Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

jennifer

Environmental Priorities Wrong & Reef Not at Risk: Peter Ridd

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Dr Peter Ridd from James Cook University gave a lecture in Townsville yesterday and it was reported in The Age. Not bad given that he wasn’t pushing a doom and gloom message and doesn’t believe the reef is at risk from global warming. He’s some of what The Age reported:

Risks to the Great Barrier Reef have been overstated and Australians should be more worried about population growth and noxious weeds, a physicist says.

Dr Peter Ridd from Townsvilles James Cook University (JCU) today challenged the widely held view that one of the world’s most important natural assets is in serious decline.

He said the reef, which other scientists predict could be wiped out within 30 years due to global climate change, was in “first rate condition”.

“It’s probably one of the best preserved ecosystems in the whole world,” Dr Ridd, of JCU’s Faculty of Science, Engineering and Information Technology, said.

“I think the only place that’s probably better is Antarctica, and that is because it’s a long way away from any significant population centre.”

His comments came only weeks after scientists warned of a new coral bleaching threat following the discovery of blanched corals off the central Queensland coast.

Dr Ridd said although the reef suffered extensive bleaching in 1998 and 2002, most of it was unaffected and the parts that were damaged “completely recovered”.

“I think some of it is a beat-up and I think we’ve got our priorities wrong,” he said.

“We have around the country some serious environmental issues associated with weeds and indeed with things like population and the growing of our cities.

“We’re not worried about all these other things which are potentially far more important and definitely there, whereas you can argue about the Great Barrier Reef being in jeopardy.”

Dr Ridd, who formerly worked with the Australian Institute of Marine Science – a body which has long sounded warnings about threats to the reef – said coral bleaching was an “adaptation to changing environmental temperature”.

Additionally, pollution from sediment and agricultural run-off was negligible given the reef’s size and how rapidly it was flushed by tides, he said.

In a draft policy paper for new environment group the Australian Environment Foundation (AEF), Peter Ridd outlines and discusses the various environmental issues he sees confronting Australia. The paper can be accessed from the home page of the AEF, click here.

I have listed nine reasons why Peter Ridd doesn’t consider the reef is at risk from global warming at an earlier blog post, click here.

More Intense Tropical Cyclones: Likely Impact of Global Warming

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Meterologists from around the world gathered in Cape Town, South Africa, this week.

At the World Meterological Conference a report was tabled summarizing information on the impact of global warming on cyclones including hurricanes and typhoons.*

Titled Statement on Tropic Cyclones and Climate Change, two of the nine authors are from the Australian Bureau of Meterology.

Julian Heming from the United Kingdom Met office gave the following summary in a media release:

“The main conclusion we came to was that none of these high-impact tropical cyclones could be specifically attributed to global warming. Whilst there is no conclusive evidence that climate change is affecting the frequency of tropical cyclones worldwide, there is an ongoing debate as to whether it is affecting their intensity.

The report is unusual, in so much as these type of documents associate with climate conferences are often written in such a way that they exaggerate the likely impact of global warming. This report seems to represents a middle ground and acknowledges there is no consensus on the issue of increased intensity.** It does acknowledges a potential impact from global warming and the likely nature of this impact – more severe hurricanes.

The report also includes comment that:

1. While demographic trends [more people living in more hurricane prone coastal environmentals] are the dominant cause of increasing damage by tropical cyclones, any significant trends in storm activity would compound such trends in damage.

2. Projected rises in global sea level are a cause for concern in the context of society’s vulnerability to tropical cyclones. In particular for the major cyclone disasters in history the primary cause of death has been salt-water flooding associated with storm surge.

3. A robust result in model simulations of tropical cyclones in a warmer climate is that there will be an increase in precipitation [rainfall] associated with these systems (for example, Knutson and Tuleya, 2004). The mechanism is simply that as the water vapor content of the tropical atmosphere increases, the moisture convergence for a given amount of dynamical convergence is enhanced. This should increase rainfall rates in systems (viz tropical cyclones) where moisture convergence is an important component of the water vapor budget. To date no observational evidence has been found to support this conclusion; so no quantitative estimate can be given for the anticipated rainfall increase without further research.

I interprete this last point to mean that as it gets warmer it is likely to get wetter?

