MORE ON THE BADNESS OF TREES

Scientists in Germany have discovered that ordinary plants produce significant amounts of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas which helps trap the sun's energy in the atmosphere. The findings, reported in the journal Nature, have been described as "startling", and may force a rethink of the role played by forests in holding back the pace of global warming.

And the BBC News Website has learned that the research, based on observations in the laboratory, appears to be corroborated by unpublished observations of methane levels in the Brazilian Amazon. Until now, it had been thought that natural sources of methane were mainly limited to environments where bacteria acted on vegetation in conditions of low oxygen levels, such as in swamps and rice paddies.

But a team led by Frank Keppler of the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg, Germany, stumbled upon this new effect when studying emissions from the leaves of trees and grasses in conditions similar to those they would encounter in the open air. To their amazement, the scientists found that all the textbooks written on the biochemistry of plants had apparently overlooked the fact that methane is produced by a range of plants even when there is plenty of oxygen. The amount of the gas produced increased when the air was warmer, and when there was more sunlight. The paper estimates that this unexplained phenomenon could account for between 10 and 30 per cent of the world's methane emissions.

The possible implications are set out in Nature by David Lowe of New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, who writes, "We now have the spectre that new forests might increase greenhouse warming through methane emissions rather than decrease it by sequestering carbon dioxide." If this turned out to be true, it would have major implications for the rules of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, which allows countries and companies to offset emissions from the burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil by funding the planting of new forests or the restoration of deforested areas.

But some experts on climate change science and policy say it is far too early to come to this kind of conclusion. Dr Halldor Thorgeirsson, deputy executive secretary to the UN Climate Change Secretariat, told the BBC News Website that while the study was interesting, the overall impact of this newly-discovered source of methane was still speculative. "We need to look at this, but this study does not for example look at measurements of direct methane emissions from forests, and that is what is needed to get a better handle on what forests do for the climate," said Dr Thorgeirsson. He added that the system of calculating forestry "credits" under the Kyoto protocol allowed for updated scientific findings to be included in the assessment of the climate benefit of any particular project.

The authors of the study themselves recognise that it is very difficult to quantify the global impact of this discovery since it is so far confined to observations of plants grown in the laboratory. But it is already finding some corroboration from observations in the "real world". The BBC News website has learned that a study soon to be published in another scientific journal reports high levels of methane in measurements taken in the Brazilian Amazon, which can't be explained by conventional explanations for how the gas is produced.

Michael Keller of the US Department of Agriculture's Forest Service, who carried out the study, said the new process discovered by the German scientists provided a plausible solution to the puzzle. But he warned against making any assumptions at this stage about what it meant for the climate impact of forests until much more was known about the way this new phenomenon operates in different conditions and among different species.

Dr Keller said, "We know that when deforestation takes place we liberate large quantities of carbon dioxide, and indeed methane, into the atmosphere. We may be replacing that forest with vegetation which produces more methane. "Until we know how this process works it is really unwise to come to any conclusions."

It is tempting to conclude from this new study that in some way we have been conned into thinking that trees were great for the planet when it turns out they might be helping to cause global warming. In fact, of course, trees are neither good nor bad. They are just there, and if they are producing methane now they always have been in natural conditions.

The study highlights, however, the extreme complexity of the relationship between the biological processes of the Earth and the chemistry of our atmosphere - and how much there is yet to discover. [But let's act as if we already know it all!]

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THE WAR ON CLARKSON

People who do not follow British TV may be unaware of a "war" that has been going on in recent months between a popular British TV presenter and Britain's Green/Left. To introduce the TV program concerned:

"Top Gear is a long-running BBC television series about cars and motorsports. The programme completed its seventh series in December 2005 under its current format and is expected to return in Spring 2006. Top Gear is estimated to have over 350 million viewers worldwide, 5 million of which view the programme each week in the UK. [1] There is also Top Gear magazine, a publication produced by the BBC in conjunction with the TV show and sharing some common editors and features between them. Top Gear is currently hosted by Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May".

