Category Archives: Uncategorized

Evaluating the effectiveness of the protection of coral reefs

Posted on by
Reply

Responding effectively to the multiple threats to coral reefs around the globe requires not only good monitoring but also good reporting of the success or failure of management strategies. The Status of Coral Reefs of the World series, the 5th edition of which was published in 2008, offers the most comprehensive and rigorous reporting of coral reef status globally. Many countries also have national or regional reports on the status of the environment, including of their coral reefs.

Evaluating and reporting on the effectiveness of management strategies for coral reefs requires a clear analytical framework. Without this the communication of any results of such research for policy improvement is severely hampered.

Reef managers and others involved in reporting on the state of coral reefs may find helpful the discussion of conceptual frameworks for evaluation of policy in a new book, Does environmental law work? How to evaluate the effectiveness of an environmental legal system. While the book focuses on laws protecting the Great Barrier Reef and the review of the relevant science is not new, the discussion of conceptual frameworks for evaluation is applicable to all measures responding to threats to coral reefs.

Denialist Agenda (Part 3): Think tanks, oil money and black ops

Posted on by
5

Clive HamiltonHere is the part 3 of Clive Hamilton’s expose of the denialist movement.  He explores the role of special interests funded ‘think tanks’ …

Clive Hamilton, ABC Unleashed.

The army of denialist bloggers and cyber-bullies is sometimes accused of being the tool of fossil fuel companies. Although there is certainly a concordance of interests, that is as far as the relationship goes. The bloggers are motivated not by financial gain (indeed, their activities may have a financial cost) but by political grievances and an anti-elite worldview at odds with the mainstream.

Nevertheless, it is true that the raw material that feeds their anger is generated overwhelmingly by a network of right-wing think tanks and websites in part funded by Big Carbon. These links, which have been heavily documented, are close enough to provoke the Royal Society to take the unprecedented step of writing to Exxon Mobil asking the company to desist from funding anti-science groups.

Yet the funding continues, often through foundations that in effect launder oil and coal money to make it more difficult to trace to its sources. One of the more important conduits is the Washington-based Atlas Economic Research Foundation. Atlas supports financially a network of some 200 libertarian think tanks around the world, including (according to an investigation by US magazine Mother Jones) the Institute of Public Affairs and the Centre for Independent Studies in Australia.

Atlas co-sponsored the Heartland Institute’s climate sceptic conference in Washington last June attended by a number of prominent Australian skeptics. The Heartland Institute has received funding from Exxon Mobil and earlier received funding from Philip Morris to campaign against smoking restrictions. It has superseded Frontiers of Freedom and the Competitive Enterprise Institute as the foremost US “think tank” working to discredit climate science and stop action on climate change.

Black ops

The deployment of think tanks and sceptic websites to attack climate science has been a carefully planned strategy that was developed in the United States in the mid-1990s. It was refined with the advice of political consultant Frank Luntz who in 2002 urged the Republican Party to undermine the credibility of climate science by commissioning “independent” experts to “make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate”. The strategy is comprehensively exposed by former PR insider Jim Hoggan in hisrecent book Climate Cover-Up.

The strategy’s use of operations that fall into the “grey area” of political campaigning – such as the creation of fake citizens groups to advance the interests of fossil fuel companies – is well-known and continuing. Only now is light being shone on a far more sinister campaign of black operations.

The hacking into computers at the Climatic Research Centre at the University of East Anglia is only part of a more extensive campaign of black ops organised by elements of the denial industry in the run-up to the Copenhagen meeting. Others include break-ins to the offices of climate scientists, an attempt to infiltrate the computer system at the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis at the University of Victoria by two people posing as technicians, and industrial espionage directed at US green groups.

The think tanks

Although Australia does not have the proliferation of well-funded conservative think tanks that have been so influential in US politics, local counterparts have served effectively as conduits for the stream of anti-science pouring out of their kindred organisations in the United States. They have also been instrumental in publicising and promoting the work of Australian sceptics such as Ian Plimer and Bob Carter. There are three established think tanks and a new one emerging.

Lavoisier Group: Perhaps better described as an advocacy group than a think tank, theLavoisier Group was founded in 1999 by Hugh Morgan, then CEO of Western Mining Corporation and a former president of the Mining Industry Council, and his long-time political operative Ray Evans. Its board consists mostly of mining industry figures. Evans has close links with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, for some years the most active denialist think tank in the United States.

Evans, with Morgan’s backing, had created a string of organisations promoting conservative causes, including the anti-union H.R Nicholls Society (with which the Lavoisier Group shares a postal address) and the Samuel Griffiths Society, committed to defending states’ rights.

