Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

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Steller’s Sea Cow

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There has been a fair interest at this blog in marine mammals, in particular whales. (If you are a new reader just do a search using the word ‘whale’ or ‘whaling’.)

But I actually think dugongs are more beautiful and probably more vulnerable as a species.

Dugongs are more closely related to elephants than to whales and dolphins.

Their closest living aquatic relatives are the manatees. Manatees live in rivers and also coastal waters of West Africa, the Caribbean, South America and the southern United States.

I was interested to read this morning that the also closely related Stellar’s Sea Cow was the first marine mammal recorded as becoming extinct, in recent times.

According to this website, the sea cow’s grew to 8 m long and weighed more than 6000 kg.

The last populations were found in the Bering Sea in 1741, but previous populations had occurred along the Pacific rim from Mexico to Japan.

Apparently the entire estimated population of 2000 became extinct by 1768 due to intensive hunting by seal hunters, taking them for their meat.

It got me thinking, which is the rarest species of marine mammal in the world today?

Congratulations to Dr Jim Peacock

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Congratulations to Dr Jim Peacock who was recently appointed to the postion of Chief Scientist for Australia.

I have always admired his dogged approach to GM issues. He was waving the flag in a very matter-of-fact way when it was most unfashinable to be pro-GM.

In an interview this morning with Tony Easterly on ABC radio he says he is concerned about global warming and that as a nation we should consider nuclear power.

Not a man to duck an issue, lets hope the New Chief Scientist can foster a culture where there is more open debate about these important issues – GM, nuclear power and global warming.

BOINC and save the planet!

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Everyone with a computer can help scientists better understand the universe, or just climate change, according to Phil Done. In the following guest post Phil suggests we all join the The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) community:

“Bored with that aquarium screen saver – worried about the computer being idle and generating greenhouse emissions between blog comments – or do you just want to do something that Ian Mott cannot do on the back of an envelope – BOINC and save the world!

What could make the climate change enthusiast’s heart beat faster – help solve the problem faster and make a personal contribution. That little hotspot on Greenland might be yours!

With Climateprediction.net and the BBC Climate Change Experiment you can do just that. You can contribute a small piece of the modelling puzzle.

How does it work?

The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) is a distributed computing infrastructure intended to be useful to fields beyond the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). This software platform is open in that it is free and open source software released under the GNU Lesser Public License. Currently BOINC is being developed by a team based at the University of California, Berkeley led by David Anderson, the project director of SETI@home – a project which uses this software.

It’s supercomputing on the grassroots level – millions of PCs on desktops at home helping to solve some of the world’s most computer – intensive scientific problems. And it’s an all-volunteer force of PC users, who, with very little effort, can contribute much-needed PC muscle to the scientific and academic communities. There are hundreds of millions of Internet-connected PCs, and they’re getting more powerful all the time, so volunteer computing can provide computing power and storage capacity way beyond what can be achieved with supercomputers, clusters, or grids. The volunteer computing approach works best for applications that don’t need to move a lot of data between processors, but this limitation will diminish as the Internet gets faster.

Of course if you’d prefer molecular biology and speed up GMO research, fighting human diseases, finding aliens in a celestial haystack, or sorting out gravitational waves there’s something for you too.

Of course contrarians have warned not to run BOINC software if:
* You are in an urban heat island,
* You’d rather find out what happens to the climate personally, or
* You are not familiar with the MER/PPP parameter settings.

Denialists have also suggested we don’t need a SETS project – Search for Earthbound Terrestrial Stupidity – it’s already been solved. And perhaps you’re blogging so hard that your screen saver never appears anyway.

Is BOINCing a western ideology? Are we losing out in the global BOINC? Do only greenies and left wingers BOINC or is BOINCing bipartisan? Are right wingers born to BOINC?

Also, you need broadband, and laptops are not recommended due to heat buildup. See the relevant FAQs.”

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Thanks Phil.