So what has Clarkson done? Here is how The Guardian sees it:

"It started as a small petition against Oxford Brookes University offering the BBC's Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson an honorary degree in recognition of his support of British technology and his contribution to learning and society. But it has turned into a mass outpouring of objection to the man who ridicules cyclists, loathes health and safety experts, despises environmentalists, annoys mountaineers, rages at Guardian readers and questions climate scientists.

According to the student organisers of a protest against the university plan, 1,400 people have objected online to "motormouth Clarkson" - many in the kind of language that he would recognise. "He is a moron who spouts ignorant and antisocial rubbish;" "he is a dangerous philistine who displays an alarming lack of intelligence; "his public persona promotes wilful ignorance," said some of the politer contributors yesterday.

In the past year the intemperate Clarkson, who also has columns in the Sun and Sunday Times, has described ramblers as "urban communists", cyclists as "Lycra Nazis", and people working for transport pressure group Transport 2000 as "ugly". Women, ethnic minorities and others have all taken offence. Recently car workers blamed him in part for the collapse of MG Rover.

His attitude to nature is also eccentric. He has questioned why Britain has so many hills, proposed that great white sharks should be eaten to extinction, been excited at the thought of Birmingham being covered by a glacier, rammed a car into a tree and driven up Ben Tongue, a Scottish mountain, in a 4x4.

Much of this is seen as good entertainment but his seemingly jocular views on global warming are ignorant and dangerous, say his critics. "What's wrong with global warming? We might lose Holland but there are other places to go on holiday," he wrote recently in the Sun. On Top Gear, he has lauded naturalist David Bellamy, who has disputed that man-made warming exists.

"Clarkson is dangerous. His views are disastrous. The message he sends across is that it's OK to have a couldn't care less attitude to the environment," said Steve Hounsham of Transport 2000. But the university was yesterday backing its man. In a statement it said: "We are giving Jeremy Clarkson an honorary degree in recognition of his enthusiasm and contribution to engineering and motor sports." The original citation talked of Clarkson's "contribution to learning and society and as an exemplary role model for students".

Clarkson was unavailable for comment yesterday, but a BBC spokesman said: "He has something to say about almost everything. Humour and lively debate are the hallmarks of Top Gear.""

So there are various ways the Left are trying to get at Clarkson. Here is one:

Jeremy Clarkson faces yet another brickbat from the Liberal Democrat transport spokesman, Tom Brake. Not content with submitting an Early Day Motion against the Top Gear presenter, right, Brake is attempting to haul him before the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee. Yesterday, he circulated a dossier on Clarkson's 'anti-green' track record to journalists, quoting his comment: 'What's wrong with global warming? We might lose Holland but there are other places to go on holiday.' Elsewhere, it highlights the chubby controversialist's belief that environmentalists should 'take up something useful, like tearing their tongues out', and his threat to 'run down' cyclists who cross his path. Brake should watch his step. Clarkson's last public enemy, Piers Morgan, ended up with a black eye.

And, finally, a comment from Clarkson himself:

"Environmentalists, it seems, can't argue like normal people. You may remember, for instance, back in the summer that a vegetarian girl, who I'd never met before, leapt from some bushes and plunged a huge banoffee pie right into the middle of my face. Then a Liberal Democrat MP called Tom Brake, who has the silliest teeth in politics, said he was going to table an early-day motion and drag me to London to watch him doing it. Now look. I don't want to see anyone's early day motion, least of all a Liberal Democrat's, which would be full of leaf mulch. And I especially don't want to see it on a table.

Why can't these people write me a letter saying, "I don't agree with you"? Why do they have to pie me and make me stand around watching a Liberal with mad teeth doing his number twos? It's beyond comprehension.

But last week the environmental protest about my way of life took an altogether more sinister turn when a Labour MP called Colin Challen made a speech in which he said he wanted me to be killed. No more pies. No more early days motions. Executed. Maybe he was joking, maybe he wasn't. Strangely, he's on record as saying he doesn't believe in capital punishment, so he doesn't want Peter Sutcliffe dead. He doesn't want Ian Huntley dead. And he thinks Gary Glitter should evade the firing squad. But he does want to see me swinging from the rafters in Wormwood Scrubs. He wants to see the faces of my distraught children on the television news and laugh at my wife as they cut me down and feed my limp, lifeless body to the prison pigs.

