Jennifer Marohasy

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Norway to Kill More Whales

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It’s official, Norway is planning to kill many more minke whales this season. The 2006 minke whale quote for Norway was officially set last December, the season started on the 1st April. The quota is much higher than for previous years. Here are some of the reasons as reported in the Orberlin Times:

“Norway‘s Foreign Ministry rejected the protest, saying the minke whales Norway harpoons for food in the North Atlantic are plentiful and well able to withstand the planned catch of 1,052 of the giant marine mammals in 2006…

“We are following procedures to ensure that whaling is within safe quotas,” he said, adding that Norway‘s catches were based upon guidelines laid down by the scientific committee of the IWC.

The 2006 hunt represents about one percent of a stock Norway estimates at 107,000 minke whales in its hunting areas in the North Atlantic. Minkes are relatively plentiful, unlike endangered blue whales.

Norway, in a move hailed by whalers but blasted by environmentalists, is also expanding hunts into international waters in the North Atlantic from its own zone for the first time since the 1980s.

It has long said whale stocks have grown uncontrollably since the 1986 moratorium and says the whales, which eat fish such as cod, are partly to blame for falling fish stocks.”

Peter Corkeron made the following comments about the Norwegian minke whale quote in a blog post at this site on 25th January:

“Minke quotas have trended upwards over time – the 2006 quota is 1052 animals. Some of this has come from carrying over untaken quotas from previous years – not a part of the Revised Management Plan/Revised Management Scheme as far as I’m aware. Some has come from changing the “tuning level” – a multiplier built into the CLA/RMP to allow for uncertainty, and changing circumstances. Other problems with quota setting include that predominantly female minkes are taken, and (as I understand it) the CLA assumes a balanced sex ratio in a hunt.

On the science side, one main data requirement is an estimate of abundance with associated estimate of error. The point estimates for northern minke abundance from Norwegian surveys increased, as you note. But the two survey series weren’t directly comparable as they covered somewhat different areas. The most recent survey series was not synoptic – the survey area was divided into 5, with one area surveyed in each of five years. These surveys are logistically difficult to run, and synoptic surveys are really hard to organize – I think the last was in 1995.

So a strong assumption (that is, an assumption that, if it’s wrong, the analysis wrong) is that whales don’t move between survey areas between years. This remains untested.

The actual surveys are vessel-based distance sampling surveys – I’m presuming that you know what distance sampling is (and if this goes to your blog, folks will read up on it).

I’ve never taken part in one of the minke surveys, but know how they work, as I’ve taken part in others elsewhere (US waters, Antarctic). Unlike virtually all other vessel-based surveys for cetaceans, the Norwegian team don’t use binoculars. They have their reasons for this, but it reduces their effective strip width, hence their survey coverage and so the precision of their abundance estimates.

There have been technical queries in past years regarding the Norwegian surveys – double counting (i.e. accidentally recording one whale as two) is an example I recall from the 90s. These have been published as papers in the IWC journal and details can be found there. You have to read through the dry, mathematical language to get at the points being made. There are others who know far more about the machinations within the IWC than I do as I’ve only been to one IWC Scientific Committee meeting.”

While I appreciate that Peter has highlighted potential problems with the Norwegian survey method, I don’t get an appreciation for the extent to which these issues would/should change the overall minke whale quota for 2006.

Rune Frovik disputed some of Peter’s claims in a subsequent blog post, including that:

“The sex ratio is taken into account. Corkeron correctly points out that CLA assumes a balanced sex ratio in the hunt. But the CLA also has a mechanism in case of unbalanced sex ratios. So if the more than 50 percent of the harvested animals are female, this leads to lower quotas. This has been practiced for the Norwegian quota. If the sex ratio was balanced, the current quota could have been higher.”

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Following comment from Peter Corkeron this blog post was changed and significantly expanded at 12noon on 25th April 2006.

Scientific Whaling: Podcast from Dana Centre

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Members of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) voted in 1982 to ban commercial whaling beginning in the 1985-86 season. Since 1992, the IWC Scientific Committee has unsuccessfully requested that the Commission lift the moratorium and allow quotas for commercial whaling of some species.

Soon after the 1986 moratorium came into effect, Iceland and Japan began what is called ‘scientific whaling’ which is legal. Interestingly, Norway continues to hunt minke whales commercially and legally on the basis that it has lodged an objection to the ban.

The Dana Centre in London sponsored an on-line discussion on scientific whaling on April 6th which can be listened to by clicking here.

It is a long discussion, but worth the listen, particularly to hear Johan Sigurjonsson from Iceland talk about the politics and the science and how for him, there is nothing morally wrong with killing minke whales.

