In Singapore, unlike Australia, the government freely admit that the barrages have dammed the estuary to create a freshwater reservoir. Such refreshing honesty.

Singapore is a tiny country with not much freshwater [2]. An official website explains [3]:

“Built across the mouth of the Marina Channel, the Marina Barrage creates Singapore’s 15th reservoir, and the first in the heart of the city. With a catchment area of 10,000 hectares, or one-sixth the size of Singapore, the Marina catchment is the island’s largest and most urbanised catchment. Together with two other new reservoirs, the Marina Reservoir increased Singapore’s water catchment from half to two-thirds of the country’s land area in 2011.”

“As the water in the Marina Basin is unaffected by the tides, its water level will be kept constant all year round. This is ideal for all kinds of recreational activities such as boating, windsurfing, kayaking and dragonboating…”

And this blog post is to reintroduce you to the revamped Myth and the Murray website that includes more information about the River Murray barrages … www.mythandthemurray.org

***

Links

1. For an overview of Australian politics as it relates to the River Murray barrages http://jennifermarohasy.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Murray-Estuary_Sydney-Institute-Paper-2.pdf

2. According to statistics from the World Resources Institute, Australia is water rich with 50,913 litres per capita per day, while in a truly water scarce country like Singapore there are only 471 litres of available water per capita per day.

3. Marina barrage/reservoir
http://www.pub.gov.sg/Marina/Pages/3-in-1-benefits.aspx#fc

Photograph taken a few days while I was in Singapore.

Please visit Myth and the Murray.

Indeed the claim that there has been a 50 per cent decline in coral cover at the Great Barrier Reef appears to be largely an artifice of the survey method. In particular, coral reefs most severely affected by bleaching in 1998, and reefs disproportionally affected by crown-of-thorn starfish outbreaks, and also reefs with insufficient time to recover from cyclones in 2009 and 2011 were targeted for repeated sampling, while more representative reefs with healthy corals were ignored.

In part 1 of this series, I reported that the World Heritage Centre will demand action by the Australian Government to spend vast sums of taxpayers’ funds to address this manufactured issue, or have the Great Barrier Reef placed on its World Heritage in Danger List. This demand is a recommendation of the United Nation’s International Union for the Conservation of Nature, UNESCO, in its State of Conservation report prepared for the June meeting of the UNESCO committee [2], which in turn is based upon a report of the environmental lobby groups WWF and the Australian Marine Conservation Society, whose report [3] in turn relies on the claims of a peer reviewed study by Glenn De’ath and co-workers [4].

The paper by De’ath and co-workers published in the US Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2012 [5] does indeed claim a 50 per cent decline in coral cover based on 27 years of data from the Australian Institute of Marine Sciences (AIMS) Long-Term Monitoring Program.

The scientists suggests 48 per cent of the decline can be attributable to cyclones, 42 per cent to crown-of-thorn predation and 10 per cent to coral bleaching. But remarkably, and at odds with the broad claims in De’ath et al. 2012, there has arguably been no increase in the incidence of cyclones over the same period [5], no evidence for deterioration in water quality at the Great Barrier Reef [6], and no general increase in the incidence of coral bleaching . So, it would seem remarkable that coral cover has declined so dramatically and purportedly from these sources.

De’ath draw their conclusions from modelling based on a study of just 214 reefs chosen from a total of approximately 3,000 reefs. So they sampled approximately 7 per cent of reefs. They do not explain in the paper how the 7 per cent of reefs were chosen, for example, they do not explain whether they randomly choose the reefs that would be studies as one draws numbers in a lottery, or whether particular reefs were selected. They also don’t explain if they continued to sample the same number of reefs over the 27-year period of the survey, or, for example, whether they reduced the number of reefs sampled over this 27-year period, and, for example, only went back to reefs that showed dramatic decline in coral cover.

Of course while scientists claim to be trustworthy, there is reason to be sceptical. As Aynsley Kellow, Professor and Head of the School of Government at the University of Tasmania, explains in his book ‘Science and Public Policy: The Virtuous Corruption of Virtual Environmental Science’ much of modern environmental science has been corrupted by noble causes. These same causes have brought tremendous prestige and wealth to many scientists.