Now presumably before calling for my death he'd have done some research, in which case he'd have noted the way I use sheep to keep the grass down on my land rather than driving around in a lawnmower, which uses fuel and minces all the beasties that so amaze us in David Attenborough's new programme. What's more, a man who charges the taxpayer o64,000 a year to pay for staff would surely have had the human resources to find out that this year I grew some totally organic, fertiliser-free barley. It didn't go well. Come autumn I had six acres of what looked like soggy grey drinking straws, which I sold for exactly o325 less than it cost to buy the seed and rent a combine harvester.

But no matter. I didn't do this out of the goodness of my heart, and nor did I do it to save the world or the whale. I did it because barley attracts lots of interesting birds that I like to look at. Selfish, I know, but ecologically speaking I like to think I achieved a little bit more than Colin Challen, who stomps round the Yorkshire Dales in a hideous purple cagoule dreaming up new and interesting people he'd like to kill. So is he mad? Well, he can't be a complete window-licker because he managed to convince 20,570 people in the last election that he should be a member of the governing party. But then again, he does have a beard, he is called Colin, and he is a member of something called the Socialist Environment Resources Association.

This is the key. On the face of it SERA sounds like a fairly benign organisation - it raises sponsorship, for instance, for people to host low-carbon-transport dinners. Mmmm. They sound like fun. But nothing with the word socialist in its name can ever be truly benign. You may remember the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, for example, where people were sentenced to death for arguing with the leadership. That's what Beardy is doing here. Like that fellow member of the face hair owner's club, Stalin, he wants me dead for disagreeing with him.

I love arguing. I love filling my dining room with social workers and foxhunters so everyone can roll up their sleeves and have a damn good row. That's because I believe in freedom of speech. Plainly the honourable member for Morley & Rothwell does not. And nor does Tom Brake from the Liberal Democrats, and nor does that girl with the big bum who pushed a pie in my face. In fact no one from the environmental bandwagon has even half an inkling about the concept of debate.

I do not believe that man is responsible for global warming. There are many eminent scientists who would agree. And I believe that western governments are in the process of spending billions of pounds trying to stem something over which we have no control. I believe that this money could be used to make the world a fairer, more peaceful place. I would much rather bring clean drinking water to an impoverished village in Sudan than bring a wind farm to the shores of Scotland. You might not agree, but surely you can see it is a reasonable argument.

Tom Brake can't. That bird with the pie can't. And certainly Colin Challen can't. Plainly he doesn't mind if all the Africans die of disease and hunger, because like all socialists, he wants to help the poor only about half as much as he wants to hurt the rich. I respect that argument. I respect the people of Leeds who listened to it and voted him into office. And I'd love to chat to him about it. But that's hard when you've got a face full of banana pie, you're faced with a pile of Mr Brake's veggie droppings and you're dead."

There is a criticism of the Green/Left attacks on Clarkson here





Global-warming fears pointless

Does anyone remember the glaciers that once threatened Florida and caused white spruce trees to grow in Georgia? Archeological evidence proves that sub-Arctic forests grew 18,000 years ago where orange groves and pecan trees now flourish. How about that mini-Ice Age of 1100-1600 A.D.? History books recount the cold weather endured by the Northern Hemisphere during that period. More recently, 20th century weather records detail the paralyzing cold and snow that often visited Western Oregon to freeze the Willamette and Columbia rivers.

Had there been weathermen and climatologists 18,000 years ago or even 100 years ago, they would have been alarmed about global cooling as glaciers advanced and temperatures plummeted. They might have prescribed burning more fossil fuels to create greenhouse gases to raise atmospheric temperatures.

