A recent paper by economist Dr Judith Ajani of the Australian National University’s Fenner School of Environment and Society, states that:
Deforestation and the degradation of native forests account for an estimated 20 per cent of Australia’s annual net greenhouse gas emissions. Most of the degradation occurs via (wood) chip exports …
Pardon? This is completely at odds with the Department of Climate Change (formerly the Australian Greenhouse Office) whose website quotes figures based upon the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) showing that emissions from the “land use, land use change and forestry” sector comprise just 2.5 per cent of Australia’s annual greenhouse emissions.
Dr Ajani’s paper (ANU E-press, Agenda, Volume 15 No. 3) goes on to explain that her estimation of annual emissions from forest “deforestation and degradation” is compromised of 11-13 per cent from land clearing for agriculture, with 7 per cent (or 38 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent) from logging native forests. However, this latter figure studiously excludes carbon capture by regenerated forests and, while said to be based on AGO figures, has actually been calculated by prominent “green” activist Margaret Blakers using a briefing paper from the Wilderness Society.
In reality, according to the Australian Emissions Information System reporting for 2006 against UNFCCC categories, harvested wood products and forest land are the only Australian sub-categories where carbon sequestration and storage outweigh emissions.
In view of this, Dr Ajani’s claims are quite extraordinary. Particularly given that logging largely involves transference of stored carbon from trees into the community via usable products; and that the forests from which these products are derived are being sustainably managed as a renewable resource that continually sequesters and then stores atmospheric carbon.
However, it appears that the major aim of Dr Ajani’s paper was to build-on an earlier paper, also published by ANU E-press, entitled Green Carbon – the Role of Native Forests in Carbon Storage – Part 1 (August 2008). This was authored by four ANU scientists, also from the Fenner School of Environment and Society, led by Professor Brendan Mackey.
Both the Mackey et al and Ajani papers advocate supposedly superior carbon accounting outcomes if native forest timber production is ended to enable forests “to regrow their carbon stocks towards their natural carrying capacity”. This mirrors a message that Australia’s mainstream environmental movement have adopted since climate change has gained political prominence.
In recent years, the environmental movement has sought to gain scientific credibility through developing close links with academia. This is evident in the Wilderness Society’s partial funding of the Mackey et al Green Carbon paper and the joint development and funding of an ANU Wild Country Research and Policy Hub based on the Wilderness Society’s Wild Country Vision. Professor Mackey is the current Director of the Hub, while Emeritus Professor Henry Nix chair’s the Hub’s Advisory Committee.
In return, the university supports the Wilderness Society through the provision of academic input to its Wild Country Science Council. ANU Emeritus Professor Henry Nix is Council Co-Chair, while Professor Mackey is a Council member.
The existence of these linkages raises questions about the influence of the Wilderness Society in the preparation of the Green Carbon paper, particularly given its uncompromising opposition to native forest logging. This is emphatically articulated in its Forests and Woodlands Policy (revised September 2005) which states that:
The Wilderness Society “does not support the use of native forests to supply woodchips for pulp, wood for power generation, charcoal production, commercial firewood, or timber commodities”.
Further to this, it “believes that all of Australia’s pulpwood, commercial firewood, and timber commodities should come from extant plantations of softwood and hardwood”.
In the latest edition of the Wilderness Society’s magazine, Wilderness News, an article describing the organisation’s Wild Country Vision for Victoria states that “securing our future starts with protecting our forests, one of the world’s biggest carbon stores;”… and “removing threats like woodchipping”.
Indisputably, the findings of the Mackey et al Green Carbon paper, and the more recent Ajani paper, fit neatly with the Wilderness Society’s vision for the future of Australia’s native forests – a future without a native hardwood timber industry.
Presumably, this is why scientific findings from the Green Carbon paper were launched at a Wilderness Society function in Bali during last December’s UN Climate Conference – some nine months before the paper was formally published on ANU E-press. Lead author, Professor Mackey was reported as presenting “new scientific research highlighting the critical role of forest protection in addressing climate change”.