The Lavoisier Group brings together leading sceptics at its conferences, promotes sceptics’ books, and publishes material such as “Nine Lies About Global Warming”, penned by Evans and parroted by sceptical columnists in the newspapers. A book edited by Evans was last year launched by Senator Barnaby Joyce, now the shadow finance minister.

Institute of Public Affairs: The oldest think tank in Australia, and with close links to the Liberal Party, the IPA took up the denialist cause early. The IPA is coy about its funding sources, but is known to have received the bulk of its income from mining, resource and tobacco companies. In addition to promoting the work of Australian sceptics like Ian Plimer, the IPA has hosted international visitors such as Bjorn Lomborg and Mark Steyn, events attended by Liberal Party heavyweights.

The IPA also sponsored the visit to Australia of President Putin’s former adviser Andrei Illarianov who fulminated against “fraudulent science” and described the Kyoto Protocol as a “death pact”, “an interstate Auschwitz”, “a sort of international Gosplan, a system to rival the former Soviet Union’s”, an argument bizarre even in the world of climate denial, but reasonable enough to be reproduced by The Australian.

Centre for Independent Studies: The CIS projects itself as a more moderate conservative think tank, but has not been able to resist promoting climate scepticism. After struggling in its early years, it was reprieved by a major funding boost from six mining companies, a rescue facilitated by Hugh Morgan. Among its board members is Sir Rod Eddington, a senior business adviser to the Labor Government. It has hosted a string of climate sceptics from overseas and Australia.

Brisbane Institute: The Brisbane Institute has for some years been a middle-of-the-road think tank but appears to have been taken over by climate sceptics. Some of its followers were shocked to hear that the Institute would host the Brisbane leg of Christopher Monckton’s Australian tour.

Last year the Brisbane Institute hosted a public lecture by Dr Jay Lehr, Science Director of the Heartland Institute. As we saw, the Heartland Institute is now the most active climate denialist organisation in the United States. Lehr was presented by the Brisbane Institute as an “internationally renowned” scientist, which is simply untrue; he has been heavily criticised for distorting and misrepresenting climate science. He is better known for spending three months in jail for defrauding the US Environmental Protection Authority in 1991.

The Brisbane Institute is perfectly entitled to take the denialist road. The puzzle is why the University of Queensland, the Institute’s primary sponsor, would support an organisation that promotes anti-science. Paying for Monckton and Fehr to trash climate science in Brisbane does not seem compatible with the University’s aim “to achieve internationally-acknowledged excellence in all forms of research”.

Several scientists from the University serve as authors or reviewers for the IPCC, a body attacked as fraudulent by Monckton and Lehr. The University of Queensland appears unconcerned about linking itself with climate denial. In 2008 it accepted a donation of $350,000 from a climate change sceptic, channeled through the IPA, who wanted it to be spent on funding doctoral research on climate change. Of course, the University said there would be no strings attached.

These think tanks are at the heart of the denial movement in this country. They provide funding and organisational capacity, they convene conferences and private meetings, they commission sceptical scientists to write papers, they publish and promote sceptical papers and books, they supply “experts” to the media and they lobby at every opportunity.

Every sceptical scientist, no matter how independent he starts out, is sooner or later drawn into the web formed by these think tanks. In Australia, Bob Carter is a favourite of the Heartland Institute and the Lavoisier Group, Ian Plimer is an associate of the Institute for Public Affairs and an adviser to Nigel Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation, and William Kinninmonth (the Australian sceptic with perhaps the strongest claims to being a climate scientist) allowed his book to be launched by the Lavoisier Group.

The links of these sceptics to political organisations with strong ideological agendas stands in sharp contrast to the vast assemblage of legitimate climate scientists who have no political connections. Yet it is the latter who are accused of being politicised.

Backlash against the 60s

Despite their financial support from Big Carbon, it would be wrong to believe that the conservative think tanks operate solely at the behest of the fossil fuel industries. Their objectives are principally ideological and they would still be campaigning against climate science without funding from Exxon Mobil and others; they would just be less effective. In the United States and Australia, it is probably true that they have received more funding from right-wing foundations with no links to Big Carbon than from oil and coal companies (although some, like the Scaife Foundations, owe their wealth to oil).

So, in the end, their motives are political rather than commercial. The arms of the denialist war on climate science – the bloggers and letter writers; the right wing columnists like Andrew Bolt, Christopher Pearson and Miranda Devine; the Murdoch broadsheets; and the conservative think tanks – are united by one factor, a hatred of environmentalism. Environmentalism is variously seen to be the enemy of individual freedom, an ideology of smug elites, an attack on capitalism and consumerism, and the vanguard of world government.