Remarkably many problems with the AIMS long-term monitoring program, the exact same program relied upon by De’ath and co-workers to conclude half of the Great Barrier Reef has been lost, are detailed in a paper published just one year before by Hugh Sweatman and co-workers [1]. Sweatman and De’ath are colleagues at AIMS and incredibaly Sweatman is one of the authors of the 2012 De’ath paper.

In the 2011 paper Dr Sweatman writes with respect to sampling in the central section of the Great Barrier Reef:

“In the early years of the programme, up to 32 reefs spread across the Swains sector were surveyed annually, but only seven reefs in the south of the Swains sector were surveyed regularly 1993–2004. Five of these seven reefs had large and persistent outbreaks of A. planci for most of the survey period, a high incidence of outbreaks that was not representative of reefs across the sector”.

Sweatman et al. 2011 go on to explain that the overall decline, often reported in coral cover for the Great Barrier Reef, is mainly used to due to large losses of coral in six of 29 subregions. This loss is attributed to coral bleaching in 1998 and outbreaks of crown-of-thorns starfish. Otherwise, Sweatman explains that living coral cover increased in one subregion (3%) and 22 subregions (76%) showed no substantial change.

Furthermore, coral reefs in the great majority of subregions showed cycles of decline and recovery over the survey period, but with little synchrony among subregions and no long term decline.

Sweatman and co-workers conclude that much of the apparent long-term decrease in coral cover reported in the scientific literature results from combining data from selective, sparse, small-scale studies before 1986 with data from both small-scale studies and large-scale monitoring surveys after that date.

In other words Sweatman et al. (2011) detail problems with the methodology used by all studies that rely on the AIMS monitoring data. Yet these issues, central to the credibility of the claim that there has been a 50 per cent decline in coral cover, are ignored in De’ath et al. 2012.

******

This is part two of a new series on the Great Barrier Reef and claims that 50 per cent of it have been lost. Read part 1 here: http://jennifermarohasy.com/2013/05/the-great-barrier-reef-have-we-really-lost-half-of-it-part-1-water-quality/

Links/References

1. Sweatman, H., S. Delean, C. Syms. 2011. Assessing loss of coral cover on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef over two decades, with implications for longer-term trends. Coral Reefs. 30: 521-531

2. IUCN, 2013, State of State of conservation of World Heritage properties WHC-13/37.COM/7B, accessed at http://whc.unesco.org/archive/2013/whc13-37com-7B-en.pdf

3. WWF AMCS, 2013, Report to the UNESCO WHC accessed at http://awsassets.wwf.org.au/downloads/mo030_fight_for_the_reef_report_to_the_unesco_world_heritage_committee_1feb13.pdf

4. De’ath, G., K. E. Fabricius, H. Sweatman, and M. Puotinen. 2012. The 27–year decline of coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef and its causes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 109(44): 17995-17999.

5. Data from the Bureau of Meteorology shows no increase in the number or severity of cyclones impacting Australia or the Great Barrier Reef. Click on the image for a better view…

This is contrary to a claim in the De’ath et al. 2012 paper that “cyclone intensities are increasing with warming ocean temperatures”.

6. While it is generally assumed, and inferred, that water quality at the Great Barrier Reef is deteriorating, these claims are not supported by the hard data as detailed in part 1 of this series… http://jennifermarohasy.com/2013/05/the-great-barrier-reef-have-we-really-lost-half-of-it-part-1-water-quality/

For example, chlorophyll monitoring on the Great Barrier Reef shows:
“Results to date show that compared with coastal regions in other parts of the world, chlorophyll a concentrations in the GBR lagoon are generally low. Chlorophyll a concentrations vary across the shelf seasonally and also with latitude. There are also persistent local gradients in chlorophyll a concentration, usually away from the coast. Consistent long-term trends in chlorophyll a concentrations haven’t yet been discerned.”. Download this text from AIMs website on April 4, 2013
http://www.aims.gov.au/docs/data-centre/chlorophyllmonitoring.html

Furthermore the De’ath et al. 2012 study states: “The disturbance data for COTS and cyclones show periodic and random fluctuations but no systematic long-term variation over the 27 year observation period.”

