EXPANDING FORESTS BAD FOR BUTTERFLIES

Chop down those trees!

Changing environmental conditions in the Canadian Rockies are stifling the mating choices of butterflies in the region, say University of Alberta researchers. Smaller and less abundant alpine meadows--largely the result of human activities--are diminishing the alpine butterfly gene pool, creating a pattern that could lead to the butterflies being less able to survive, said Dr. Jens Roland, a biological scientist at the University of Alberta and an author of a paper on the subject that has been published recently in Molecular Ecology.

Working with colleagues in the U of A Department of Biological Sciences, Roland and doctoral student Nusha Keyghobadi used samples of butterfly dispersal and genetic variability taken from the Kananaskis region in Alberta to show a correlation between less genetic diversity and smaller meadows. According to Roland, the altitude of the tree line in the Canadian Rockies is rising--likely due to global warming--and, outside of national parks, forest fires are usually suppressed. These factors are combining to create larger forests and smaller alpine meadows. This is bad news for butterflies in the Rockies, such as the Parnasissus, which Roland studies, because they require two things that they can easily find in meadows: sunlight and stone crop.

Butterflies need sunlight to elevate their body temperatures in order to fly, and forests are generally too shady for them to travel through with quickness and ease. Parnasissus also need stone crop, a plant that grows in meadows and is the only suitable host for alpine butterfly larvae. Therefore, alpine butterflies do not generally travel beyond the meadows they are born in, and the shrinking meadows could lead to inbreeding and the decreased diversity in the gene pool, Roland said. "In general, inbreeding leads a species to be more vulnerable to a variety of mortality factors that lower survival rates," Roland explained. "This has been demonstrated for other species of butterflies."

Only a few species of butterflies are threatened in the Canadian Rockies, but many more are threatened in Europe, where the problem of shrinking alpine meadows is older and more acute. Roland believes the results of his study can inform conservation biologists in Europe to help them save their butterflies.

As for protecting the butterflies in the Canadian Rockies, Roland would like to see more prescribed burning of forests to increase the number and size of alpine meadows. However, unlike the park areas, the unprotected land areas are often used for commercial purposes and are therefore less likely to be allowed to burn. "They do prescribed burning in the national parks for general maintenance, but they also do it to increase the meadow areas, which animals such as sheep and elk like to inhabit. The offshoot is that it also helps smaller animals, such as the butterflies," Roland said.

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Kyoto is dead let it be buried

The following article by economist Alan Wood appeared in yesterday's edition of Australia's national Daily, The Australian. It includes a useful summary of the recent House of Lords report:

Showing what a skilful politician he is, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in his role as president of the G8, managed to simultaneously read the burial service for the Kyoto Treaty while declaring the corpse still breathed. In a sense, though, he is right. The issue of global climate change and how to deal with it is still very much alive. What is dead is Europe's attempt to impose its highly regulated socialist model of climate control on the rest of the world, striking a calculated economic blow at the US in the process.

So the need to ensure what Blair calls "a new dialogue" on reducing greenhouse gas emissions proceeds on a transparent and well-informed basis is crucial. It is by no means obvious that it will. According to Australia's Minister for the Environment, Ian Campbell, the challenge is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about 50 per cent "some time this century". England has a target of a 60 per cent reduction by 2050. This would involve a substantial rise in the cost of energy, particularly carbon-based energy.

Yet the reaction of the Australian and other governments to rising petrol prices is to deny all blame and emphasise their policies are helping to prevent an even bigger rise. These are the people who will cut emissions by 50 per cent to 60 per cent?

I chose this example because it conveniently links in to the report of the select committee on economic affairs of the Britain's House of Lords on the Economics of Climate Change. The report was released on July 6, obviously to coincide with the G8 meeting, where climate change was one of the main issues put on the agenda by Blair. The report deserves attention, because it raises serious questions about the way the global warming issue is being handled by governments and about the reliability and probity of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - the key international body behind the global warming forecasts governments rely on. The first chapter of the report dismisses Kyoto and says the public needs to be told of the costs that will be imposed on it if the far more telling initiatives needed to tackle climate change in any significant way are introduced.

"The fuel protests of 1999-2000 [when the Howard Government dropped the indexation of petrol excise] are testimony to the sensitivity of the public to even modestly rising energy prices," the report says. "Substantial increases in energy prices must be an integral part of any policy for reducing carbon emissions." It wants the British Government to come clean on the cost of its emission target, but there is no sign it or any other government is keen to do that. Equally important, the report raises serious questions about the integrity of the IPCC, with the clear implication that a dangerous amount of politics is being mixed in with the science of global warming projections.