The report includes the following summary of tropical cyclone activity during 2004 and 2005 and notes that a number of high-impact tropical cyclones events occurred during this period:

1. Ten fully developed tropical cyclones made landfall in Japan in 2004, causing widespread damage.

2. Southern China experienced much below-normal tropical cyclone landfalls and subsequently suffered a severe drought.

3. Four major hurricanes caused extensive damage and disruption to Florida communities in 2004.

4. In March 2004 southern Brazil suffered severe damage from a system that had hurricane characteristics, the first recorded cyclone of its type in the region.

5. Five fully developed cyclones passed through the Cook Islands in a five week period in February-March 2005.

6. The 2005 North Atlantic Hurricane Season broke several records including number of tropical cyclones, number of major hurricanes making landfall and number of category five hurricanes. In particular, the landfall of Hurricane Katrina at New Orleans and Mississippi caused unprecedented damage and more than 1300 deaths.

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*A hurricane is a cyclone in the Atlantic Basin and North Pacific east of the dateline. A typhoon is a cyclone in the Northwest Pacific west of the date line.

** This is what the report says on the issue of cyclone intensity:

“No single high impact tropical cyclone event of 2004 and 2005 can be directly attributed to global warming, though there may be an impact on the group as a whole;

– Emanuel (2005) has produced evidence for a substantial increase in the power of tropical cyclones (denoted by the integral of the cube of the maximum winds over time) during the last 50 years. This result is supported by the findings of Webster et al (2005) that there has been a substantial global increase (nearly 100%) in the proportion of the most severe tropical cyclones (category 4 and 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale), from the period from 1970 to 1995, which has been accompanied by a similar decrease in weaker systems.

– The research community is deeply divided over whether the results of these studies are due, at least in part, to problems in the tropical cyclone data base. Precisely, the historical record of tropical cyclone tracks and intensities is a byproduct of real-time operations. Thus it’s accuracy and completeness changes continuously through the record as a result of the continuous changes and improvements in data density and quality, changes in satellite remote
sensing retrieval and dissemination, and changes in training. In particular a step-function change in methodologies for determination of satellite intensity occurred with the introduction of geosynchronous satellites in the mid to late 1970’s.

– The division in the community on the Webster et al and on the Emanuel papers is not as to whether Global Warming can cause a trend in tropical cyclone intensities. Rather it is on whether such a signal can be detected in the historical data base. Also it can be difficult to isolate the forced response of the climate system in the presence of substantial decadal and multi-decadal natural variability, such as the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation.

– Whilst the existence of a large multi-decadal oscillation in Atlantic tropical cyclones is still generally accepted, some scientists believe that a trend towards more intense cyclones is emerging. This is a hotly debated area for which we can provide no definitive conclusion. It is agreed that there is no evidence for a decreasing trend in cyclone intensities.”

Update

Following comment and advice from readers of this blog I added the word ‘tropical’ to the title of this blog post.

Jennifer, 8pm. 22nd Feb.

How Many Cricket Pitches Burnt?

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Jim Hoggett milks goats at his farm west of Gloucester in northern eastern NSW, he is also a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, and he had the feature letter in last week’s The Land (16th February). It read:

Last weekend we had the routine “alleged illegal land clearing” scare in the Sydney Morning Herald, fostered by the Wilderness Society. It was alleged that the equivalent of 6 Sydney Cricket Ground pitches were being illegally cleared in NSW every hour of every day.

The greatest threat to nature in NSW is not scrub clearing in the central West. It is fire, especially fire in the National Parks.

In the few weeks prior to the SMH report an area perhaps 10 times the area of alleged illegal clearing went up in wildfires across the eastern States. And the season is not over yet. To use the much loved
Green cricket pitch analogy, that is the equivalent of 60 Sydney Cricket Grounds every hour of every day. The difference is that the fires consume the pristine, national heritage, wilderness rather than Central-Western scrub.

And this is as nothing to the 2003 fires (900 cricket grounds per hour for NSW and the ACT alone) where the jewels in the crown were burned to the ground – if that is not too mixed a metaphor.

I have not heard a peep out of the Wilderness Society about all this. Nor has anyone to my knowledge ever attempted to measure this truly massive, recurring ecological damage. Not to mention the annual risk
to the lives of firefighters. No doubt there is a lot of silent hand wringing but I hear no solutions.

And we will no doubt find that much of the alleged illegal clearing was of regrowth. The interval between the two photos in the SMH report was only 3 years. So much of the area may well have been previously cleared. Perhaps we could direct the satellite to take a survey of reafforestation in NSW. We might well find that the total area and density of NSW native vegetation has actually increased with regrowth and forest thickening. Let’s look at the stock as well as the flow.

