Remove that wood and place it in a house and it is protected from decay by both a roof and paint, and it is protected from termites by both physical barriers and chemical treatment.

Interestingly, about the only way a forest could be modelled to have the volume of carbon being claimed by the WWF funded shonkademics is if they have wrongly assumed that there are no hollows up the middle of old growth trees. Fat chance.

“They seek it here, they seek it there, those greenies seek it everywhere.
Are they lying, or just alarmin?
About cursed, elusive, Pimpernel Carbon”.

Remove that wood and place it in a house and it is protected from decay by both a roof and paint, and it is protected from termites by both physical barriers and chemical treatment.

Interestingly, about the only way a forest could be modelled to have the volume of carbon being claimed by the WWF funded shonkademics is if they have wrongly assumed that there are no hollows up the middle of old growth trees.

Fat chance.

An awful lot of old growth forest tree thingys I’ve encountered seem to attract termites. You know methane belching bludgers who wouldn’t recognise an ETS if you shoved one up their cloacae.

Just how good is an old growth forest as a carbon sink when every tree is potentially on the menu!

And for the record, summer wildfires also have the habit of ignoring proposed ETS guidelines!

This definition outlines a minimum threshhold of 10% canopy etc but fails to adjust for the actual condition of natural forests in particular rainfall bands.

So we get farmers in 2000mm rainfall zones, where natural canopy cover was 90%+, having their cleared grazing paddocks with 10% shade trees being wrongly defined as a forest.

And once it is defined as a forest, and deemed to have existed prior to 1990, then any expansion of that forest, to 20%, 60% or right back to the original 90%, is deemed to be “natural” and part of a process “already in train” and therefore unable to attract carbon credits.

To their credit, the Queensland DNRM recognised this issue by listing a “normal extent” for each regional ecosystem and then defined the vegetation as “remnant” if the canopy achieved 50% of this extent.

But to their eternal damnation, they then completely abused this process by listing these “normal extents” at substantially lower levels than are currently exhibited by that same vegetation on those very sites.

So we now have a situation where regrowth vegetation is listed as “remnant” when the canopy is more than double the officially designated “normal extent”. And partial clearing activities that merely reduce the canopy cover back to or just below the official “normal extent” are detected by satellite scan and reported as remnant destruction.

Farmers who have maintained widely spaced shade trees in lawfully cleared paddocks are having their paddocks classed as remnant when a good season of seedling growth increases the apparent canopy over the falsely understated “normal extent” level.

They do this by applying a definition of “normal height” that is not based on the height normally achieved by the original forest but by an average of the trees on the site itself, regardless of their growth stage. They compound this criminal conspiracy by falsely excluding the original paddock trees on the basis that they are “emergent”, a type only found in rainforests, not eucalypt woodlands.

To apply a single, 10% canopy test to every forest type from closed forest to 10% open woodland is a gross and inexcusable abuse of power by way of its total unreasonableness.

And to use that test in a way that assumes that any subsequent increase in canopy is “natural” and without any human input or intent is an abuse of power.

And to use that test in a way that assumes that any reduction in canopy is environmentally adverse, human induced destruction of a natural habitat is an equal abuse of power.

Meanwhile back at the key issue. Old growth might just be barely carbon positive if left alone but this does not negate the fact that this forest involves very large emissions which can be postponed and even prevented.

And it does not negate the fact that the growth rate of these forests, while sufficient to off-set the emissions from decay, are still only a fraction of their potential. The overwhelming majority of the trees are senescent and therefore grow at a very slow pace.

The proper management of forests, and the logical option if there really was an urgent need to capture carbon, would be to intercept the wood before it begins to decay and place it in a form and location that limits further decay and stores carbon for the long term.

This interception will also capture the carbon before the growth rate of the tree has declined thereby maintaining a high rate of carbon capture by the forest in perpetuity.

It is a physical and mathematical absurdity to suggest that maintaining decay rates and maintaining slow growth rates constitutes the best method of storing carbon in perpetuity.

The storage of harvested wood carbon in house and other human forms is far superior to so called “natural” processes that provide no quarantine from decay at all.