Is the glass of global weather half warm or half cold? Is the Homo sapiens with all his diesel engines and emissions causing global warming, or are we really in a cosmic cycle of planetary heating and cooling that we cannot control or even understand? There is no one on this Earth who can be 100 percent certain of the answer, regardless if it is former President Bill Clinton or some soothsayer in Saskatchewan.

We really don't know what controls the Earth's climate, and that ignorance frightens folks. There are predictions of melting ice caps, rising sea levels, droughts and erratic weather if we don't curtail all emissions. Some people have the arrogance and audacity to believe we can significantly influence and control global warming with more government regulation. They blindly ignore the fact that one St. Helens eruption, one meteor from outer space, or a magnetic shift of the North Pole could erase everything regulated by the Environmental Protectional Agency or Kyoto treaty.

As a species, we are naive to think we can start or stop the next global climate change. There are powers far beyond our understanding that influence this planet's well-being. We should use common sense to protect and conserve what we know -- plant a tree; walk instead of drive; recycle metals and plastics; feed the birds; smile at a stranger. Maybe the last two things won't save the planet, but at least they will improve our attitude about doomsday predictions.

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THE GREENING OF THE SAHEL

(From CO2 Science Magazine, 11 January 2006)

"The Sahel," in the words of Anyamba and Tucker (2005), "is a semi-arid region stretching approximately 5000 km across northern Africa from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to near the Red Sea in the east and extending roughly from 12°N to 18°N," which "forms an ecological transition between the Sahara desert to the north and the humid tropical savanna to the south (Le Houerou, 1980)." It was recently featured in a special issue of the Journal of Arid Environments entitled "The 'Greening' of the Sahel," which describes its recovery from what Hutchinson et al. (2005) describe as a run of "several devastating droughts and famines between the late 1960s and early 1990s."

Working with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) data obtained from polar orbiting satellites, Anyamba and Tucker developed a Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) history that stretches from 1981 to 2003. Comparing this history with the precipitation history of the Sahel developed by Nicholson (2005), they find that "the persistence and spatial coherence of drought conditions during the 1980s is well represented by the NDVI anomaly patterns and corresponds with the documented rainfall anomalies across the region during this time period." Thereafter, they also find that "the prevalence of greener than normal conditions during the 1990s to 2003 follows a similar increase in rainfall over the region during the last decade."

In another analysis of NDVI and rainfall data in the same issue of the Journal of Arid Environments, Olsson et al. (2005) also find "a consistent trend of increasing vegetation greenness in much of the region," which they describe as "remarkable," and they state that increasing rainfall over the last few years "is certainly one reason" for the greening phenomenon. However, they find that the increase in rainfall "does not fully explain" it. Why?

For one thing, the three Swedish scientists note that "only eight out of 40 rainfall observations showed a statistically significant (95%) increase of rainfall between 1982-1990 and 1991-1999." In addition, they report that "further analysis of this relationship does not indicate an overall relationship between rainfall increase and vegetation trend." So what else could be driving the increase in greenness?

Olsson et al. suggest that "another potential explanation could be improved land management, which has been shown to cause similar changes in vegetation response elsewhere (Runnstrom, 2003)." However, in more detailed analyses of Burkina Faso and Mali, where production of millet rose by 55% and 35%, respectively, since 1980, they could find "no clear relationship" between agricultural productivity and NDVI, which argues against the land management explanation.

A third speculation of Olsson et al. is that the greening of the Sahel could be caused by increasing rural-to-urban migration. In this scenario, widespread increases in vegetation occur as a result of "reduced area under cultivation," due to a shortage of rural laborers, and/or "increasing inputs on cropland," such as seeds, machinery and fertilizers made possible by an increase in money sent home to rural households by family members working in cities. However, Olsson et al. note that "more empirical research is needed to verify this [hypothesis]."

We also have speculated on the cause of Sahelian greening, suggesting that the aerial fertilization effect of the ongoing rise in the air's CO2 content, which greatly enhances vegetative productivity, and its anti-transpiration effect, which enhances plant water-use efficiency and enables plants to grow in areas that were once too dry to sustain them, may be playing prominent roles [see our reviews of Prince et al. (1998) and Nicholson et al. (1998)]. