, CSIRO Wildlife and Ecology.

Blueprint for a Living Continent. A Way Forward from The Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists (Nov 2002).
“Clear distinction needs to be made between the need to stop broadscale clearing of remnant native vegetation and the need to control shrub invasion in the semi-arid and arid pastoral areas of Australia. This part of Australia has been managed by indigenous Australians for 45,000 years, using fire. Since European settlement these fire management practices have changed which is causing environmental damage in some areas.”

Landholders in western NSW and Queensland may have felt some relief last Sunday with well known journalist Ross Coulthart acknowledging the very real problem of invasive woody weeds. But it appears the Wilderness Society is now going to ignore the event and the issues it raised. There has been no official response from the organisation; no media release attempting to justify their position. I guess this strategy makes it difficult for landholders to get any traction on the issue in the mainstream media? How do you have a debate when one side won’t debate?