I agree that Indonesian demand for payment to refrain from deforestation (home of cuddly orang utans) is essentially blackmail. They should conserve the forests to avoid a large carbon debit, perhaps as assessed by satellite surveillance. They shoot themselves in the foot by razing those forests. In any case Australia cannot excuse burning more coal because CO2 absorption by standing tropical forest won't increase.

My fear with temperate old growth forest such as in Tasmania is that it will get too fragmented and will dry out. I believe large stands not only self seed but create their own rain clouds. Kiln made charcoal from plantation wood subsequently plowed back into the soil (after using the gas and heat) might be another way of locking up carbon apart from high value wood products.

An article from the forestry lobby demanding to continue their practices despite making their forecasts using flawed science on too small a survey population, over too short a time frame.

In primary school we learnt about the transpiration cycle, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transpiration, that theory hasn't changed, we have deforested Victoria and wonder of wonders we face climatic change of receiving 2/3 of our existing rainfall.

Leongatha used to receive over 80 inches rain per year , it now recieves 40 inches of rain.
Melbourne was 30 inches is now 20 inches

The Australian "Environment" Foundation---another one dimensional IPA clone full of the usual lies and short sighted and short term thinking, set up to counter and discredit the environmental movement altogether.

Yet another "expert" who wants to lead people to believe that forests are just collections of trees and resources of carbon.

Either you respect life and the ecology in which we all live or you don't. By deliberately destroying the habitat of Australia's unique flora and fauna we are slowly chipping away at that which is most important to our long term viability, biodiversity.

The author of this work clearly doesn't see a forest as a place where biodiversity can grow and survive, but as a resource which humans should harvest and the more the merrier. Unlike the propaganda spread around, this kind of thinking will ultimately undermine our future security.

But as long as someone stands up today and says "what about the jobs" it will all continue and make it harder and harder over the years for others who don't work in "old-growth forestry" to get jobs and ultimately threaten their own (as you need others to demand what your produce) as our ecology slowly flat-lines.

Mark Poynter's article would be fine and reasonable if it weren't based on the blatant misrepresentation of Australia's native forest logging industry as a wood production industry, as he did in a very similar article in the Age business section the other day.

Poynter must come clean and acknowledge that only 5% of the carbon from logging in Australia actually ends up in long-lived wood products such as furniture and building materials.

The vast majority is chipped and pulped for paper, much of which ends up being released as CO2 and methane into the atmosphere after just a few years. The remainder is burnt or decays as part of the forestry operation.

That is, fully 95% of the carbon from logging operations in Australia is emitted immediately or within a few short years. Only 5% remains in the long-lived wood products that Poynter is spinning madly.

Now is there any credibility left at all in his article?

Tim Hollo - some points in response to your criticism:
Your 5% figure is suspicous, but agree that solid timber products are the minor component of production compared with paper products. This is largely dictated by the growth characteristcs of Australian eucalypts and the high standards required for solid timber products.

The best analogy I can think of is the beef industry which exists to produce meat for human consumption, but in fact produces far greater quantities of offal, bone, and fat for pet food and fertiliser, and hide for leather. Yet it is still the beef industry. Most mining is the same - the targeted mineral is mixed with huge volumes of rock.

Paper products have been misrepresented as a virtual carbon emission by the environmental movement for some time. In reality, a substantial quantity remains in service for decades - think books, files, boxes. Further to that, around 48% of Australian paper products are recycled, and finally, at the end of its service life can be effectively stored in landfills where recent studies show it can remain virtually intact for as long as 20 - 30 years. So carbon transferred from trees into paper products is far from an automatic emission within a few short years.

Also, as the article pointed out under a sustainable harvesting regime, emissions from waste are being simultaneously recaptured in other parts of the forest so there is no net carbon emission.

Spinning madly? What's your solution Tim - perhaps greater use of steel and concrete and more tropical timber imports?