This antagonism towards the real or assumed ideas of environmentalism is spiced with a loathing for “green culture” represented by the image of the long-haired tree-huggers who want to impose their ascetic lifestyle on others.

Politically, climate denialism represents a backlash against the advances begun by the social movements of the 1960s and their destabilisation of traditional social structures and beliefs, including those of the right of humans to exploit the natural world, which helps explain why its activists are overwhelmingly older. Raging against climate science fits perfectly with the worldview, style and audience demographic of populist shock-jocks like Alan Jones, Australia’s answer to Rush Limbaugh.

To turn back the tide of denialism, perhaps the most significant step would be for those conservative leaders who accept the science to speak out loudly and clearly about the need to take action. It is in their hands to break down the belief that global warming is somehow a left-wing cause.

Tomorrow: How to manufacture a scientific scandal.

Climate sceptics are recycled critics of controls on tobacco and acid rain

Posted on by
1

Jeffrey Sachs, guardian.co.uk,          Friday 19 February 2010 12.47 GMT

In the weeks before and after the Copenhagen climate change conference last December, the science of climate change came under harsh attack by critics who contend that climate scientists have deliberately suppressed evidence — and that the science itself is severely flawed. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC), the global group of experts charged with assessing the state of climate science, has been accused of bias.

The global public is disconcerted by these attacks. If experts cannot agree that there is a climate crisis, why should governments spend billions of dollars to address it?

The fact is that the critics — who are few in number but aggressive in their attacks — are deploying tactics that they have honed for more than 25 years. During their long campaign, they have greatly exaggerated scientific disagreements in order to stop action on climate change, with special interests like Exxon Mobil footing the bill.

Many books have recently documented the games played by the climate-change deniers. Merchants of Doubt, a new book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway set for release in mid-2010, will be an authoritative account of their misbehaviour. The authors show that the same group of mischief-makers, given a platform by the free-market ideologues of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, has consistently tried to confuse the public and discredit the scientists whose insights are helping to save the world from unintended environmental harm.

Today’s campaigners against action on climate change are in many cases backed by the same lobbies, individuals, and organisations that sided with the tobacco industry to discredit the science linking smoking and lung cancer. Later, they fought the scientific evidence that sulphur oxides from coal-fired power plants were causing “acid rain.” Then, when it was discovered that certain chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were causing the depletion of ozone in the atmosphere, the same groups launched a nasty campaign to discredit that science, too.

Later still, the group defended the tobacco giants against charges that second-hand smoke causes cancer and other diseases. And then, starting mainly in the 1980s, this same group took on the battle against climate change.

What is amazing is that, although these attacks on science have been wrong for 30 years, they still sow doubts about established facts. The truth is that there is big money backing the climate-change deniers, whether it is companies that don’t want to pay the extra costs of regulation, or free-market ideologues opposed to any government controls.

The latest round of attacks involves two episodes. The first was the hacking of a climate-change research centre in England. The emails that were stolen suggested a lack of forthrightness in the presentation of some climate data. Whatever the details of this specific case, the studies in question represent a tiny fraction of the overwhelming scientific evidence that points to the reality and urgency of man-made climate change.

The second issue was a blatant error concerning glaciers that appeared in a major IPCC report. Here it should be understood that the IPCC issues thousands of pages of text. There are, no doubt, errors in those pages. But errors in the midst of a vast and complex report by the IPCC point to the inevitability of human shortcomings, not to any fundamental flaws in climate science.

When the emails and the IPCC error were brought to light, editorial writers at The Wall Street Journal launched a vicious campaign describing climate science as a hoax and a conspiracy. They claimed that scientists were fabricating evidence in order to obtain government research grants — a ludicrous accusation, I thought at the time, given that the scientists under attack have devoted their lives to finding the truth, and have certainly not become rich relative to their peers in finance and business.

But then I recalled that this line of attack — charging a scientific conspiracy to drum up “business” for science — was almost identical to that used by The Wall Street Journal and others in the past, when they fought controls on tobacco, acid rain, ozone depletion, second-hand smoke, and other dangerous pollutants. In other words, their arguments were systematic and contrived, not at all original to the circumstances.

We are witnessing a predictable process by ideologues and right-wing think tanks and publications to discredit the scientific process. Their arguments have been repeatedly disproved for 30 years — time after time — but their aggressive methods of public propaganda succeed in causing delay and confusion.

Climate change science is a wondrous intellectual activity. Great scientific minds have learned over the course of many decades to “read” the Earth’s history, in order to understand how the climate system works. They have deployed brilliant physics, biology, and instrumentation (such as satellites reading detailed features of the Earth’s systems) in order to advance our understanding.