What is the net gain/loss?

Even better, instead of spending millions of dollars on satellites to spy on its own citizens, government could divert the money to programs which would prevent the mass destruction of our fauna and flora. Then we could possible simplify the absurdly restrictive Native Vegetation Act and work on a program of serious fire mitigation in our Parks.

Incidentally, the alleged illegal clearing amounted to less than one hundredth of one per cent of the area of NSW.

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Republished with permission from Jim Hoggett.

Organic Toilet Paper: For the Intelligent Consumer

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Question: when is a tomato not a tomato? Answer: When it’s an organic tomato. Those who are into organics say it’s superior to anything you can get that has been grown using conventional production methods. They will tell you that an organic tomato tastes better, is better for you and is grown in away that causes less harm to the environment. It may be more expensive, but you get what you pay for, don’t you?

Thats accoring to an article on organics titled It’s only natural published over the weekend in the Sunday [colour] Magazine of the Sydney and Melbourne tabloid newspapers. I didn’t see the magazine, but Detribe kindly sent these snippets for the blog:

Critics, however, say it’s a rip-off. Nothing more than a load of marketing hogwash aimed at people with more money than sense, which plays on fears about the misuse of pesticides and is supported through a series of far-fetched claims. Weighing up the pros and cons can be confusing, but one thing that’s New Age crystal clear is just how popular organic products have become in recent years.

In 1990, just 372,000 ha were farmed organically in Australia. Today, the total land area given to organic production is around 10 million hectares and Australia now accounts for nearly half the world’s organic farmland. Staggering as that increase may seem, organic food production still represents less than two per cent of the total value of agricultural production in this country.

The Australian organic food industry, estimated to be worth between $250-$500 rnillion, remains a minor player in the agricultural sector But, according to the government’s Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation (RIRDC), domestic demand for organic products significantly outstrips supply, despite an estimated growth in organic production of at least 15-25 per cent per annum, every year for the past five years.

… “Our market is intelligent consumer” says Pierce Cody founder of Macro Whole foods, a new chain of organic supermarkets sprouting up in Sydney and Melbourne. The stores sell everything from organic toilet paper and toothpaste, to cleaning products and pet food. Cody believes the key to growth is treating the consumer with respect.

“I can’t see us advertising on a billboard, ‘Macro: You’ll love us’ because people don’t buy organic just because you tell them to. It’s a choice they arrive at themselves” he says.

Cody’s background is in advertising, he confesses he only got, into organics because he could see there was “monstrous scope for growth”. “It’s the thing,” he says. “The concept is very simple to understand. It’s clean, original food, made the way it used to be made. We are taking food back to the future.”

Cody admits that “our market tends to be more white collar than blue collar”, but he, denies the higher cost associated with organics makes it elitist.

“It is more expensive, yes, but it’s the real cost of food prior to industrialised farming, which cuts comers.”

[But]… by not using artificial fertilizers -like nitrogen, organic farmers have smaller yields – typically around 30 to 50 percent less than crops grown on conventional farms. This is the main reason why organic products are more expensive.

…In 1994; Trina Karstrom took over the Botobolar vineyard in scenic Mudgee, NSW. The 22 ha vineyard was the first organic one to be planted in Australia. That was in 1971 and the vines have always been grown without the use of pesticides, herbicides or chemical fertilizers. She is in no doubt about the health benefits of organically grown produce.

“I shudder to think what residual spray is in [conventional] wines,” she says, “Grapes don’t get washed before they’re processed and the chemicals growers are allowed to spray are quite scary.” Or are they?

Not according to Microbiologist Dr David Tribe, Senior lecturer at the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Melbourne. “The organic lot make all these claims about better nutrition and health benefits but, overall, the hard evidence simply doesn’t support it” he says.

A review of more than 100 studies that looked at differences between organic and conventional food, conducted in 2002 at New Zealand’s University of Otago found there was “no convincing evidence to back claims that organically grown foods were healthier or tastier than those grown using chemicals”. The review found that nutritional value had more to do with freshness and methods of storage than whether artificial inputs, such as pesticides, were used during production.

Strictly speaking; professional bodies outside the organic movement, such as the Dietitians Association of Australia (DAA) and the Australian Medical Association (AMA), do not share the view that organic food is necessarily healthier than food grown conventionally.