No wonder the average person is concerned about the environment! Such casual reporting that we have already lost a full half of the Great Barrier Reef!

Photograph by Walter Starck

This publicity is all part of a campaign to stop the development of new port facilities along the Queensland coastline. But rather than just come out and say they don’t want more development– that in fact they despise industry– the activist scientists dress it up as the end of the Great Barrier Reef as we know it.

I have written extensively about the water quality scare campaigns of the late 1990s and early 2000s [1,2,3]. They weren’t about new port developments, but they did prostitute science just like this new campaign.

It is still my contention that while agriculture is having a measurable impact in Great Barrier Reef catchments i.e. in river and streams that flow into the GBR, there is no measurable negative water quality impacts on the Great Barrier Reef proper [1,2,3].

This is a highly contentious claim. But it’s supported by the data [4]. Indeed the Australian Institute of Marine Science has been measuring water quality across the GBR for decades –- cross shelf and seasonal patterns of water column nitrogen (nitrite, nitrate, dissolved organic nitrogen, particulate nitrogen) and chlorophyll a concentrations –- and the data shows no trend of eutrophication. Indeed both nearshore and offshore reefs appear to be developing, for the most part, in a generally low-nutrient environment.

Nevertheless, hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent over the last 10 or more years ostensibly to improve reef water quality. Just a week ago I was told by a Central Queensland landholder that she has received a little over A$100,000 in government grants over the last few years to undertake improvements on her farm as part of the Reef Rescue program [5]. She said she doubted that any of the several projects could conceivably have an impact on reef water quality, but they have significantly improved the value of her property. Indeed, there is money to construct water troughs and increase ground cover and the list goes on [6]. That is the power of the agricultural lobby, they couldn’t beat the WWF campaign that painted them as destroying the reef [2], but they were encouraged to put their handout for government money and got A$400 million to be distributed to landholders and hangers-on.

All this money, and still the perception that reef water quality is deteriorating! Then again, I guess there wouldn’t have been the extra $200 million announced recently for rural industry, and extension of the same tax-payer-funded program to 2018, if there were a perception that the perceived water quality problem had been solved.

But what about this claim of a 50 percent decline in coral cover? The claim was recently made in the preamble to a petition by a group of “respected coral reef scientists” and promoted by Scientific America [7]. They reference a peer-reviewed paper entitled ‘The 27-year decline of coral cover on the Great Barrier reef and its causes’ published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science by Dr Glenn De’ath et al 2012. [8]

I’ll start to dissect this claim in Part 2 of a planned series on the Great Barrier Reef.

***

References/Further Reading

1. Great Barrier Reef ‘research’ – A litany of false claims By Jennifer Marohasy, October 2011
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=12719

2. WWF Says ‘Jump’, Governments Ask ‘How High’? By Jennifer Marohasy, March 2002
http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/33869/20030430-0000/www.ipa.org.au/pubs/ngounit/wwffs.html

3. Deceit in the name of conservation By Jennifer Marohasy, March 2003 http://jennifermarohasy.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Review55-1DeceitinNameConservation.pdf

4. For example… Chlorophyll monitoring on the Great Barrier Reef “Results to date show that compared with coastal regions in other parts of the world, chlorophyll a concentrations in the GBR lagoon are generally low. Chlorophyll a concentrations vary across the shelf seasonally and also with latitude. There are also persistent local gradients in chlorophyll a concentration, usually away from the coast. Consistent long-term trends in chlorophyll a concentrations haven’t yet been discerned.” Download this text from AIMs website on April 4, 2013 http://www.aims.gov.au/docs/data-centre/chlorophyllmonitoring.html