And the sequential accumulation of more rapidly grown carbon will take only one or two cycles to exceed the total accumulation over many centuries under so called “natural’ conditions.

The greens have a simple choice. If we really do have a carbon crisis then there is no excuse for not managing forests for maximum carbon sequestration over the whole value chain.

If there is no such thing as a carbon crisis then they are free to indulge their highly carbon inefficient whimsies for decaying forests full of slowly growing, slowly dying trees.

They can’t have both.

Ian; you need to think disolved oxygen then come up with natural rates of oxidation for your wood at the bottom of the the sea before hammering our canary to the post.

one link I looked at

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V6M-4DDR7WY-1&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=ffd6b60639676699935fd0a2444c2200

The so-called “paper” is nothing more than a review of literature covering “estimates”. The abstract only indicated an “increase” in carbon storage but gives no indication of volumes or scale. But that didn’t stop the clowns from making a blanket statement about preventing “any” or all disturbance in OG forest, and by implication, any forest over 15 years old.

At which point my bull$hit canary fell off his perch, again.

For a start, all of “the literature” has continued with this absurd notion that a tree, once cut, produces intantaneous emissions. But tell that to the 80 year old tree stumps that are still holding most of their carbon all over my high rainfall/high wood rot prone property.

And anyone who could make such a statement about the prevention of any disturbance without first considering what the wood has actually been used for (ie long term storage in houses or good books) betrays either their ignorance of the issue or their callous disregard for the truth.

For example, if the entire wood volume of an old growth forest was dumped at the bottom of the sea where it will remain in situ for centuries, then a continual cycle of regrowth and harvest for other long term uses will be overwhelmingly more carbon contributive than leaving the original forest to take 700 years to add a mere 70 extra tonnes of carbon.

Once again we have conclusions being drawn, and then flogged by the scumnoscenti, without any test of significance or relevance of the information.

Simply putting aside these old forests in parks and reserves and expecting them to store carbon forever is simply denying nature. The icon old ash forests of SE Australia which were targetted in the ANU Green Carbon paper can only be renewed by fire or logging, otherwise they will die and revert to climax vegetation smaller scrub or rainforest trees that store far less carbon.

On the other hand when they burn as many areas did in 2003 and 2006/07 they release massive amounts of carbon. The notion that they can store carbon in perpetuity should not be entertained, but nevertheless continues to be used as a lever against the timber industry which at least transfers carbon out of the forest into far more secure storage in the community, although admittedly many products may not be especially long-lived.

Why not cap human beings at 35 years too. Why let them reach old age – same argument.

Old growth forests are often equated with high levels of biodiversity, but this is not always the case. In the temperate zones they can be low in terms of number of plant and animal species, while some modified natural or semi-natural forests and forests bordering agricultural areas may provide additional habitats and thus more species.

The Nature paper itself puts an age to the concept of ‘Old Growth’: “Our NEP estimates suggest that forests 200 years old and above.”

But then they refer to the UN FAO use of “Primary Forest” to calculate the Carbon locked up. Yet Primary forests are defined as “forests of native species, in which there are no clearly visible indications of human activity and ecological processes are not significantly disturbed’.

Clearly primary forest can contain forest of all age classes; however the paper uses the total area of primary forest to estimate carbon in old growth.

There is similar confusion in the green claims; the battle front in Southern Tasmania is the 18% of the Weld Valley outside the WHA reserve that contains some old forests managed for research and special timber production as well as regrowth from 1934 bushfire managed for timber production, yet there is almost a permanent protest about these 70 year old forests.

The Greens Institute has attempted to define it: “Old growth forests contain trees aged 200-300 years plus.” in its 2007 publication Forests: vital for climate protection.

The accepted definition within Australia is the one developed by the “Janis” criteria to establish comprehensive adequate and representative reserves of our forests undertaken a decade ago.

All figures reported by the National and state governments and resultant policy decisions use this definition.

The definition is:

“Old-growth forest is ecologically mature forest where the effects of disturbances are now negligible.”