And the message is clear: large-scale use of oil, coal, and gas is threatening the biology and chemistry of the planet. We are fuelling dangerous changes in Earth’s climate and ocean chemistry, giving rise to extreme storms, droughts, and other hazards that will damage the food supply and the quality of life of the planet.

The IPCC and the climate scientists are telling us a crucial message. We need urgently to transform our energy, transport, food, industrial, and construction systems to reduce the dangerous human impact on the climate. It is our responsibility to listen, to understand the message, and then to act.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2010

Scientists Defend UN Climate Change Report From Right Wing Assault

Posted on by
2

This was posted at TechPulse360 by Mark Boslet this morning.

Scalding critiques of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 report run hotter than Ronald Reagan’s temper when confronting a Vietnam War peace demonstration.

Mistakes, these right wing critics, claim, undermine the entire U.N.-sponsored study, Al Gore’s Nobel Prize and the entire body of scientific evidence supporting global warming.

Return to the do-nothing policies of the Bush years, they scream.

It is shocking the force that several rather trivial errors have in undermining a massive three-volume report totaling more than 3,000 pages. Welcome to the nonsense of the climate change debate (or rather non-debate).

It was the IPCC report that forcefully told the world the burning of fossil fuels was warming the globe and action had to be taken. The study was immediately assailed as over reaching. Now right-wingers and Republicans are feasting on several errors that have come to light, including an incorrect date for the melting of the Himalayan glaciers. It was said to be 2035, but it more probably later.

Another incorrect statement describes the Netherlands as more than 50 percent under sea level. A final comes because the IPCC relied on non-scientific source to claim that 40 percent of the Amazon rain forest will become to savanna if the warming trend from CO2 accumulation is not reversed.

None of these mistakes should have appeared in the scholarly work, people from both sides of the aisle agree. But they are relatively minor points considering the scope of the work, according to climate scientists interviewed about the controversy.

“I’m not surprised that a report which involves three massive volumes (each over 1000 pages of smallish print), written by over 450 lead authors and 800 contributing authors (and reviewed by 2,500 expert experts who submitted 90,000 review comments on the draft document) (could) have a few errors in it,” says Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Professor and Director of the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland in Australia.

“When you compare it to the gross errors of fact which are promulgated by people claiming that climate change is not occurring, these few errors in an otherwise very watertight document are relatively insignificant,” he says.

Presenting errors like these should be a major concern for the IPCC, Hoegh-Guldberg wrote in an e-mail. But do they justify throwing out the rest of the work?  “Of course not.”

More on ESA listing for corals

Posted on by
Reply

There is an interesting discussion on the coallist server about the new petition to list 82 more corals that illuminates the variety of perspectives on this topic:

On February 10, 2010, NOAA Fisheries Service published a Federal

Register Notice finding the agency will evaluate the status of 82

species of coral under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), in response to

a petition from the Center for Biological Diversity. Of the 82 species

that will be reviewed, seven species occur in U.S. Caribbean waters and,

according to the petition, 75 occur in U.S. Pacific waters. NOAA?s

Fisheries Service is soliciting information on the species? historical

and current distribution and abundance, the short- and long-term effects

of climate change on their condition and the effects of other potential

threats such as land-based sources of pollution, and existing

conversation efforts. Please see the FR notice for further information

at http://sero.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/esa/82CoralSpecies.htm

—

Jennifer Ann Moore

Acropora Coordinator

Natural Resource Specialist

NOAA Fisheries Service

Protected Resources Division

263 13th Ave. S.

St. Petersburg, FL  33701

(727)824-5312 phone

(727)824-5309 fax

jennifer.moore@noaa.gov

http://sero.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/esa/acropora.htm

From: Sarah Heberling <Sarah.Heberling@noaa.gov>

Subject: [Coral-List] Endangered species status will be considered for

82            corals

To: coral-list@coral.aoml.noaa.gov

Message-ID: <4B7D76B8.6090206@noaa.gov>

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

Thank you, Andrea!

For additional information on what NMFS is doing for the ESA-listed

species of /Acropora palmata/ and /A. cervicornis/ in the U.S. and

Caribbean, I encourage you to visit our website:

http://sero.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/esa/acropora.htm.  There you will find FAQs

about the listing process and about the designation of critical habitat

under the ESA (including answers to “What does this mean to me??”).

Plus, there is a handy worksheet for figuring out which permits you

might need when conducting research on these two listed species.  It’s

all not as scary as some would have you think.

Additionally, please visit

http://sero.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/esa/82CoralSpecies.htm for more information

on the petition to list 82 corals, on NMFS’ 90-day response to the

petition, and on NMFS’ request for more information to support status

reviews for these species.  Please consider providing your comments,

data, and information to assist us with the massive task of thoroughly

assessing the status of each the 82 candidate coral species!!