Sunday Magazine (News Ltd Herald/Sun), page 23.
February 19 2006 Craig Scutt

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Thanks Detribe.

Lift Ban on GM Food Crops: Peter Corish

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The federal government’s Agriculture and Food Reference Group handed down its report last week titled ‘Creating Our Future: Agriculture and food policy for the next generation’ (4,700 kbs). It is very long, over 200 pages, and covers a range of issues including GM food crops. I haven’t had a proper read yet, but received the following note from Roger Kalla:

Jennifer,

You might be interested to know that the Agriculture and Food Policy Reference Group (that called for submissions to its review of Agriculture and Food policy in August) has delivered its report to the Minister for Agriculture.

It was reported in Friday’s The Age under the heading ‘Call for ban to GM crops to end’.

I had a conversation with the Gene Technology Regulator, Sue Meek, about it on Wednesday at the launch of the Victorian Agribiosciences Centre.

Sue was very encouraged by the findings of the review led by the leader of the National Farmers Federation, Peter Corish, which put the emphasis on the lifting of the GM crop moratoria so that the Australian farmers could catch up with the rest of the world.

By the way, during the launch Minister Brumby was unashamedly spruiking for a new comapny Gramina PL which has developed GM grass with new health and animal production traits. The GM rye grass is hypoallergenic and has got a superior herbage quality.

No sneeze (humans) and sweeter taste (cows) are the real benefits of these GM grasses.

The problem is that they can’t be grown in Australia and have had to be field evaluated in the US!

Regards,

Roger

The National Farmers Federation has so far been silent on GM issues. It is great to see Peter Corish calling for a lifting of the bans and to see The Age reporting this.

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You can read my submission to the Reference Group by clicking here.

Greenland Melting Faster Than, When it was Cooling?

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I reckon it is nearly impossible to keep up with the climate change literature particularly the latest climate change scare story. Working out whether a particular piece of information is invented, real, real but exaggerated, etcetera, certainly takes effort.

Brisbane’s newspaper, The Courier-Mail, has a story on page 19 of this weekend’s edition titled ‘Greenland ice sheets double melt rate’.

It begins:

“Global warming is melting Greenland’s glaciers much faster than previously believed, raising fears that sea levels will rise rapidly during the next century”

This is how it works according to a latest issue of Science magazine:

“The Greenland Ice Sheet gains mass through snowfall and loses it by surface melting and runoff to the sea, together with the production of icebergs and melting at the base of its floating ice tongues. The difference between these gains and losses is the mass balance; a negative balance contributes to global sea-level rise and vice versa. About half of the discharge from the ice sheet is through 12 fast-flowing outlet glaciers, most no more than 10 to 20 km across at their seaward margin, and each fed from a large interior basin of about 50,000 to 100,000 km2. As a result, the mass balance of the ice sheet depends quite sensitively on the behavior of these outlet glaciers.

Two changes to these glaciers have been observed recently. First, the floating tongues or ice shelves of several outlet glaciers, each several hundred meters thick and extending up to tens of kilometers beyond the grounded glaciers, have broken up in the past few years. Second, measurements of ice velocity made with satellite radar interferometric methods have demonstrated that flow rates of these glaciers have approximately doubled over the past 5 years or so.”

This article in Science (Vol. 31, pg 963-964) goes on to explain that 2002 and 2005 are records for “melt extent over the 27 years of observation” – which I assume refers to the last 27 years.

Contrast this information with an article titled “Recent cooling in coastal southern greenland and relation with the north atlantic oscillation” published in 2003 by Edward Hanna and John Cappelen (Geophysical research letters, VoL. 30, NO. 3, 1132).

This research paper which covers the period up until 2002 (the year there was record melting according to the new article in Science magazine)states:

“Analysis of new data for eight stations in coastal southern Greenland, 1958-2001, shows a significant cooling (trend-line change -1.29C for the 44 years), as do sea-surface temperatures in the adjacent part of the Labrador Sea, in contrast to global warming (+0.53C over the same period). The land and sea temperature series follow similar patterns and are strongly correlated but with no obvious lead/lag either way. This cooling is significantly inversely correlated with an increased phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) over the past few decades (r = -0.76), and will probably have significantly affected the mass balance of the Greenland Ice Sheet.

This 2003 paper only refers to coastal southern Greenland, while the new Science paper refers to “several large glaciers” and the last 5 years or so.

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Thanks to Phil Done for alerting me to the new paper in Science and Benny Peiser for the link to 2003 paper.