A blog of Mackey’s Bali presentation by the Zero Emission Network gushed that his new research showed that “if the forestry sector was included in a carbon pricing mechanism …. the native forest industry would collapse overnight”. It also noted that “the report is only in limited release, but people interested in it should contact the Wilderness Society”.
The Green Carbon paper was at that time undergoing peer review, but the authors seemed to have no qualms in publicly releasing its findings. This smacks of a departure from normal academic process specifically to serve the requirements of political activism. The additional implication that the Wilderness Society was distributing the draft paper casts further doubt on the authors’ commitment to academic integrity.
In recent weeks, the timber industry has publicly questioned the scientific objectivity of the Green Carbon paper. This has included speculation about why ANU E-press published the paper without the accompanying technical data that underpins its findings. The paper itself explained that this was because “a technical paper that details the source data, the methods used and the full results is being prepared for a scientific journal”.
Whether or not this eventuates remains to be seen, but the absence of supporting technical data has certainly created difficulties for those wishing to critically analyse the paper’s scientific findings. It has also raised questions about ANU E-press acting as a conduit for incomplete or poorly conducted “psuedo-science”.
The university has vigorously defended ANU E-press as being an online publishing facility that is on the Federal Government’s register of Acceptable Commercial Publishers and one that requires independent review of all published works. ANU E-press has since confirmed that the Green Carbon paper was peer reviewed by three academics including one from outside the university.
Last month, the paper’s authors revealed that its two ANU referees were Dr Michael Roderick, who specialises in environmental survey and monitoring; and Emeritus Professor Henry Nix, who has been described as a pioneer in computer-based land resource inventory and evaluation. As mentioned earlier, Professor Nix is Co-Chair of the Wilderness Society’s Wild Country Science Council on which the paper’s lead author, Professor Mackey also sits.
The involvement of Professor Nix casts some doubt on the independence of the review process. On the question of whether the paper’s supporting technical data was deliberately excluded from publication, one would have thought that if it was part of the peer review process it would have been suitable for publication. On the other hand, if it was not part of the peer review process, there should be serious concern over the value of that process.
Further doubts about the veracity of the ANU E-Press review process are raised by Dr Ajani’s paper. She acknowledges and thanks seven reviewers, plus two anonymous referees for their input. Among the reviewers are three of the four authors of the Green Carbon paper, including Professor Mackey, as well as Margaret Blakers and Naomi Edwards.
Ms Blakers, who was mentioned earlier, is a well-known environmental activist who has worked for Greens Senator Bob Brown and latterly founded the Greens Institute. Ms Edwards assisted The Wilderness Society during its campaign against the proposed Gunns’ pulpmill. She was described by The Age newspaper in April 2006 as a “former high flying Sydney actuary who threw in the towel …. to became a mini-skirted performer and forest activist in the hippie community of Cygnet in southern Tasmania”. Neither would appear to have the ideological independence needed to objectively review Ajani’s paper.
It is particularly significant that although both the Ajani and Mackey et al papers are about forests, there is no evidence of input from forest scientists who are surely experts in this field. Unsurprisingly, both papers display a poor understanding of basic forestry concepts. This is amply demonstrated by the Green Carbon paper which:
1. Seriously overstates the extent of current and future timber production in SE Australia;
2. Displays only a simplistic understanding of what logging is, and what its variations and components mean in terms of carbon accounting;
3. Wrongly presumes that every forest left untouched by human disturbance will develop into “old growth” with maximum carbon storage;
4. Seriously understates the inevitability and severity of natural disturbances that affect forests, such as wildfire, and their impact on carbon accounting;
5. Misunderstands the role of lightning, access, topography, and suppression capability in shaping where the largest and most destructive fires occur;
6. Is unaware of the acknowledged link between forest use and the capability to effectively manage landscape-scale fire which has the greatest impacts on biodiversity and water, as well as carbon storage;
7. Does not understand that management expenditure and effort in particular parts of the forest provide flow-on benefits for other parts of the forest estate;
8. Draws a seemingly illogical distinction between the ecological resilience of regrowth after logging and fire even though the regenerative processes are the same;
9. Appears to ignore the ecological implications of totally avoiding disturbance which can ultimately result in the replacement of eucalypt forest by other vegetation; and
10. Fails to address the carbon accounting implications of not harvesting native forests – such as more imports and greater use of steel and concrete – given that its favoured plantations “solution” is unviable due to insufficient hardwood plantations capable of producing sawn timber.
