Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

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Hottest Town: Hottest Year: 1924

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“I haven’t heard any claims beating this in this supposed summer of all summers”, was the message in an email from a reader of this blog and this link that includes:

“There are a small number of towns in Australia whose names have such a potency and such a power of association that they automatically conjure up images. The name ‘Marble Bar’ is synonymous with mining, isolation and, most importantly, heat.

It is known as ‘the hottest town in Australia’ a fact which is still recorded by the Guinness Book of Records. For 161 consecutive days to 20 April 1924 the temperature in the town never dropped below 100F (37.8C). This record still stands after nearly seventy years.

And they wouldn’t have had airconditioning back in 1924.

As the newcomer to hell said to the devil “Don’t try scaring me with hellfire – I’m from Marble Bar”.

On Putting Out Bushfires

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“Part of bushfire fighting culture is that you control lightning strikes by 10 o’clock the next morning or you are in trouble. We have done that over the years and we have done it successfully. We had not lost them before. But nobody seemed to want to put these out. I do not know why. I keep asking myself why, in the middle of January, in the middle of a drought and with the highest fuel loads ever, nobody seemed to want to put those fires out. It is just sickening.”

Val Jeffrey was referring to the January 2003 fires that went on to burn 3 million hectares of south eastern Australia including much of Kosciousko National Park.

According to two new blog posts at HenryThornton.com,

“This summers’ fire season is not yet over but we hope not to see a major fire in the [Victorian] Otways.

The Victorian Government must urgently learn the lessons from 2003 that have not been learnt in the Grampians and Brisbane Ranges, and must apply improved practices to the management of the Otways and other parks in Victoria.”

Read more,

http://www.henrythornton.com/article.asp?article_id=3893
and

http://www.henrythornton.com/article.asp?article_id=3892.

SA Premier Pledges 60% Cut in Emissions

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South Australian Premier Mike Rann might be listening to the once-banned Solar Shop advertisements in which Tim Flannery says climate change is the greatest threat facing humanity.

According to ABC Online, just today he has pledged a whopping 60 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions if his government is re-elected on March 18.

He will even introduce new laws to make sure the target is achieved by 2050.

The policy was apparently announced at a wind farm this morning and includes $250,000 to set up a climate change research centre at the University of Adelaide and the installation of mini wind turbines on government buildings in the city.

So 2050 is how many elections away? How old will Mike Rann be in 2050?

(Sorry Joe, but one for Ender.)

How Green was My Subsidy?

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The European Union spends about A$5.6 billion a year on schemes aimed at encouraging less-intensive farming in order to increase biodiversity, improve water quality etcetera on farm. But it has delivered very little tangible environmental benefit according to a recent news feature in Nature by John Whitfield titled ‘How green was my subsidy’.

One of the problems according to the feature article is that “most of Europe’s agi-environmental schemes have very vague goals.”

And sometimes research results indicate that wildlife is not adverse to a bit of farming. For example, one of the first scientific audits of an agri-environment scheme, showed that in Holland a project intended to help ground-nesting meadow birds by delaying the mowing of fields was having no effect – in this region some birds actually seemed to prefer intensively farmed fields.

David Kleijn, an ecologist from Wageningen University in Holland, has spearheaded the research effort to document the benefits in a rigorous way.

This work has concluded that:

“Plants showed the most widespread benefits, with higher diversity on scheme fields in
every country except the Netherlands. Bees benefited in Germany and Switzerland, grasshoppers and crickets in Britain, and spiders in Spain. In cases where the biodiversity went up, nearly all the beneficiaries were common species; only one scheme – a Spanish programme aimed at making arable fields bird-friendly by leaving winter stubble – showed a positive effect on endangered species, one of which was the thekla lark (Galerida theklae).”

The Nature news feature article really emphasis the extent to which Europeans like to mix their nature and farming with the conclusion:

“Such schemes may not be the best way to promote the preservation of endangered species. … Europe might do better to allow some areas to revert to a state close to wilderness while others are intensively farmed, and then to manage the whole system so as to maximize leisure, flood protection, and water quality.

… biodiversity benefits would accrue even if not particularly targeted. But Europeans like farmland landscapes, and will probably continue to try and convince themselves that there are practical ways to keep areas that are rich in wildlife and pleasing to the eye, which also produce cheap food and don

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?

Ian Mott on Jared Diamond & Old Growth

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Following my recent post titled ‘More Tall Tales from Jared Diamond’ there was comment that it would be useful to know the area of old growth forest remaining in Australia. I put the challenge to Ian Mott and here is his guest post:

“Professor Jared Diamond has an elliptical orbit of the truth that includes regular intersection with comet Aunty (ABC), usually when both are at their apogee. And Diamond’s appearance on Robyn Williams program, In Conversation, 23/02/06, is no exception.

He said, “Australia is the first-world country that has the smallest fraction of its land area covered by old-growth forest.” And he went on to state that Japan has a much larger percentage of its land mass as old growth forest.

Apparently this sort of pronunciamento is regarded as information to the ever decreasing proportion of ABC listeners, eager for any skerrick that will reinforce their national self loathing or entrench the party line of, humanity as original sin.