Al Gore, and Another Air Conditioner in the Wall

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“How can anyone living through today’s bizarre and mutable weather not be concerned about global warming?” wrote David Kirkpatrick in a recent issue of CNN Money.

Kirkpatrick then goes on to tell us that he heard the best speech from former US Vice President Al Gore about unprecedented change in the earth’s climate seriously aggravated by human activity.

I was interested to know how much of the “unprecedented change” Al Gore attributed to “human aggravation”, but instead he just listed the “evidence” that “climate is changing”.

The following points are Kirkpatrick summary of Al Gore’s evidence:

“1. Global CO2 levels are way outside what have been historical norms over several hundred thousand years.

2. All ten of the hottest years on record, globally, have occurred in the last 15 years.

3. Last summer, all-time heat records were set in both the U.S. West and East.

4. Global ocean temperatures are far outside of historical norms.

5. Even after last year’s devastating Hurricane Katrina, the subsequent Hurricane Wilma was briefly the most severe hurricane ever recorded.

6. Last year Japan hit an all-time record for typhoons –10. The previous record was 7.

7. The largest downpour ever seen occurred last summer in India.

8. Thirty-five years ago there were an average of 225 days when Alaska’s tundra was frozen enough for trucks to drive. Today there are only 75.”

The first point doesn’t actually tell us climate is changing. Points 2,3,5,6,7 and 8 read like a mumble jumble of ‘cherry picked’ anecdote – but I can see there are some interesting statistics here. Number 4 doesn’t match. And I didn’t know that global ocean temperatures were far outside of historical norms?

Not that I deny climate change – there has always been climate change and there will always be climate change. But how much is due to us?

A movie by Paramount Classics based on this sort of ‘evidence’ and Al Gore’s personal journey of discovery titled ‘The Inconvenient Truth’ is due out in May. And there will be a book out by the same name, also by Al Gore. And, according to David Kirkpatrick, Gore is working with major environment groups in the US on a new consortium with the aim of running a “campaign of public persuasion” about global warming and its consequences.

I think the message is already out there – that it is getting warmer.

But no one really believes the world is about to end. Rather several of my friends, and lots of other people, have decided (as far as I can tell based at least in part on all the news reports about global warming) that they need to install an air conditioner, because it is going to get hotter.

The new air conditioners will be coal-powered, in so much as most of the electricity for Brisbane in south eastern Queensland, Australia, comes from coal-fired power stations.

Leatherback Turtles Facing Extinction

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Marine ecologist Larry Crowder from Duke University in the US is reported at BBC News Online claiming that leatherback turtles face extinction within 30 years if there are not dramatic changes to fishing practices.

According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species there has been a 70 percent decline in the global population of female Leatherbacks in one generation.

The IUCN attributes the dramatic decline to poaching of the turtle’s eggs as well as entanglement in fishing lines.

According to Professor Crowder:

“Globally, each day, there are around four million hooks in the world’s oceans fishing for tuna and swordfish.

Turtles will eat the bait and get caught on the hooks, or simply get entangled in the lines.

Because the range of leatherbacks is so great, national legislation on long lines will not be sufficient to save the animals.

“If you tag one with a satellite tag in Monterey bay, it will shoot straight across to Indonesia,” Professor Crowder explained.

“They are the most widely distributed sea turtle. They swim from 50 degrees south to 50 degrees north. Trying to regulate their interactions with fisheries out in international waters is really difficult.”

Professor Crowder told delegates [at a conference in Denver] that there was much that could be done to minimise the impact of long line fishing, such as changing the shape of hooks.”

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I have previously written that plastic bags can kill marine turtles particularly Leatherbacks, click here.

More Tall Tales from Jared Diamond

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I would like to think that Australia’s national broadcaster would take-to-task an American who writes a best selling book that is full of factual errors that denigrate Australia. But instead our ABC just keeps giving him more time on radio to tell his tall tales.