One example it picks up is what it calls the Henderson/Castles critique. David Henderson is a former chief economist at the OECD and Ian Castles is a former commonwealth statistician and senior Australian policy adviser. Henderson and Castles have criticised the economics behind some the key IPCC scenarios on global warming that are driving government policy on greenhouse in many countries, including this one. The IPCC's response has been personal denigration of Henderson and Castles and an attempt to dismiss their arguments as of no consequence.

In contrast, the Lords committee found that they had performed a valuable public service, commenting that without them the debate now swirling around the emissions scenarios would never have taken place. All the witnesses other than the IPCC's own supported Henderson and Castles. And they aren't the only ones questioning the IPCC's work. The British Treasury, for example, doubted the growth figures used in the scenarios. The committee was incredulous to find the IPCC had no intention of reviewing its scenarios before their next assessment of climate change. It said that in the light of the serious questions raised, the IPCC should urgently review its emission scenarios.

The committee was also highly critical of the involvement of political representatives in drafting policy summaries. It quoted one witness who said government sensitivities meant wording that suggested costs of climate control would be large, for example, might "upset" governments who were claiming they would be small and easily bearable, and only agreed wording was used. The committee said it not only could see no justification for this government involvement, but it opened the way for climate science and economics to be determined, at least in part, by political requirements rather than the evidence.

The committee also found some evidence that scientists who did not agree with mainstream scientific consensus on the IPCC were dropped from its panels and less qualified experts substituted. One case was an expert on malaria, Paul Reiter, nominated by the US Government and rejected by the IPCC. "We cannot prove that Professor Reiter's nomination was rejected because of the likelihood that he would argue warming and malaria are not correlated in the manner the IPCC reports suggest. But the suspicion must be there ... It seems to us that there remains a risk that [the] IPCC has become a 'knowledge monopoly', in some respects unwilling to listen to those who do not pursue the consensus line."

Kyoto is dead, but there is a high risk what follows it will also be deeply flawed if governments uncritically accept, as they now seem to, that the IPCC's projections on climate change are a sound basis for future policy. As the committee concludes: "The science of climate change leaves considerable uncertainty about the future". Action against the risk of global warming is prudent. But governments and their citizens need untainted scientific and economic evidence about the extent of global warming and the costs and benefits of various responses before they can react sensibly.






DDT PHOBIA STILL KILLING AFRICANS

Malaria hasn't resurfaced in the United States since DDT was banned. But it remains one of the most potent killers in tropical regions, including parts of Central and South America and especially in Africa. An estimated 300 million people contract malaria every year, and at least 2 million of them die, mostly African children under the age of 5. Until 1999, malaria was a far deadlier plague than AIDS. Even those who survive malaria may suffer brain damage.

There are no effective vaccines against malaria, and drugs needed to treat it are prohibitively expensive. Several prominent health and relief organizations have tried other methods to keep malaria in check, such as dousing bed netting with less harmful chemicals, but they haven't worked very well.

However, a handful of nations, including South Africa, have had remarkable success controlling malaria by spraying small amounts of DDT on interior walls in homes, where it kills or repels the specific mosquito species that transmits the disease when it bites.

Still, the World Health Organization and USAID, which receive funding from the American government, will not pay for DDT treatments because of American prohibitions on its use. That ban ought to be lifted - or eased.

Last month, scientists in London announced that they'd discovered two types of fungi that kill malaria-carrying mosquitoes but which are harmless to humans. That's hopeful news, but it could take up to five years before the fungi could be synthesized for use against malaria. Until then, limited and closely monitored applications of DDT may help hasten the day when malaria in Africa and other parts of the developing world is little more than a memory - as it is here.

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ANOTHER COMMENT ON THE "PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE"

One of my readers writes as follows with reference to my post of yesterday:

"The precautionary principle is an anti-progress, anti-technology ideology that would cause the health of our nation to stagnate instead of steadily improving. "

Is it just me or is this massive irony. The same people who are terrified of technological progress advocate every kind of social and personal experimentation.

Genetically modified corn -- It's been tested on animals and had its molecular constituents examined, but who knows there might be something we don't know about.

Nuclear energy -- we can't use it because we can't be absolutely sure about it's storing its waste products for a million years.

Same sex marriage -- never occurred before in any known civilization, no problem. Let's do it, kumbaya.

Multiculturalism -- ceaselessly attack the dominant and successful culture and urge the adoption of the values of failed cultures. No problem, all cultures are equal (except in the ability to earn money, which is unimportant compared to other cultural abilities, like body piercing).

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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