Military exercises 'good for endangered species'

Firing ranges can have more wildlife than national parks

Military exercises are boosting biodiversity, according to a study of land used for US training manoeuvres in Germany. Such land has more endangered species than nearby national parks. The land is uncultivated, but also churned up by tank tracks and explosions. This creates habitat both for species that prefer pristine lands and those that require disturbed ground, explains ecologist Steven Warren of Colorado State University in Fort Collins. Military land can host more species than agricultural land, Warren told a meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Montreal. What's more, its biodiversity can also exceed that of natural parks, where species that need disturbance cannot get a foothold.

Warren and his colleague Reiner Buettner of the Institute of Botany and Landscape Ecology in Hemhofen, Germany, surveyed two US military bases at Grafenwoehr and Hohenfels in the southern state of Bavaria. Although the bases represent less than 1% of the state's area, they contain 22% of its endangered species, Warren told the meeting. The national parks cover a similar area but host fewer endangered plants and animals, Warren says. "Some people are very anti-military," Warren says. "They assume that there's nothing the military can do that will be beneficial, particularly with relation to ecology." Warren, who doesn't work for the army, used to assume the same himself. "Twenty years ago I looked at military activities as an ecologist and thought 'they need me'. But I guess that's not really so."

Warren and Buettner studied several species to try and understand the benefits of military ground. One, the natterjack toad, breeds in water-filled ruts created by tank tracks, they found. The tendency when setting aside a nature reserve is to prevent disturbances such as periodic flooding, says Warren. But this can inadvertently remove some habitats. "[Tanks] replace to some degree the processes that have been stopped," Warren says. The same goes for fires caused by bombing. "We've trained generations of people that fire is bad," he says, "but in fact it's crucial for ecosystems."

The number of species on former Soviet training camps around Berlin has dropped since the fall of the Iron Curtain, Warren says, supporting the idea that military activity is good for biodiversity. "But some military chiefs worry that endangered species may begin to obstruct their exercises." The US Marine Corps has previously complained that the US Endangered Species Act threatens to turn its Camp Pendleton beach in San Diego County, California - home to 18 threatened species - into a nature reserve rather than a training facility.

Warren hopes that conservationists could learn from the military, and provide disturbances to help endangered species. One trial project at Tennenlohe, near Nuremberg in Germany, involves cutting up land using an agricultural tool called a ripper in a bid to mimic tank tracks.

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Australia's Minister for hot air

By Andrew Bolt

The savage green critics of the Howard Government are wrong. Guys, calm down. You've actually won. Just look: The Government's slick new Environment Minister Ian Campbell is now peddling your global warming myths.

Am I unfair? Well, compare two reports on global warming released last month -- an alarmist one here, and a far more sober one by a committee of Britain's House of Lords that warns the warming hype is being whipped up by political trickery. The alarmist report was, alas, released by Campbell himself, and produced the usual oh-my-God horror stories in the media. Commissioned by the Government's Australian Greenhouse Office, it followed the scary script: Australia is hotting up fast, thanks to our belching. Our reefs may turn white, our dams dusty, our weather wild. Malaria could creep back in the heat and kill us. We had to spend big on slashing our emissions. Campbell, who should know better, only fed the hysteria. "I don't think there is much doubt, frankly, about the science of global warming," he gloomed.

Really? In fact, the British report -- all but ignored here -- concludes the opposite: "The science of climate change remains debatable." So which of these reports to believe? Should we panic about global warming -- or politicians like Campbell? Let's compare.

The Australian Greenhouse Office's report was written by private consultants who talked exclusively to our environment ministries and agencies. Not one sceptical scientist outside our paid-to-be-green bureaucracy got to have a say. And its warnings of doom were based not on any new science, but on the 2001 report of the United Nation's body which has pushed the global warming scare hardest -- the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. So if the IPCC is wrong, then so is much of Campbell's report.

Of course, the media has often told you not to doubt the IPCC -- a horde of experts brought together every few years by the UN to write reports on global warming. Just believe it: The globe will heat up by as much as 5.8 degrees by 2100, and we're largely to blame.

Not so fast, the British House of Lords' committee on economic affairs now says with alarm. This committee -- which included two former chancellors of the Exchequer, three top economists and a former Bank of England governor -- grilled more than 40 experts from around the world, including sceptics, to check the science of the global warming scare, and to price the solutions. It tested the greenhouse claims in a way the authors of Campbell's report didn't even try. And, ouch -- what it found shames the IPCC. As the committee summed up with British restraint: "We have some concerns about the objectivity of the IPCC process, with some of its emissions scenarios and summary documentation apparently influenced by political considerations." What's more: "There are significant doubts about some aspects of the IPCC's emissions scenario exercise . . . (and) the high emissions scenarios contained some questionable assumptions and outcomes . . . "There are some positive aspects to global warming and these appear to have been played down . . ."

That's putting it mildly. The examples the committee then gave to back up its claims of exaggeration, distortion and political interference should make even Ian Campbell wonder how settled this IPCC "science" he relies on really is. Here are just the top dozen of those examples:

1. The IPCC seemed to shut out some scientists who questioned its global warming theories.

2. A top IPCC malaria expert who disproved its claim that warming would spread the disease was dropped and replaced by people with little expertise.

3. IPCC scientists were outraged when the panel's political appointees falsified their 2001 report to make them seem to predict big losses from warming.

4. The IPCC "seemed to have made a conscious effort to downplay" research on the economic harm, or lack of it, that warming might cause -- perhaps because research actually showed "monetised damage is relatively low, even for a warming of 2.5 degrees".

5. Some of the IPCC's scariest warnings of a hotter world assumed the world's population would more than double -- "a projection not borne out by any of the population forecasts made elsewhere".

6. The IPCC "appears to be playing down" research showing it wasn't actually worth slashing greenhouse gases, when the Kyoto Accord, for instance, would cut temperatures by just 0.1 degrees by 2100 for a cost of up to $US17 trillion.

7. There was "uncertainty and controversy about the underlying data" behind the IPCC's claim that warming would make cyclones and hurricanes worse -- a claim that seemed unproven.

8. The IPCC had to take "a more balanced approach" and give "fuller consideration . . . on the positive effects of warming" -- such as better crops and more pleasant climates.

9. IPCC predictions that poorer countries would catch up fast to richer countries, so pumping out more greenhouse gases, were in fact widely disputed and seemed kind assumptions based on "political factors".

10. A mistake in the way the IPCC calculated the relative wealth of countries also exaggerated how much the poor ones would develop and the extra gases they would then emit.

11. The IPCC claimed average carbon dioxide emissions for each person were rising, when they were actually falling.

12. The IPCC seemed to underestimate how much sulphur emissions cooled the atmosphere.

Suspicious, how every one of these mistakes and distortions by the IPCC, and more, exaggerated the dangers of global warming. True, the House of Lords committee agreed there had been warming in the past century and most scientists thought our emissions were partly to blame. But it attacked the IPCC for "opening the way for climate science and economics to be determined, at least in part, by political requirements rather than by the evidence". What? Politics has trumped evidence? Someone tell our Environment Minister! Actually, don't bother. Just look how sweetly green he now looks, swearing the science of global warming really is beyond doubt. Trust him. Vote for him.

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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

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