Professor Jared Diamond got a great run on ABC radio last June when he was over here promoting his new book ‘Collapse: How societies choose to fail or survive’. Then Robyn Williams ran him again on The Science Show a few months later and for a whole hour.

I complained and was given 15 minutes on Ockham’s Razor last November.

I have reviewed his chapter on Australia and shown it to be full of factual errors, click here for the published paper and I list some of the errors at the end of this blog post.

Michael Duffy invited Professor Diamond to debate me on Duffy’s ABC radio program Counterpoint a couple of weeks ago, but the professor declined.

So the ABC gave him a wad of time last Thursday night, again on a Robyn Williams program, In Conversation. Click here for the transcript.

While the program was billed as putting the professor on the spot – it was anything but a tough interview. Indeed Diamond was given more opportunity to tell more tall tales.

These included that unless we change our ways there won’t be any tropical rainforests left in Australia in 30 years time. That’s right – read the transcript!

He also thought it relevant to make the point that “Australia is the first-world country that has the smallest fraction of its land area covered by old-growth forest.” I thought we were also the driest continent on earth after the Antarctic so how relevant is that statistic? Should we turn our coastal rivers inland so that we can grow forest were there is now desert?

He goes on to state that Japan has a much larger percentage of its land mass as old growth forest. I would guess – and perhaps a reader of this blog might do the relevant calculations – that we have a much larger total area of old growth forest than Japan?

And I can’t believe the following claim but would like more information. He said in the interview last Thursday night that:

“Farmers are bringing pressure to bear on other farmers. Again on my last visit to Australia I had a very interesting time with a farmer in South Australia who was telling me that if a farmer who either leases land, or owns land outright is not taking good care of the land for example by over-stocking it, then local farmers put pressure on that farmer to change his or her practices. And in extreme cases my farmer-friend told me, if a farmer continues to abuse his or her land then even if you own it outright your land may be confiscated.”

Can anybody tell me as a comment below, or by separate email, whether there could be any truth in this claim that freehold land can be confiscated in South Australia?

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Just a few of the errors:

In the book the professor gets the price of wood chip wrong suggesting we sell it to Japan for US$7 per ton when official statistics show it sells for A$151 per tonne.

He indicates Australian farmers produce less food on a tonnes per hectare basis than most of the rest of the world, but doesn’t specify which crops. If we consider some of our major crops including cotton and rice – well Australian farmers harvest much more than the world average on a tonnes per hectare basis.

We produce on average 7 tonnes of rice per hectare in Australia while the world average is 4 tonnes/ha and Australian rice growers use 50 percent less water for every kilo of rice produced than the world average. In Australia the average yield for cotton is 1,672 tonnes/ha, while the world average is just 638 tonnes/ha – a lot less.

One of the reasons we manage to produce so more cotton per hectare is because our cotton is all irrigated. This is a reason why we don’t produce so much wheat per hectare. We grow a lot of wheat in Australia, but it is not irrigated, so our yields are low relative to much of the rest of the world.

In the book published by Penguin, Professor Diamond claims that, “it is cheaper to grow oranges in Brazil and ship the resulting orange juice concentrate 8,000 miles to Australia than to buy orange juice produced from Australian citrus trees.” Yet official statistics show Australia exports almost three times the quantity of citrus it imports. During the 2003/04 financial year Australian producers exported navel and valencia oranges worth A$107 million.

Indeed, contrary to the impression give by the professor, Australia exports most of the food it produces with crop exports valued at A$13,269 million in 2003/04.

In ‘Collapse’ Diamond states that Australians are cutting down too many trees and as a consequence Australia’s forests will disappear long before our coal and iron reserves. Some forests have been clearfelled, some have been selectively logged, most have regrown. The area of forest is increasing, not reducing. The area of old growth forest protected nationally has increased from 1.2 million hectares to 3.8 millionh hectares since 1996. Tasmania has 43 percent of its total land are protected in reserves, including 82 percent of its rainforest.