It is clear that addressing the above matters would have severely weakened, if not invalidated, the paper’s central assertion that not logging forests will massively increase carbon storage. A cynical view is that in recognition of this, Mackey et al may have chosen to avoid informed scrutiny of their paper so as not to compromise findings that fit a pre-ordained agenda.
In view of the doubts surrounding its objectivity and veracity, it is very disappointing that the Green Carbon paper has gained such traction in the media and in some scientific circles. In particular, its infiltration into the Garnaut Climate Change Final Report is unfortunate given the likely influence of this on future government policy.
This was apparently driven by representations by the environmental movement during the public consultation phase which ended in April 2008. In the latest Wilderness News, a text box attached to an article entitled, Green Carbon, by Dr Heather Keith (one of the co-authors of the Green Carbon paper) states that:
The Wilderness Society made an organisational submission [to the Garnaut Review] that spells out the compelling science about forests and carbon. And we co-ordinated thousands of Australians to have their say on this critical issue by making their own submissions.
This shows that even before it was published, the Green Carbon paper was being commandeered for use in submissions to the Garnaut process. This would seem to further confirm the strength of linkages between some ANU scientists and the environmental movement.
In a recent media release, the ANU claimed that it was “proud of researchers who challenge current views and develop new ways of understanding our environment”. If this means supporting scientists who willingly compromise objectivity and academic process to serve the political agenda of a financial backer, the university may have a problem.
It is important to appreciate that conclusions being drawn from the Green Carbon paper are out of step with the international view of the role of forests in climate change. In 2007, this was articulated by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which stated that:
In the long term, a sustainable forest management strategy aimed at maintaining or increasing forest carbon stocks, while producing an annual sustained yield of timber, fibre or energy from the forest, will generate the largest sustained mitigation benefit.
Mark Poynter is a professional forester with 30 years experience. He is a member of the Institute of Foresters and the Association of Consultant Foresters, and author of the book ‘Saving Australia’s Forests and its Implications’ (published in 2007).
This article was written on behalf of the Institute of Foresters of Australia was first published at On Line Opinion and is republished here with permission from the author.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Figures for Australia’s emissions from forests are totally skewed due to the exclusion of emissions resulting from Forestry Tasmania’s high-intensity burn-offs in any figures quoted, under the Kyoto Protocol. Also those emissions go to the upper atmosphere, doing far more damage than the smoke from ordinary bushfires. The high-intensity burns also ensure the remains of our forests are turned into ash, which does not happen in an ordinary bushfire.
Salamander,
So???? What is your point.
Are our emissions under stated then?
And how do you know these emissions go to the upper atmosphere?
Stick your nose into science requires you to back up your statements with some empirical data.
Salamander,
never been to a bushfire then I see – 2million ha in Vic 02/03 and 06/07 columns of smoke that make your Tasmanian stuff look like a piddling back yard barbeque. That’s one of the problems of this fantasy (I can’t call it a scientific work) it simply does not account for the disturbance of bushfires in any way that’s near adequate. Also at the same time we burn 2 million ha in the south east and think it’s a big deal across the north of Australia 20 to 30 million ha a year is the norm were does that show up in this art work?
Mark’s article is spot on and exposes some of the myths about forests and carbon accounting. The Ajani paper quoted a greens institute report with a table that showed whilst managed forested land captured and stored 51.5 MT of Carbon in 2005, this figure was totally ignored. Yet the table was from preliminary figures in the National Carbon Accounting System, a system that recently won the Australian Museum’s Eureka prize for innovation. The ANU recently congratulated its own researcher and the development team on the prize.
Yet the Mackey et al paper claims that it tested the NCAS and found “it underestimated the carbon carrying capacity of natural forests with high biomass stocks” .Yet as we are still waiting for the technical paper showing calculations and methodology we have no idea of the testing process to make such a bold claim.
However we do have an open and transparent process for the NCAS and the 2006 UNFCCC accounting figures Mark used. This includes accounting for both harvested wood and slash (non-merchantable components of trees felled and left to decay and burnt in-forest) as well as man caused biomass burning such as fuel reduction.
Estimates of emissions using the UNFCCC framework can be obtained from AGEIS at http://www.climatechange.gov.au/inventory/index.html as well as details on the NCAS Inventory for each state and sector that shows Tasmania has reduced emissions by 25% since 1990.
Craige Brown makes a good point. In the ANU book about green carbon funded in part by the Wilderness Society and in part by the taxpayer we find on page 23 how the researchers treated these bushfires:”The value of GPP used was the maximum annual value for the period from 1 July 2000 to 30 June 2005 (the maximum was used in order to exclude
periods of major disturbance such as the 2003 bushfires).”
Thats right the impact of the 2003 bushfires was excluded!!!
Excellent piece by Mark. he neglected only to mention the inability of all at the Fenner School, led by Nix and Mackey, to have any glimmer of understanding of the concept of sustainable logging. If the logging of hardwood from native forest in Australia is not sustainable, how come it is all still there after over 200 years? See Garnaut’s Final report, Table 22.6. Native forests account for 147 mn hectares, plantations for 2 mn. so clearly most timber production in Australia derives from the former. The authors of Green Carbon (endorsed by the Garnaut Report, Table 22.2) want all logging to cease in the former, without quantifying the resulting change in the balance of trade in wood products. To be fair to Garnaut, his report does admit, p.551, that “the objective should be to credit genuine multi-year sequestration of carbon in harvested wood products.” That concept is way beyond the grasp of Minster Wong, let alone her favourite advisers at the ANU’s Fenner School, and all involved with the Kyoto Protocol.
Salamander appears to be another of those characters prone to gross and unsubstantiated exaggeration.
Here is something for him or her to ponder: The total amount of native forest harvested annually in Tasmania is around 30,000 hectares. By comparison, not very much, is it? This is the amount of area that is generally subjected to re-generation burning, with the objective being to burn of the slash and residue from logging, (leaves, branches, stumps, and some logs that are of insufficient size, or difficult shape that preclude them from making up a load to the chipper), after the saw logs and chip logs have been removed. This, in total, has to be significantly less than was present in that same particular tract of forest before harvesting occured. (to suggest anything else is gobsmackingly stupid!) Sure, the objective has to be to get that material to burn as hot as possible, so as to ensure good growing conditions for the subsequent re-growth, but it is never going to be anywhere near as hot as a wildfire would be in that same patch of forest if it were burnt at the same time, or indeed, if it were burnt at the worst moment in the fire danger period.
The re-generation burning season in Tasmania is determined by careful measurement of the prevailing conditions. Usually it is only about 20 days per year, in the autumn. The soil dryness index must be right, the weather conditions must be right, particularly the wind, and close attention is paid to the best weather forecasting information available. The best time is just after the first autumn rain, when the exposed target area has had a couple of days to dry off, but while the surrounding standing forest is still damp.
A good re-generation burn is lit about mid afternoon, and sure, by evening you can see a good colunm of smoke rising in to the sky. But by morning, you wake to a clear sky. This is in sharp contrast to unplanned fire, which usually burns a far greater area than the average forestry coupe, and which often lasts for days, or occurs when the coming weather conditions drive the smoke down to ground level across a wide area.
Salamander presents a familiar point of view, gushed often by the usual suspects, probably in the belief that, if repeated often enough, a useful number of uninformed and gullible members of the public at large will believe it. I’m pretty sick of that…
I must say a heart-felt thankyou to Mark Poynter. As a woodworker in Tasmania, whose only scope for profitability is to locate myself within one of the only three remaining areas of viability for Tasmanians in the application side of the timber industry: the site-specific construction and fitout sector, or the high-end one-off furniture niche market, or the craft shop and gallery circuit selling world-class portable items to the tourism and gift market; it is very useful to have something to throw back at those who are degrading and demoralising what should be such a joyful experience: working with some of the best timbers in the world!