Isn’t the ban on commercial whaling a form of eco-imperialism with countries such as Australia, Britian and New Zealand imposing their will on Iceland and Japan?

8783 Percent of Amazon Rainforest Intact?

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Michael Duffy interviewed James Smith from the BBC, on ABC radio earlier this week, about his documentary ‘Battle for the Amazon’, which will be will be screen on SBS TV tomorrow, Sunday 23 April at 8.30pm.

Duffy remarks at his website:

“In the 1970s and 1980s, environmental campaigners sounded the alarm about deforestation in the Amazon and the impact it would have on the planet’s ecoystem and climate. We were told an area of the rainforest the size of Belgium was being destroyed every year. By now you might expect there’d be no trees left.

But the documentary … reveals that 87 percent of the rainforest remains untouched. Deforested areas have not turned to desert, but productive farm land. So, has the scale of environmental threat caused by the logging of the rainforest been overstated?”

I’ll be watching the documentary tomorrow night.

You can hear the interview by clicking here.

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Update Monday. The doucumentary referred to 83 percent, not 87 percent, of the rainforest being intact.

Another Letter to the Canadian PM: Does 90 Automatically Trump 60?

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Not so long ago I republished a letter from 60 ‘global warming skeptics’ who wrote to the new Prime Minister of Canada asking for more public consultation on climate change issues and explaining that climate change can be natural, click here to read the blog piece.

Now 90 ‘global warming believers’ have written to the PM of Canada:

An Open Letter to the Prime Minister of Canada on Climate Change Science

April 18 2006

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper, P.C., M.P.

Prime Minister of Canada

Ottawa, ON K1A 0A3

Dear Prime Minister:

As climate science leaders from the academic, public and private sectors across Canada, we wish to convey our views on the current state of knowledge of climate change and to call upon you to provide national leadership in addressing the issue. The scientific views we express are shared by the vast majority of the national and international climate science community.

We concur with the climate science assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2001, which has also been supported by the Royal Society of Canada and the national academies of science of all G-8 countries, as well as those of China, India and Brazil. We endorse the conclusions of the IPCC assessment that “There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities” and of the 2005 Arctic Climate Impact Assessment that “Arctic temperatures have risen at almost twice the rate of those in the rest of the world over the past few decades”.

Climate variability and change is a global issue and the international IPCC process for assessment of climate science, with its rigorous scientific peer review processes, is the appropriate mechanism for assessing what is known and not known about climate science. Many Canadian climate scientists are participating in the preparation of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report which will be completed in 2007.

The following points emerge from the assessments and ongoing research by respected Canadian and international researchers:
• There is increasingly unambiguous evidence of changing climate in Canada and around the world.
• There will be increasing impacts of climate change on Canada’s natural ecosystems and on our socio-economic activities.
• Advances in climate science since the 2001 IPCC Assessment have provided more evidence supporting the need for action and development of a strategy for adaptation to projected changes.
• Canada needs a national climate change strategy with continued investments in research to track the rate and nature of changes, understand what is happening, to refine projections of changes induced by anthropogenic release of greenhouse gases and to analyse opportunities and threats presented by these changes.

We have supplied justification and more detail for each of these points in the accompanying documentation.

We urge you and your government to develop an effective national strategy to deal with the many important aspects of climate that will affect both Canada and the rest of the world in the near future. We believe that sound policy requires good scientific input.

We would be pleased to provide a scientific briefing and further support, clarification and information at any time.

Yours sincerely:

Signed by 90 Canadian climate science leaders from the academic, public and private sectors across the country.

For a list of the science leaders and also supporting background information click here.

And there is editorial comment at CNC, click here and more opinion at Canada’s National Post, click here.

West Papua Is Resource Rich: Esther Pan

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Ms. Marohasy,

I am writing from the Council on Foreign Relations, in New York. We wanted to alert you to a piece we recently published which might be of interest to your readership.

It is on the recent protests over natural resources in Papua — a topic of reasonable significance to Australians. You can find the piece at:

http://www.cfr.org/publication/10484/

Thank you for your time.

Lee Hudson Teslik
Council on Foreign Relations

Boincing to Oblivion: Warwick Hughes

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Dear Jennifer,

I hope you are going to comment on the BOINC disaster. See my post at;
http://www.warwickhughes.com/blog/?p=39#more-39
With links to where they have had to announce a major error.

Coolwire 11 in Feb 2005 with perhaps a prescient little note on the BOINC mess.
http://www.warwickhughes.com/cool/cool11.htm

All the best,
Warwick
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I have previously posted on Boincing, click here.