Cheers,

Sarah

—

Sarah E. Heberling

NOAA Fisheries Service

Phone: (727) 824-5312

Fax: (727) 824-5309

Email: Sarah.Heberling@noaa.gov

Web: http://sero.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/pr.htm

“What good is a used up world; and how could it be worth having?”

Coral-Listers, Be careful what you wish for and beware of, “The Law

of unintended consequences.”  At stake is the listing of 82 species

of corals which is the first step toward making all Atlantic  coral

reefs off limits to divers and researchers (except for an elite few).

Imagine the increased paperwork ect., that will be required to obtain

a permit to study any of these corals or a reef where they live. If

passed the next step will  be designation of critical habitats to

protect these species—-from what? and how? Every scuba diver

bubbles Co2 into the water, (exhaled breath contains up to 40,000 ppm

Co2).Down the road we may have to stop scuba diving or mandate the

use of rebreathers. The Co2 battle is being fought vigorously on many

other fronts  so why use corals as pawns to create a new tangle of

government regulations and bureaucrats? What is really behind this?

Job creation? More coral police? The only winners I see will be the

lawyers! I think that this time The Center for Biodiversity has gone

over the top and is more obstructionist than I ever thought they

would be. I wonder who supports them? How do they get their funding?

Now that’s something to ponder! Lets be reasonable!  This action is

not going to save  corals. Just look to the geologic record. The

grandest reefs the world has ever known grew during the Cretaceous

when Co2 levels were more than 7 times present levels. To and Earth

scientist this action appears to be just one more issue for people to

disagree on in a country already so politically divided on most any

subject one can think of. No this is not Glen Beck speaking…

Gene Shinn

Gene:

There is plenty to question and debate about the application of the ESA

in the way it is being used by the Center for Biodiversity, but this

unwashed, inflammatory drivel is not civil discourse and has no place on

coral-list.

John Ogden

Gene,

Let me tell you a little story.  You will recall the Conch Coalition, the

so-called “grass-roots” group that formed in the Florida Keys to oppose

the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary in the early to mid-1990’s.  I

said so-called and put “grass-roots” in parenthesis because some of their

organizers came from out of town and a local investigative reporter found

funding links back to the wise-use movement.

But to get to my point, Conch Coalition representatives began a

door-to-door campaign, especially in the Upper Keys telling people such

things as, “if you loose the roof on your house in a hurricane, the

Sanctuary will not let you rebuild!”. Or, a real frightening bit of

mis-leading, malicious fabrication was “if your car leaks oil on your

driveway, NOAA will fine you $100 thousand dollars.”  They were full of

lies and mis-information and single income or retired individuals believed

them at first.

However, when these malicious and false claims did not happen, even

multiple hurricane strikes later…. the credibility of the Conch

Coalition was affected.  Those that came from the outside are gone and

support for the Sanctuary has swung to the positive side.

Now … I recall you made similar claims about the listing of Acropora

species …. Yet your falsely based predictions haven’t taken place.

I share this story about how the Conch Coalition tarnished and lost their

credibility in the Keys as a long time friend.

Billy Causey

Hi all,

I’d like to respond to some of the questions Gene raised about CBD’s coral

petition and the effects of listing corals under the Endangered Species Act

(ESA). First, the purpose of the listing petition is pretty straightforward:

to protect corals from a range of threats, including not just climate change

and acidification, but degraded water quality, destruction by anchors, trawl

gear, and unsustainable development. Please bear in mind that listing a

species and designating critical habitat for it does not automatically block

any activity.  Acropora palmata and A. cervicornis are already listed under

the ESA and critical habitat has been designated for both species along the

south Fla. coast and Keys.  Diving, fishing, research, and pretty much every

other activity that was permitted before continues now.  The main difference

is that the federal government must now ensure that any activity it

authorizes or funds in that area (e.g., dredging) will not jeopardize the

survival and recovery of those species or destroy their critical habitat.

That analysis rarely results in activities being wholly curtailed.  Most

often they are modified to minimize impacts and allowed to continue.

As one who works with this law day in and day out, I can assure you that

listing corals is not going to lead to requiring rebreathers or excluding

divers from coral habitat.  What we do hope it will accomplish with divers

is an increased awareness that these corals are fragile, incredibly

important habitat-builders that need to be treated with care.  I’ve seen

enough of my fellow divers grabbing and kicking coral to believe that

message has still not reached nearly enough recreational divers.

We also hope to raise awareness regarding the threat of climate change and

ocean acidification to coral reefs.  As many on this list have noted, public

awareness is crucial to protecting corals.  There has been much discussion

on the list about how to bring the “save the corals” message to the public.

This is one more way to do that.

As for research, it is true that researchers will need to get one more

permit.  For researchers dedicated to understanding and conserving corals,

I’d hope this wouldn’t be seen as a reason to oppose protecting them under a

law designed to ensure not only their survival, but their recovery.

Moreover, ESA listing can bring with it increased attention and funding for

scientific research on the listed species.

I hope this information is helpful.  Please feel free to contact us if you

have any questions about the petition, how the process works, etc.  Thank

you all for the great work you do to protect corals.

Andrea

Andrea A. Treece

Senior Attorney, Oceans Program

Center for Biological Diversity

351 California Street, Suite 600

San Francisco, CA 94104

ph: 415-436-9682 x306      fax:  415-436-9683

I’d like to support Andrea in her comments about the value and supposed obstacles created by an ESA list of coral. First, speaking as a 35-year veteran of the recreational diving industry and editor of the oldest national scuba publication in America, we have no fear that anyone will require us to use rebreathers, or impose any other onerous regulations due to the listing. In fact, the listing of staghorn and elkhorn has, as she indicates, raised the awareness among divers to the plight of these species as well as coral reef in general. And I have no doubt that listing more species will do the same.

Now, putting on my hat as a marine science professor, we have the privilege here at FKCC of working with the Coral Restoration Foundation in raising and transplanting cervicornis in the Florida Keys; and we not found any requirements imposed on us that are either onerous or unreasonable.

Alex

Alex. F. Brylske, Ph.D.

Professor, Marine Science & Technology

Florida Keys Community College

5901 College Rd.

Key West, FL 33040

office: 305-809-3148

cell: 954-701-1966

alex.brylske@fkcc.edu

brylske@aol.com

Fellow coral listers,

I prefer to silently read the posts by others, but every now and then, I

am forced to comment.  Recent posts on the topic of listing of more corals

under the US Endangered Species Act by Gene Shinn, John Ogden and others

show the diversity of opinion out there, even among the scientifically

informed.  Rather than comment on whether listing is a useful action to

take, let me take a different tack. (I remain curious concerning the

penchant within the US for listing organisms that live largely or entirely

outside US jurisdiction ? such as the red kangaroo ? but now is not the

time and place for that discussion.)  There is such a thing as fiddling

while Rome burns.  We are generally quite good at that, and I fear we are

going to go on fiddling until the opportunity to actually take action will

have passed us by.  Corals, and many other species, are at risk of

extinction because too many of us insist on demanding too much from an

environment that cannot provide for these wants.  I happen to think we

need these other species more than we realize, and that it is in our own

self-interest to change our attitudes and behavior now.  We do not need

the US to list corals as endangered to know that management of most reef

areas around the world is woefully inadequate, nor to know what steps need

to be taken to improve that management ? reduce overfishing, cut

pollution, eliminate inappropriate coastal development, and, yes, cut CO2

emissions and reduce atmospheric CO2 concentrations in order to

stabilize/restore ocean surface waters pH.  In short, we need to start

managing our impacts on reefs, instead of continuing to pretend to manage

them.  That means making actual, on-the-ground changes, not discussing

changes, legislating changes, or bemoaning the lack of changes.  We could

also start thinking seriously about the carrying capacity of this planet

for Homo sapiens, rather than complacently noting that our population is

trending towards 9.2 billion by mid century.  What can one scientist do?

We each can start by doing our best to articulate the problem as clearly

as possible in every forum open to us ? we have a very big problem and

most people are quite unaware of how big it is.  When did you last

buttonhole a politician, get an article into a newspaper, talk to a school

group, post on a web-site, get yourself onto TV to talk about environment,

or, especially, work to improve environmental management where you live?

When did  you last talk quietly to your family or neighbors about this

issue?  When did you set an example?  Spaceship Earth is not being managed

sustainably, and its coral canaries are screaming as loudly as they can.

Peter Sale

Peter F. Sale

Assistant Director

United Nations University

Institute for Water, Environment and Health

and

University Professor Emeritus

University of Windsor

IPCC errors: facts and spin

Posted on by
Reply

There is a great new must read article at RealClimate outlining and analyzing all those errors in the IPCC AR4 report you keep hearing about.  Check it our here.

Currently, a few errors –and supposed errors– in the last IPCC report (“AR4″) are making the media rounds – together with a lot of distortion and professional spin by parties interested in discrediting climate science.  Time for us to sort the wheat from the chaff: which of these putative errors are real, and which not? And what does it all mean, for the IPCC in particular, and for climate science more broadly?

Let’s start with a few basic facts about the IPCC.  The IPCC is not, as many people seem to think, a large organization. In fact, it has only 10 full-time staff in its secretariat at the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva, plus a few staff in four technical support units that help the chairs of the three IPCC working groups and the national greenhouse gas inventories group. The actual work of the IPCC is done by unpaid volunteers – thousands of scientists at universities and research institutes around the world who contribute as authors or reviewers to the completion of the IPCC reports. A large fraction of the relevant scientific community is thus involved in the effort…

Read the rest here

Same old Bolt, same old story.

Posted on by
17

wilson-boltUpdate: Andrew is at it again.  Either he doesn’t understand the science or he is wilfully distorting the information surrounding the impact of climate change on coral reefs.

See also this posting and this one on huge impacts of exceptionally warm water in Western Australia on coral reefs.

Update: this piece was first published back on Feb 10th, 2009 – I thought it would be worth bringing up to the top to highlight Bolt’s ongoing war against science.

After last nights airing of the Australian Story (click here if you missed the epsiode), the columnist Andrew Bolt has decided to play the wounded soldier, accusing ABC Australian Story of bias.  Like me, you might find this a little amusing coming from someone who spends most of his time spinning the truth on all number of issues at the expense of his unable-to-respond victims.  Apart from failing to tell you that the ABC went to great lengths to put up the full video of our exchange (which is up on their website here, and the fact that he got the last word), he continues to accuse the ABC of bias and scientists like me of being eco-alarmists.  In a very tiresome way he has trotted out the same old accusations despite the fact that he has been corrected endlessly.  So much for his adherence to the truth!

Anyway, here we go again:

Accusation 1.  “In 1999, Ove warned that the Great Barrier Reef was under pressure from global warming, and much of it had turned white. In fact, he later admitted the reef had made a “surprising” recovery.”

Firstly, Andrew has the year wrong – I think he meant 1998.  In 1998, 60% of the Great Barrier Reef bleached, and about 5-10% of the reef died. These are not my figures, but figures from the surveys done by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. All published in peer review journals rather than newspapers.  Secondly, it is true we as a scientific community were very concerned – rightfully so given similar events happened in the Western Indian Ocean in 1998, which resulted in 46% of coral reefs being destroyed.  One third of those coral reefs destroyed remain missing in action, and have failed to recover 10 years after the event.   Third, in all of Andrew’s comments so far, it is apparent that he fails to realise that we were talking about the risk of particular events happening.  As waters heat and corals bleached, there is the increased risk of reefs like the Great Barrier Reef being severely damaged.  I believe that it would be remiss of scientists not to communicate the concern about this increased risk – I challenge anyone who thinks that this is an alarmist strategy.

As for my comment about a “surprising recovery” – like many reef scientists, I was overjoyed to see that the Great Barrier Reef had fared better than the Western Indian Ocean. The fact that the risk had increased sharply but we got away with only 5-10% of the reefs being damaged was good to see.  Despite the small percentage though, 5-10% of reefs represents about 4,000 square kilometres of coral reef being destroyed.  That is, even though it wasn’t as bad as the catastrophe in the Western Indian Ocean, it was still a highly significant event.

Accusation 2. “In 2006, he warned high temperatures meant “between 30 and 40 per cent of coral on Queensland’s great Barrier Reef could die within a month”. In fact, he later admitted this bleaching had “a minimal impact”.

I stand by the statement that coral bleaching is a serious threat to the Great Barrier Reef – to date we have gotten off lightly compared to other areas around the world. Let’s examine what actually happened in 2006.  Early in that year, we saw an unusual and rapid warming of the waters of the Great Barrier Reef and the risk of a major bleaching event escalated as temperatures climbed. Leading scientists from the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority were saying exactly what I was saying. Both US experts at NOAA and NASA came out with similar statements.  While the northern Great Barrier Reef looked like it might be damaged, the risk dissipated as summer progressed.  As it turned out, however, the hot water remained in the southern Great Barrier Reef and killed 30-40% of corals in that region. Again, the outcome was not trivial but it wasn’t as bad as the sorts of catastrophes we had seen in other reef regions around the world, such as the Caribbean and Indian Ocean regions.

Accusation 3. “In 2007, he warned that temperature changes of the kind caused by global warming were again bleaching the reef. In fact, the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network in December said there had been no big damage to the reef caused by climate change in the four years since its last report, and veteran diver Ben Cropp said that in 50 years he’d seen none at all.”

Putting Andrew unsubstantiated quotes aside, there are some huge inaccuracies and problems in this missive.  Firstly, Andrew’s claim that the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network held this position has been disputed by one of the key scientists from the network.  Secondly, referring to the opinion of a veteran spearfisherman is fine, but runs counter to the objective analysis of the evidence on this issue. I have asked Andrew to read the paper by John Bruno and Liz Selig (both leading international coral reef scientists) who have examined 6000 separate studies done over the last 40 years, and have found evidence that coral reefs both on the Great Barrier Reef and in the Western Pacific deteriorating at the rate of 1-2% per year.  The challenge to Andrew is to show why this analysis of 6000 separate studies is wrong and why he and a few unpublished ‘experts’ are right – the paper is free online for anyone to read.