5. Reef Rescue  “In the first phase of the Caring for our Country Reef Rescue program, the Australian Government committed $200 million over five years (2008-09 to 2012-13) to improve the quality of water entering the Great Barrier Reef lagoon. Over the course of the program more than 3200 individual land managers received water quality grants for on-farm projects. Through the second phase of Caring for our Country, the Australian Government has committed a further $200 million to continue efforts to protect the Great Barrier Reef through improvements to the quality of water flowing into the Great Barrier Reef lagoon. Over a further five year period the Reef Rescue program will enhance the reef’s resilience to the threats posed by climate change and nutrients, pesticides and sediment runoff through a number of complimentary approaches. The next phase of Reef Rescue will support activities that will contribute to both the Sustainable Environment and Sustainable Agriculture streams of Caring for our Country.” Downloaded from government website on April 4, 2013
http://www.nrm.gov.au/funding/reef-rescue/

6. $200m to extend Reef Rescue program Beef Central, April 29, 2013 http://www.beefcentral.com/p/news/article/3062

7. Coal Development Threatens Great Barrier Reef by Stephanie Paige Ogburn, April 30, 2013 http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-development-threatens-great-barrier-reef

8. De’ath, G., K. E. Fabricius, H. Sweatman, and M. Puotinen. 2012. The 27–year decline of coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef and its causes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 109(44): 17995-17999.

The Coalition’s Direct Action Plan, 29 April 2013 (9.8MB)

Clearly the Coalition has no intention of showing leadership on this issue with Mr Hunt explaining that:

“We agree with the Government on the science of climate change, we agree on the targets to reduce emissions and we agree on using markets as the best mechanism.”

But I can’t see how this “Direct Action Plan” can possibly work as detailed, in particular the economics of revegetation for carbon sequestration and soil carbon sequestration don’t add-up. Yet Mr Hunt claims:

“The fund will not only reduce our emissions, it will improve Australia’s environment through a range of measures including revegetation, better land management and enhanced soil quality.”

But hang on. Mr Hunt is claiming the price of carbon will climb to $350 per tonne by 2050. Ha! Hasn’t anyone told Mr Hunt that the carbon market recently collapsed in Europe?  Only a fool or a politician could write:

“This simple, straightforward approach is a vastly better way to tackle climate change than the blunt instrument that is the Carbon Tax, which has already inflicted economy-wide pain and will continue to do so as it climbs to its own predicted price of $350 per tonne of C02 by 2050. That is why we will repeal the Carbon Tax and replace it with a classic reverse auction system, based on incentive and innovation.”

What a crock!

That’s the final paragraph in a new report by Emil A. Røyrvik; a social anthropologist and senior research scientists at SINTEF Technology and Society, Scandinavia’s largest independent research organisation.

The report about “the debate on man-made global warming” including an analysis of “the four myths of climate change”, “the hockey stick”, “climategate” and surveys and petitions of dissenting and contrarian positions.

Dr Røyrvik comes at the issue from an academic perspective and very clearly articulates the strength of the consensus position but also the logic of the contrarians – as he labels us.

The section on philosophy of science reminded me what science is meant to be about…

‘Although seeking an open, (self)critical and impartial analysis, this report is, like any other human expression, based on some premises. This report is inspired by social studies of science and technology (STS) and it is necessary to briefly outline the epistemological premises that the analysis in this report is grounded in. That is, from the outset to highlight the report’s main underlying assumptions about the role and status of science in society. The report is based in the sociology of science in the form outlined especially by influential thinkers such as Robert K. Merton and Karl Polanyi. In general, Merton’s (1973) famous norms of science form the report’s epistemological gaze. Merton outlined what he termed the four sets of institutional imperatives that comprise the ethos of modern science. These four were communism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized scepticism. Already forming the catching “CUDOS” acronym, later philosophers of science have added “originality” to Merton’s list, making the acronym even more fitting.

‘In later commonly accepted versions based on Merton (e.g. Ziman 2000) the ethos of science entails Communalism in the sense that scientific results are publicly shared by the entire scientific community; Universalism, in the sense that claims to truth are evaluated in terms of universal and
impersonal criteria, independent of terms such as race, class, gender, religion and nationality; Disinterestedness, understood in the sense that scientists should act for the common good of science, rather than for personal gain; Originality in research contributions; and Scepticism
(Organized Scepticism) through rigorous, systematic and critical scrutiny of all scientific claims by the scientific community. This last norm is achieved through peer-review and open publication.

‘Merton and followers consider these principles to be both goals and methods of science and that they are binding to scientists. In a complementary vein Michael Polanyi outlined his views on “the republic of science” (1962), a classic defence of the autonomy of the scientific endeavour. While not discarding the importance of science’s contribution to society, he argued that this could and should only be achieved under scientific self-governance: “… we reject today the interference of political or religious authorities with the pursuit of science [and] we must do this in the name of the established scientific authority which safeguards the pursuit of science”. Following Polanyi, imposing societal goals to the “Society of Explorers” would inhibit its spontaneity and freedom, and as a consequence the quality and results (also societal) of scientific inquiry. This argument highlight a continuing conflict regarding the role of science in society, on the one hand its free and unhampered pursuit of truth and the revealing of the world, and on the other hand society’s arguably legitimate interest in securing some instrumental goals and usefulness from scientific labors. Obviously, this tensional science-policy interface is at the core of the controversy related to climate science and the IPCC.

Download the full report here:

Consensus and Controversy: The Debate on Man-Made Global Warming
SINTEF A24071. 2013_04_12

http://www.sintef.no/upload/Teknologi_og_samfunn/Teknologiledelse/SINTEF%20Report%20A24071,%20Consensus%20and%20Controversy.pdf

In the following email, which Sarah Ferguson from ABC Four Corners has asked me to publish, she explains that my recent column in The Land on the same topic is “mischievous” [4]. In particular she claims a first hand knowledge of the situation in Indonesia and that half the abattoir footage in the program was filmed by Four Corners.

Ms Ferguson does not explain, however, whether, any of the footage of animal cruelty in the abattoirs as shown on the program was taken by Four Corners.

Dear Jennifer,

Re your article “Tracks lead to theatre of abattoir footage”. This article must have been written without watching the program it is commenting on.

The Four Corner’s program, “A Bloody Business” is available to view on line at this address and has been at all times since the original broadcast.
http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2011/s3228880.htm

You say, “the footage was not taken by Animals Australia…” and “In the Four Corners’ program we were told that the footage wasn’t taken by Four Corners or the ABC”. Both these statements are wrong. It is preposterous to say the program said the footage was not taken by Four Corners when I appear in the abattoir sequences. Lyn White from Animals Australia is also shown filming in one of the first abattoir scenes of the program.

These are the facts. Half of the abattoir footage in the program was filmed by Four Corners, half by Animals Australia.

In early 2011 Lyn White from Animals Australia brought extensive footage to Four Corners that she had just filmed in Indonesia. The footage was accompanied by a detailed scientific analysis by the RSPCA. White told us what she told the subsequent Senate enquiry in publicly available testimony that she had filmed with a fellow investigator from the UK based Tracks organisation. White brought us hours of footage, shot with two cameras, one operated by Lyn White, one by her colleague. This approach meant her footage was high quality with very good coverage of each scene. In the broadcast Lyn White describes the scenes she filmed and the experience of witnessing the cruelty in those scenes.

Having viewed their footage, Four Corners conducted its own investigation in Indonesia. The first abattoir we filmed at was Gondrung in Jakarta. I am shown in the abattoir during that sequence and throughout the program on the journey through Indonesia.

You refer to the abattoirs featured as being “rogue operators.” The abattoirs in the program are not rogue operators. We had footage of at least 13 abattoirs across the country, all of which had received recent training and supervision from the Australian live export industry. They were all using Australian supplied restraining boxes which Australian experts had taught them to use. The first abattoir we visited at Gondrung was one of the biggest mid level abattoirs in the country. It had received 6 advising/training visits from Meat and Livestock Australia in the past 14 months. Further to that we had internal industry documents referring to similar treatment of animals at these and other abattoirs. We also showed the excellent operations of a big stunning abattoir in Java to show what standards could be achieved in Indonesia.

The footage was viewed for the program by the world’s leading expert on cattle behaviour (and a regular consultant to Australian industry) who was appalled by what she saw, both the treatment of cattle and the construction of the Australian supplied equipment.