I find it annoying when scientists become pea-brained about ecological issues. I am not advocating that we should become callous and ignore the environment, I’m saying we should get emotion out of the equation and think clearly and scientifically.
The IPCC provides a graph in AR4 which shows clearly that 97% of all CO2 emissions are natural and come from the land and oceans and that 98.5% is reabsorbed. That’s a steady state situation with deforestation taking place all over the world. Can someone explain to me how cutting down a controlled number of trees in Australia is going to affect those emission and reabsorption rates significantly?
We get that nonsense here in Canada from environmentalists. They talk about clear-cutting in our forrests, and activists come from Europe to tut-tut after they have destroyed all their forrests. What they don’t tell you is the amount of reforrestation taking place. Also, I took a ferry ride from the south of British Columbia to Prince Rupert, which is about 400 miles north. Looking ashore from the ferry, all one can see for 400 miles is trees. That goes inland right across much of BC for another 400 miles in most places. We have more trees than anyone could ever use yet activists focus in on small clear-cuts that do no one any harm in the long run.
Australian environmentalists should be focussing on replanting rather than wringing their hands over logging and slash burning, which has a very short life in the atmosphere.
Judith Ajani is the very same Judith Clark who spent the early 1990’s claiming that there was, even back then, enough plantation wood to supply all the nation’s needs without any supply from native forests. And on the basis of this crap, councils and schools all over the country installed childrens playground equipment made with pinus radiata soaked in Copper Chrome Arsenate. In the interests of “future generations”, no less.
This woman’s “research” has never had any more than a casual relationship with the facts. And to seriously think that our farmers would willingly switch from quality, “durability class 1” native hardwoods to third rate, plantation grown “termite salad” for their fence posts and infrastructure needs merely demonstrates the depth of her ignorance.
I have split bloodwood posts on my boundary line that have all their carbon still intact, still doing their part of the job they were cut for in 1922. I say “their part of the job” because the barbed wire (galvanised steel) gave up long ago, with just a few rusty remnants still in evidence.
And not only do these Fenner School bogans continue with the fantasy that all the carbon is emitted when the tree is cut, they continue to promote “termite salad” soaked in toxins as an ecologically viable alternative.
But Mark Poynter is absolutely spot on when he asks, how on earth can someone conduct a credible “peer review” when they didn’t include any qualified peers and didn’t, and still haven’t, provided any working papers?
Furthermore, if Garnaut has endorsed this paper, without examining the working papers then he has been in very serious breach of his professional obligation to perform his duties with appropriate dilligence, care and attention. There is a prima facie case that both the Fenner School clowns, (being in receipt of public funding) and Garnaut, have acted, at least negligently, if not fraudulently.
It is a simple test. Is the provision of working papers with a published report “best practice” or not? It clearly is.
Have these people failed to meet best practice standards in their work? Absolutely.
Is it reasonably foreseeable that persons may suffer some form of detriment if the results of their failure to exercise dilligence, care and attention are acted upon by the policy process? Yep.