Afterall, in his own words Andrew admits:

“I am not a scientist, and cannot have an informed opinion on your research.”

Then, what are you really saying?

Somali pirates and roving banditry

Posted on by
Reply

Resilience Science just ran a post on a recent AP story that highlights the link between Somali pirates and recovering fish stocks in the region. Basically, increases in pirate activity has scared off the roving bandits –  fishing fleets from mainly from South Korea, Japan and EU – that have previously been exploiting the rich fishing grounds in the region.

Fishermen and sportsmen say they’ve been catching more fish than ever. Howard Lawrence-Brown, who owns Kenya Deep Sea Fishing, said fishing stocks over the last year have been up “enormously — across all species.”

“We had the best marlin season ever last year,” said Lawrence-Brown, who owns Kenya Deep Sea Fishing. “The only explanation is that somebody is not targeting them somewhere. … There’s definitely no question about it, the lack of commercial fishing has made a difference.”

I’m personally not convinced that overexploited fish stocks can recover on such short time-scales, but this is an interesting hypothesis. The story reiterates another interesting facet of the Somali pirate problem: that this phenomenon actually began as a way to protect Somali fishing grounds from foreign fleets. From another, earlier story from Time magazine

Ever since a civil war brought down Somalia’s last functional government in 1991, the country’s 3,330 km (2,000 miles) of coastline — the longest in continental Africa — has been pillaged by foreign vessels. A United Nations report in 2006 said that, in the absence of the country’s at one time serviceable coastguard, Somali waters have become the site of an international “free for all,” with fishing fleets from around the world illegally plundering Somali stocks and freezing out the country’s own rudimentarily-equipped fishermen. According to another U.N. report, an estimated $300 million worth of seafood is stolen from the country’s coastline each year. “In any context,” says Gustavo Carvalho, a London-based researcher with Global Witness, an environmental NGO, “that is a staggering sum.”

In the face of this, impoverished Somalis living by the sea have been forced over the years to defend their own fishing expeditions out of ports such as Eyl, Kismayo and Harardhere — all now considered to be pirate dens. Somali fishermen, whose industry was always small-scale, lacked the advanced boats and technologies of their interloping competitors, and also complained of being shot at by foreign fishermen with water cannons and firearms. “The first pirate gangs emerged in the ’90s to protect against foreign trawlers,” says Peter Lehr, lecturer in terrorism studies at Scotland’s University of St. Andrews and editor of Violence at Sea: Piracy in the Age of Global Terrorism. The names of existing pirate fleets, such as the National Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia or Somali Marines, are testament to the pirates’ initial motivations.

‘Triple whammy’ takes toll on Arctic erosion

Posted on by
2

Coastal erosion is a growing problem related to AGW you don’t hear much about.  Erosion, and habitat and property loss, is related to sea level rise, but can be compounded by other things such as changes in storm intensity and frequency and by fetch and exposure duration, which in the Arctic is increasing due to sea ice loss.

U. COLORADO—The combined effect of declining sea ice, warming seawater, and increased wave activity is causing the northern coastline of Alaska to erode by up to one-third the length of a football field each year.

Robert Anderson, associate professor of geological sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder, says the conditions have led to the steady retreat of 30 to 45 feet a year of the 12-foot-high bluffs.

The bluffs are actually frozen blocks of silt and peat containing 50 to 80 percent ice—which are toppled into the Beaufort Sea during the summer months by a combination of large waves pounding the shoreline and warm seawater melting the base of the bluffs.

Once the blocks have fallen, the coastal seawater melts them in a matter of days, sweeping the silty material out to sea.

The problem is caused by several factors, including increased erosion along the Alaskan coastline due to longer ice-free summer conditions and warmer seawater bathing the coast, Anderson says.

The third potential factor is that the longer the sea ice is detached from the coastline, the further out to sea the sea-ice edge will be.

This open-ocean distance between the sea ice and the shore, known as the “fetch,” increases both the energy of waves crashing into the coast and the height to which warm seawater can come into contact with the frozen bluffs.

“What we are seeing now is a triple whammy effect,” Anderson says.

“Since the summer Arctic sea ice cover continues to decline and Arctic air and sea temperatures continue to rise, we really don’t see any prospect for this process ending.

Read the full story on Futurity here

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSXpsg_gjms&w=425&h=344]