The footage was easy to get in the sense the abattoir owners allowed the filming that we showed. The abattoir owners and slaughter men did not try to hide the treatment of the animals which strongly suggests they regarded it as routine. It is offensive to suggest that I, my camera team or Lyn White would set up or cause animals to be mistreated. Once again if you had seen the program you would know this could not be the case.

The Tracks investigator worked for Lyn on her portion of the filming. It is mischievous to claim her testimonial says the filming was not her own. It does not say that.

Above all there is no substitute for watching the program, especially before writing about it.*

I trust you will correct the record.

Regards,
Sarah Ferguson
[April 21, 2013]

The Four Corners program flicks from showing acceptable practice in abattoirs to truly gruesome images without any attribution of the source of the footage.

It is common practice for some animal rights activists to perform stunts, and also stage, enhance or only selectively release footage to get a particular message across to viewers.

Given that it appears Four Corners used footage from Tracks Investigations this should have been declared. But not even in the long introduction to the program given by Kerry O’Brien is mention made of the involvement of these professional filmmakers and animal rights activists. These are filmmakers who appear to have been commissioned by Animals Australia to travel to Indonesia to get the footage that was subsequently passed on to Four Corners and incorporated into the ABC TV program that resulted in the suspension of live cattle export to Indonesia.

If Ms Ferguson and ABC Four Corners are serious about clarifying the situation then they must at the very least provide us with a scene by scene breakdown of the origin of the footage shown in the program. If Ms Ferguson and the ABC now release complete details of the location and date of each scene, this will assist a public assessment of the veracity of the evidence presented. Failure to comply with this request would suggest there is a lack of transparency in the process leading to the acquisition of the visual evidence broadcast in the program.

According to Scot Braithwaite, an Australian who works in feedlots and abattoirs in Indonesia the Four Corners program showed ‘expert manipulation’. In a letter from Mr Braithwaite that I published in June 2011 he claims to have witnessed thousands of animals slaughtered in Indonesian abattoirs and that 98 per cent of the time the kill is quick and without fuss [5].

***

*Contrary to this false claim from Sarah Ferguson I have watched the program and read the transcript.

References

1. Who filmed the video clip of Australian cattle in the Indonesian abattoirs?
http://jennifermarohasy.com/2012/05/who-filmed-the-video-clip-of-australian-cattle-in-the-indonesian-abattoirs/

2. Tracks Investigations, Annual Review 2011-2
http://www.tracksinvestigations.org/Tracks_Investigations/Home_files/Tracks%20Annual%20Review%202011%3A2%20.pdf

3. Tracks Investigations – “the eco spooks”, http://www.tracksinvestigations.org/Tracks_Investigations/Home.html
viewed April 21, 2013

4. Tracks lead to theatre of abattoir footage, The Land, 11th April 2013, page 22

5. Asking for a Fairgo for Live Export: Scot Braithwaite
http://jennifermarohasy.com/2011/06/asking-for-a-fairgo-for-live-export-scot-braithwaite/

6. The quote from Lyn White presented above as green text in the breakout box is from the Tracks Investigations website… downloaded today.

Yet carbon markets have developed not because the Catholic Church requested them, but because they were justified and promoted by leading scientists in cahoots with well meaning economists.

These markets and trading schemes are part of a new vision for a different world, a world based in essence on junk science and the new religion of environmentalism.

In Australia we have a carbon tax that will become a trading scheme. At least this is the plan. Writing about government-sponsored television advertisements promoting clean energy before the carbon tax was introduced Jeremy Barlow commented:

“There are a great many criticisms that can be made about these extraordinary government advertisements. They have been justified on the basis that we need more information yet they contain little information. They have used taxpayer funds to provide free publicity for a very small group of companies, presumably to the disadvantage of their competitors – something for the government’s Competitive Neutrality Complaints Office to chew over.

“But the real sadness lies in what these advertisements tell us about the failed and excessively cosy relationship between this government and its scientific advisers. In its blind acceptance of the scientific promise, this government tragically has succumbed to the triumph of wishful thinking over common sense.”

