Mark, thanks for another thoughtful expose on academic activism.

In September 2006 (Bulletin of the Ecological Society of Australia) one of the researchers, Sandy Berry tells of the WildCountry project. She states it “is an initiative of the Wilderness Society, the industry partner in the ARC Linkage Grant that provides much of our funding. The research agenda has been developed in collaboration with the WildCountry Science Council.”

The Australian Research Council (ARC) identifies the grant as LP0455163 to the ANU and lists the members of the WildCountry Science council.

The $440,000 grant of taxpayer’s funds was for the “Development and Testing of an Australia-wide Biodiversity Conservation Assessment and Planning”, yet in the green carbon report it is acknowledged that “These analyses also drew on data and models developed as part of an Australian Research Council Linkage grant, LP0455163.”

Like last year’s green carbon book that stated “A technical paper that details the source data, the methods used and the full results is being prepared”, this new paper is also short on detail. Instead of inventory data of each forest plot we are told “Our field measurements and calculations revealed that maximum biomass carbon density for a E. regnans-dominated site was 1,819 tC_ha_1 in living above-ground biomass and 2,844 tC_ha_1 in total biomass from stands with a well-defined structure of overstory and midstory trees (see Fig. 1).

Yet 'Fig. 1' appears to be part of a photo shown on the ABC science web site reporting the story see http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2009/06/16/2599532.htm

The ABC version includes an access road, has it been ‘cropped’ out for the scientific paper that claims “it had been subject to minimal human disturbance”?

What would have happened to the carbon density if the 10 metre plot had been taken on the road?

It would be a different story from those in the Regnans, described as the tallest flowering plants in the world that can tower more than 100 metres and can grow more than a metre per year to exceed 50 metres within 35 years and maximum height within 200 years in the absence of fire.

Maybe we should put all carbon-related products such as coal and oil underground where they naturally belong to grow trees and such to save this world for our descendants?

Certainly our scientific reasoning has the other alternatives, so why don't we just get to it?

I myself can't help cause' I'm going on 89.

Cheers, BB, Buntine, WA.

Last year there was one thing I thought Mackey et al's green carbon book might be good for - curing insomnia. In the early morning my eyelids were getting heavy as I struggled through the endless pages of ideology looking for the scientific basis; but I sat bolt upright when I got to their statement “...A technical paper that details the source data, the methods used and the full results is being prepared”. Ahh! The Cold Fusion ploy. Straight to the media. Sycophant 'reviewers'. A con job by the Fenner Carbon Clowns. I'm going to read the new PNAS item tonight to see if it can overcome the three short blacks I'll be having at 1130 tonight.

Mark, we still have to go trout fishin' sometime.

Mark, I think you have explained what is a quite complex area very well.

To Taswegian – Initially it seems like a nice idea for all imported timber to be from certified forests, but if so, shouldn't this also apply to all imported goods made from wood, such as furniture, packaging and paper? Otherwise there will be an unfair advantage given to imported goods (eg furniture) competing with Australian made furniture (and it would apply an environmental double-standard). Ultimately, of course, if import restrictions were just applied to raw timber and not to manufactured goods made from wood, you would just see the manufacturing go off-shore.

Secondly, much of the sustainable fine hardwood that Australia imports from the USA, Europe and Canada is not certified, yet comes from small farm sustainable wood-lots. These “little forests”, which are maybe 5 – 20 acres of trees like Maple (where Maple Syrup comes from!), Walnut (yup, that’s your nuts) and Oak provide ongoing sustainable supplementary income for these farmers, and have done so for generations. However, in many cases it simply isn't feasible for these guys to get ten acres or so of woods certified, and so, for instance, only about 5% of the hardwood forests of the US are certified. For these farmers, certification is just too expensive, time-consuming and beyond the capacity of their resources. Imagine coming in at night, after digging fence holes all day, having finished the milking and fed the calves, help your wife with some chores, and sit down with the kids and help them with their homework, and then you have to do your certification paper-work.

I recently heard the following film review:

“THE BURNING SEASON by writer/director Cathy Henkel.
It’s about the problem of deforestation IN INDONESIA and the subsequent burning of the forests to clear the land for plantations of palm trees for their oil.
Frightening statistics abound. THIS BURNING IS RESPONSIBLE FOR 20% OF THE WORLD’S CARBON EMISSIONS
http://www.abc.net.au/atthemovies/txt/s2603294.htm

Quite a high figure, so I did some checking, and found this:

“Aside from affecting biodiversity, 20 percent of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere - a major contributor to global climate change - is from deforestation. Until recently, policymakers have focused on coal-burning power plants and SUVs as global warming culprits, but in 2007, for the first time, the United Nations Framework Commission on Climate Change included forests as official sources of carbon emissions - and targets for action. As a result, entrepreneurs are building businesses that save forests by making them worth more standing than torched.”
http://www.illegal-logging.info/item_single.php?item=news&item_id=3347&

It seems likely that the ABC film reviewer got it wrong – FOREST BURNING IN GENERAL IS RESPONSIBLE FOR 20%.

But what caught my attention was this little gem:

“IN 2007, FOR THE FIRST TIME , the United Nations Framework Commission on Climate Change INCLUDED FORESTS AS OFFICIAL SOURCES OF CARBON EMISSIONS - and targets for action”.

Am missing/misreading something here --it seems various UN bodies were talking of culpability long before 2007.

Yet, 20% of emissions/sources were not factored in until 2007!

Draw your own conclusions!

Horus: the UN agencies and others like WWF & co are incapable of - or unwilling to - distinguish between gross and net. They are also guilty of latent but innate racism. The truths are (1) deforestation that leads to plantation forestry or oil palm plantations and the like actually take up more CO2 per annum than was being stored in old but moribund forests; (2) they never castigate white nations that do just as much if not more logging than the Indonesians Malaysians and other browns - have you ever seen them hugging the trees in Finland and Scandinavia before they get logged?. As ever there is one law for the white rich and another for the poor browns.

Here are some facts (from FAO) that you will NEVER see in any emanation from Greenpeace and their fellow racists: black Africa's total round wood production (ie logs) in 2002 was 66.8 million cubic metres, those wicked Indonesians managed 80 mn cu.m., but white Europe's was 480 mn cu.m. and North America 615 mn cu.m. But the disparities are immaterial as about 100% of industrial roundwood whether from black or white countries ends up as furniture and building materials that STORE CO2 indefinitely, a fact Greenpeace (and the original auhtors of this thread) will never admit, but then why would they being ignorant if not both racist and dishonest? So the truth is that there is no NET loss of CO2 from logging, in fact the world's forest industries and tree crops including oil palm coffee cocoa and tea are net absorbers of CO2.

Here are some more annoying facts (for the authors of this thread): Oil palm takes up 25.7 tonnes of CO2 per hectare p.a., tropical forests manage just 9.62. But then it is only black/brown countries that do oil palm, and they are also the main consumers (palm oil is a food, a fact you will never get from Greenpeace and co) but who cares if they have to do without or buy more expensive olive oil from us whities?