Ian Mott, you are absolutely right about the negligence bordering on fraud in the Garnaut Report with its unquestioning acceptance of the Mackey/Fenner School paper, but that negligence becomes overtly fraudulent when the report bases its main modelling on the paper by Garnaut, Howes, Jotzo and Sheehan, which produces CO2 concentrations from a range of emissions profiles without once mentioning the natural uptakes that accounted for 57 per cent of total recorded emissions in 2007. In the background was the MAGICC model that also omits any modelling of natural uptakes, and that in turn embodies a chorus of models known as C4MIP. These models unite in assuming that natural uptakes of CO2 by oceans and biosphere will decline if temperature rises. The key paper is Friedlingstein and 28 others, of whom 7 were contributing authors of ch.7 of WG1 of AR4 2007, in Journal of Climate vol.19 15 July 2006, 3337-3353. Its Fig. 2 e and f shows massive reductions in land and ocean uptakes with changes in surface temperature, based only on its models with NO reference to any observed evidence to that effect.This paper was endorsed – nay adopted – by Stern, by IPCC loc.cit of course (surprise!), and Ganrant, ch 4, p.103. The paper presents no real world evidence at all, offering instead only the ensembled “findings” of the C4MIP models that rising Temperature will reverse the growth of natural uptakes. Naturally F et 28 al ignore any paper offering statistical analysis of real world field experiments showing that rising temperature reinforces CO2 fertilization over a wide range of the former. For example, although citing Nowak et al 2004 in New Phytologist 162 253-80, they omit any reference to Norby and Luo in the SAME issue of that journal (281-293), who however very tiresomely reported the results of their controlled edxperiments using red and sugar maple trees at Oak Ridge TN, who showed that without elevated CO2, higher temperature would reduce growth of dry mass, but with elevated CO2, growth was not much less than with ambient temp. and elevated CO2 (Fig.5). One can see why F et 28 al hate Norby & Luo, because the latter say “models to forecast fuure [climate] changes need data support to be useful, and data-model fusion has become essential in global change research”, precisely what F et 28 al are determined to avoid, with the support of Stern, IPCC,and Garnaut. The Garnaut report at Fig2.7 blithely accepts F et 28 al as evdience for its curves showing declining natural ptyakes for which it has not a shred of evidence in the historical record. Nor does it offer any plausible a priori argument that improvements in varieties of all major food crops will cease, resulting in reduced growth of natural uptakes.
A similar fraud is the Report’s claim that livestock exhale CO2 and CH4 without ever having absorbed those compounds or their sources from their feed.
In short I think there is a basis for approaching Slater and Gordon to prepare a class action against Garnaut and Wong for deliberately misleading the Australian public with biassed and essentially fraudulent (by suppression of material evidence) political propaganda.
I agree, Tim, but at the moment there has not been any detriment so there cannot be any action for damages. I think there are better prospects under judicial review (improper exercise of power by way of failure to take relevant matters into consideration and over consideration of irrelevant matters. And those within the reviwing departments should be feeling a very chill wind up their nether regions on the issue of misconduct and the fact that their indemnity from prosecution does not extend to acts done negligently or unlawfully.
It is now almost standard operating procedure for the scumocrats to hive anything less than kosher off to a “consultant” so they cannot cop the blame for their deliberate acts.
For another profound personal view on this subject, particularly in relation to Tasmania’s old growth forests and their future; see the transcript of tonight’s edition of Australian Story – “A Letter From Richard Flanagan”
http://www.abc.net.au/austory/
Ian Mott: good points. I still think we should advise the big players to proceed as you suggest to demanding judicial review.
Gavin: Richard Flanagan and his mate Cousins, what hypocrites. Having made their own fortunes in Sydney, they have no compunction in denying ordinary Tasmanians job opportunities in a wholly sustainable operation.
Gavin is this the same Flanagan that featured at an earlier blog at http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/003377.html or was it the one who waited until Premier Jim Bacon died before attacking his contribution to Tasmania. Perhaps he is the same person that refers to Tasmanian forestry as “Rape” and refuses to acknowledge the professionalism of the forest scientists and conservation planners that have developed Tasmania current sustainable forest practices.
Is he the one who ignores the 1.88 million of hectares of high quality wilderness, the 1 million hectares of old growth forest already reserved as part of conservation areas that cover 43% of Tasmania’s land mass?
Surely the ABC will expose the fact that a Sydney silvertail paid for his propaganda about Tasmania ‘old growth destruction’ to be distributed in the Electorates of Malcolm Turnbull and Peter Garrett, in a bid to stop a pulp mill that was never to use old growth as a feed stock. Hopefully the ABC will tell their viewers that this campaign failed as both Garrett and Turnbull increased their vote! If it is, then I won’t be watching. Perhaps you should read Mark Poynter’s book Saving Australia’s Forests for an authoritive analysis of Flanagan’s forests rants.