Yesterday the European parliament voted against renewing support for its politically mandated carbon price, and so the carbon price has crashed. Headlines in today’s mainstream media include ‘Carbon trading scheme facing strife’.

The optimistic amongst us might be hoping that the end for carbon trading is nigh along with the deranged wishful thinking that Thomas Barlow alludes to.

But read the text of that same article in today’s Sydney Morning Herald by Malcolm Maiden, and it suggests there is opportunity for the carbon price to recover and that the idea of a world-trading scheme may be out of reach, not forever, but just for decades.

Who wrote: “reality is only an illusion, albeit a very persistent one”?

****

Much revealed in government’s new carbon tax TV advertisements by Thomas Barlow http://jennifermarohasy.com/2011/07/much-revealed-in-governments-new-carbon-tax-tv-advertisements-thomas-barlow/
July 23, 2011

And for more ‘old’ posts on ‘carbon trading’ click here .

The last few years has seen a dramatic rise in the incidence of rhino poaching. Previously secure populations are now being targeted by aggressive poaching operations, backed by international crime syndicates. Part of the problem is that the legal trade has been banned following campaigning by the ignorant self-righteous.

The illegal trade is driven by the high price for rhino horn because a worldwide trade ban has made rhino horn artificially scarce.

As Michael ‘t Sas-Rolfes explains:

“Establishing an appropriately structured legal trading regime for rhino horn may provide a more effective and lasting solution to the rhino poaching problem for three reasons:

First [a legal trade] would bring trade out into the open. Market prices would be visible, thereby allowing for continued and accurate monitoring of ongoing consumer demand relative to supply. This would enable governments, conservationists and rhino owners to be far more immediately responsive to changing market conditions. It would also enable them to identify and engage directly with consumers.

Second, by providing a significantly increased and potentially ongoing source of supply, the incentives for speculative stockpiling by criminals would be greatly reduced, if not altogether removed. Furthermore, by meeting the demand at the highly inelastic and persistent ‘top end’ of the market, the price of horn would almost certainly drop, perhaps quite drastically, thereby reducing the profitability of the illegal market and concomitant incentives for poaching and illegal trade.

Third, by becoming active market participants, legal suppliers of rhino horn gain a new source of income, which they are able to re-invest in improved protection and breeding. Legal owners and custodians also have a significant competitive advantage over poachers and illegal suppliers: defendable legal rights and, in most cases, privileged physical access to and control of their stocks. If necessary, they can even dehorn their animals.”

You can read more, including why and how the re-education of people who desire rhino horn production hasn’t worked here…
http://www.rhino-economics.com/

An understanding of appropriate mechanisms for the sustainable use of not only rhino, but also elephants and crocodiles, seems to be generally in retreat. The world seems to be spinning away from practical wildlife conservation. Is it inevitable that social media will contribute to a rise in the banning of activities that could contribute to long-term sustainable management and conservation of wildlife, while inadvertently assisting the development of poaching and illegal trade?

***

Further reading …

1. ‘The Rhino Poaching Crisis: A Market Analysis’ by Michael ‘t Sas-Rolfes can be downloaded at
http://www.rhino-economics.com/

2. For publications on sustainable use, but with an Australian focus visit
http://www.wmi.com.au/wmi-abst.html

The picture is from http://www.rhino-economics.com/the-illegal-rhino-horn-trade-is-driven-by-greed-and-evil-people/ . And republished here with Michael’s permission. Thank you.

Margaret Thatcher was no friend of science, but she was a friend of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) that was established in the School of Environmental Science at the University of East Anglia in Norwich in 1972.

This is the same institution that Climategate exposed as being up to its neck in scientific fraud.

The establishment of the CRU only just preceded Thatcherism. With Thatcher’s market economics applied to public science none of the scientists at the CRU were ever guaranteed a salary. They had to generate their own income through grants and contracts.

Much of their money did end up coming from government but it had to be earned, they had to show their value to the politician and this is now par for the course [1].

It was following the miner’s strike in the UK and Prime Minister Thatcher’s increasing impatience with Arthur Scargill, then president of the National Union of Mineworkers, that the first tentative links were drawn between coal mining and the possibility of a climate catastrophe.