So how far from planet Veracity is this guy? I will first examine the statistics for Japan and then Australia.

Japan

A quick Google search revealed that popular Japanese magazine KATEIGAHO, in a feature on forests, reported that only 1 percent of the Japanese forest estate is virgin, what we would call old-growth.

But the best site for comparing both Japanese and Australian forests is the World Forestry Centre which tells us that:

“Japan is very heavily forested at 70 percent [67.5 pc actually] of its total land area, or 25 million hectares of its 37 m ha total. This 25 m ha can be broken down into 23 m ha of closed forest area, with 10 m ha of planted forests and 14 m ha of natural forests. Japan has one of the highest percentages of forest cover of the developed countries. However, because of the very high population density in this small country, the forest area per capita is only about 0.2 hectares, which is one quarter of the world figure.

About 40 pc of Japan’s forest area, more than 10 million hectares, consists of plantations. These man-made forests consist mostly of softwood species like Sugi (Japanese cedar) or Hinoki (Japanese cypress), and were planted during the 1950’s and 1960s.”

In summary, only 1 pc of this 25 million hectares is what we would call ‘old growth’, that is, only 250,000ha or 0.67 of 1 pc of total land area.

So even after the blatantly cheap shot of comparing a wide desert country with a thin mountainous maritime one, the real ‘old growth’ figure has come hurtling back through the asteroid belt.

The 14 million hectares of “natural forests” are what we would call “native regrowth forests” that have been continually harvested for timber production for centuries, in a cycle of harvest and regeneration. And that 1 pc of old growth works out at 20 square metres of old growth for each Japanese citizen.

Of the original 37 million hectares of Japan that was once covered in forest, a total of 23 million hectares (62pc) was cleared for agriculture etcetera while 98 pc of the remaining 14 million hectares was regularly harvested for timber over many centuries. But since the 1950’s another 10 million hectares (27pc) has been replanted, most probably to recover from excessive harvesting during and after the war years when all of Tokyo and other cities were rebuilt after allied firebombing.

Australia

It is a nonsense to compare Australian desert with Japanese forest. The only effective means of comparison is to compare what each country has done with those natural resource elements that they have in common. So we need to assess what we have done with our stock of similar forest.

The World Forestry Centre site, mentioned above, tells us that Australia’s total land area is 768 million hectares and that forests cover 20 percent of the landmass including woodlands*:

“There are about 43.7 million hectares of native forest in Australia, and four main land tenures relating to these forests. This is 5.7pc of the total area and 57pc of the original forested area. There is another 119 million hectares of woodland.”

The National Association of Forest Industries (NAFI), gives more accurate figures showing that 5.7pc of the country is forest, of a type comparable to those of Japan, while 15.5pc are woodlands.

So for all the hand wringing about Australia’s supposed land clearing Armageddon, it is a fact that only 10pc (77 million hectares) of the country actually had forest on it to begin with and only 43pc of this (4.3pc of total area) has been cleared.

But to determine how much of this forest is “old growth” we need to go back to the Resource Assessment Commission’s 1990 data sets**.

These used slightly different categories but still posted a total forest area of 43.185 million hectares of native forest of which 17.4 million hectares (40.3pc) had never been logged.

This needs to be adjusted slightly as the Japanese ‘old growth’ figure is expressed as a percentage of total forest, including plantations. So the 17.4 million hectares of old growth amounts to 38.3pc of the combined total Australian forest area of 45.4 million hectares.

In Summary

Japan started with 37 million hectares of forest but cleared this back to 38pc before returning another 27pc for native species plantations to produce a current forest area of 67pc of the original. Only 1pc of total forest area is considered “old growth” and all of the remainder is available for on-going timber production in perpetuity.

Australia started with 77 million hectares of forest but has cleared this back to a point below 57pc before returning an undetermined but significant portion of regrowth, and 2pc as plantations to produce a current forested area of 59pc of the original. More than 38pc of total forest area could be described as ‘old growth’ which is not available for timber production, being in either National Park or reserved portions of State Forests. And even when our vast area of desert and grassland is considered, the 17.4 million hectares of ‘old growth’ forest still amounts to 2.2pc of our total area compared to 1pc for Japan.

When considering native forest alone, Japan has retained 38pc of its original area while Australia has retained 57pc of its original forested are. The addition of the 119 million hectares of Australian woodland to this analysis would produce an even higher retention figure for Australia.

Professor Jared Diamond’s statement that, “Australia is the first-world country that has the smallest fraction of its land area covered by old-growth forest”, and his comparisons between Japanese and Australian forests amount to a very serious misrepresentation of the facts by a person who has held himself out to the Australian public as an expert in these matters. And media entities that have reported Mr Diamond’s misrepresentations have duty to publish equally weighted corrections.

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* Woodlands are defined as forests where crown cover as viewed from above is between 20 and 50pc. Typically such forests are 10 to 20 metres in height though they may reach 30 metres. Some are managed commercially for timber production, but the primary land use for most is grazing.

** A Survey of Australia’s Forest Resource, March 1992, Resource Assessment Commission, AGPS, ISBN 0 644 24486 0 (hard copy only)”

Thanks Ian.