The most disturbing thing about Flanagan is the state of his mind. What he demonstrated for the camera last night was a mind that no longer seeks the balance of economic, social and ecological values that we understand as the essence of “sustainability”. No, Flanagan’s mind has gone to an entirely new territory where every last piece of forest is “sacred”.
And once this mental shift to the “sacred” has taken place then he has no more room for balance and no more room for any form of compromise. So the fact that more than a million hectares of old growth forest is already set aside, “protected”, and available for both his perverted molestation and his gonzo “sacraments”, it will never be enough.
The singular great intellectual cop-out of minds that so loosely apply the concept of the “sacred” is their complete exclusion of questions of degree. To them, something is absolutely sacred or not at all. Their minds have excluded any potential for the partial, or the proportionate. And having discarded the possibility of a proportionate response, they have long left behind their capacity for a reasonable response.
More sinisterly, his mind is now in a condition where any form of managerial change in any sort of forest, regardless of its quality or habitat value, is akin to the desecration of a religious icon. And his mind is now free of any issues of conscience in respect to the de-humanisation of of those who he regards as involved in desecration. He actually stated in the program that he regarded the act of cutting these trees as an action that diminishes the very humanity of the persons responsible.
So his mind is now in a condition where even the most reasonable measures, and highly practical measures, like partial harvesting and rotational harvest and regeneration, in a context of a very large reserve system, is akin to “desecration of the sacred” by “sub-humans”.
And it is no small irony that it is our very use of reason, our capacity to distinguish degrees of meaning and value, and our capacity to make proportionate responses to a range of circumstances, that is, and will hopefully remain, mankind’s proudest attribute. And we all have a duty to recognise a critically injured intellect when it presents itself among us.
Tim; there is ample opportunity for ordinary Tasmanians to find a sustainable job in and beyond their native forests.
Last week while fitting a brown hardwood handle to an old Hytest ¾ axe head after finishing a cleaned up Brades 8 oz engineers hammer head with a similar wooden handle I had just purchased from Bunning’s hardware store I started thinking about the permanency of any carbon stored within those old tools.
Given those steel forgings were post ww2 how good is the handle considering it’s likely use in each case? But let’s say for argument sake there is a lot of handles in every pulp wood tree given the round up by “woodworker” above on what’s left for the fire.
Before you guys give me any more crap on our timber industry future with or without Gunns; go down to your local store and browse the prices of any timbers including a swag of mixed handles.
BTW; “woodworker” writes a good yarn for a hard headed bushie but will he be remembered by this country’s history buffs alongside Flanagan?
Given my soft spot for native timbers, I should relate a recent observation regarding our local environment for everyone’s benefit. As we travelled NW from ANU to a luncheon in the country on Saturday I noticed most of the isolated more mature eucalypts round the hills were not dying but quite dead whereas the clumps had survived and had plenty of foliage. Back home a miniature cactus garden grown in a brick platter that once flourished on an exposed veranda corner since 1996 is also totally dead now.
I reckon it’s these seens that capture the attention of ANU forestry researchers too. They must account for a diminishing rural tree cover in many regions. On the other hand Mark Poynter and Co on this blog make no concessions for this most obvious climate change.
Ian; I noticed Judith A or C whoever gets the hardwood potential in fine papers right elsewhere but I doubt she has personally fitted handles or made papers before getting across the various issues of carbon storage in a lager picture.
Another incoherent “four cone” conversation from Gavin, as if axe handles are a statistically relevant part of the native forest wood market.
Meanwhile, in the real world, researchers on old landfill sites in Sydney found newsprint in perfect condition, fully readable, and obviously with all its carbon in safe storage more than 60 years after it was deposited there. But the “poor white campus trash” from the IPCC and ANU insist on claiming that trees cut for pulpwood emit their carbon in the same year the tree is cut.
And of course, they have already fed all that carbon into their climate muddles.
You’re right Ian Mott. I recently found myself rummaging for kindling in an offcut wooddump near the old mill on my property, and lo, wouldn’t you know, but after 15 years the timber still looked fresh and clean and full of carbon.
So who wants to buy a huge pile of my sequestered carbon?