Various luminaries from that time have told me that Prime Minister Thatcher was keen to reduce Britain’s dependence on coal. She drew the connection between rising carbon dioxide emissions and coal mining before it was fashionable because she thought there was perhaps some scientific justification, and because she was keen to find justification for alternative energy sources, particularly nuclear.

Indeed her government became a strong supporter of climate research in the mid-1980s. Mrs Thatcher visited the CRU and assembled her entire cabinet to hear a seminar on climate change at which Tom Wigley, then director of CRU, was the star performer.

***

[1] “Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.” – on her election as prime minister in 1979

[2] Bob Carter explains in ‘Science is Not Concensus’ how during the 1980s there came a restructuring of the way in which government science operated. Public-good programme funding for the activities of government science agencies shrank, to be replaced by funding for individual projects with limited lifetimes.
http://members.iinet.net.au/~glrmc/IPA-RMC-03Reviewr.pdf

My key problem with the ‘the hockey stick’ has always been that the upward spike representing runaway global warming in the 20th Century was never of the same stuff as the rest of the chart. That is the spike is largely based on the instrumental temperature record i.e. the thermometer record, while the downward trending line that it was grafted on to, is based on proxies, in particular estimates of temperature derived from studies of tree rings.

It has always, for me, been a case of Michael Mann comparing apples and oranges, or to put it another way sticking an apple on the end of a banana.

The Michael Mann and Shaun Marcott Hockey Sticks

Worst the grafting was necessary because the proxy record, i.e. the tree ring record, shows that global temperatures have declined since about 1960.

Of course we know that global temperature haven’t declined since 1960, or thereabout, so there must be something wrong with the proxy record. This is known as “the divergence problem” and it is a problem, because if tree rings are not a good indicator of global temperature after 1960, how can they be a good indicator of global temperature prior to 1960?

Indeed there doesn’t appear to be a reliable method for reconstructing the last 100 or so years based on the standard techniques used to reconstruct the last 2,000, 4,000 and even 11,000 years of global temperature.

So when someone claims the past 10 years have been hotter than the past 11,300 years, as the Australian Broadcasting Commission did recently [1], there is good reason to cringe.

Of course the ABC didn’t make it up. They were reporting on the work of climate scientists recently published in a reputable journal. In particular a paper by Shaun Marcott and colleagues published in Science [2].

Sceptic, mathematician and blogger, Steve McIntyre, broke the original hockey stick into bits to do a thorough analysis, showing that the entire shaft, not just post 1960, was a fancy construct to create the impression of runaway global warming [3], and he’s done the same with this new Marcott fabrication [2].

While some who read this blog may cringe at my use of the word fabrication, it is more than justified because as Dr Marcott now admits in his own words[4]:

“[T]he 20th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions. Our primary conclusions are based on a comparison of the longer term paleotemperature changes from our reconstruction with the well-documented temperature changes that have occurred over the last century, as documented by the instrumental record.”

In summary, Dr Marcott created the perception of a spike in temperatures the same way Michael Mann did in that first hockey stick paper that featured so prominently in the third IPCC report, by comparing apples and oranges… or perhaps best described as grafting an apple onto the end of a banana.

***

1. Earth on track to be hottest in human history: study . March 8, 2013
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-03-08/climate-study/4561164

2. A reconstruction of regional and global temperature for the past 11,300 years. Marcott et al.. Science, Volume 339, No. 6124, pages 1198-1201.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6124/1198.abstract

Abstract: Surface temperature reconstructions of the past 1500 years suggest that recent warming is unprecedented in that time. Here we provide a broader perspective by reconstructing regional and global temperature anomalies for the past 11,300 years from 73 globally distributed records. Early Holocene (10,000 to 5000 years ago) warmth is followed by ~0.7°C cooling through the middle to late Holocene (

3. see http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/mcintyre-ee-2005.pdf and more http://climateaudit.org/multiproxy-pdfs/ and the latest http://climateaudit.org/2013/03/31/the-marcott-filibuster/

4. Response by Marcott et al. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/03/response-by-marcott-et-al/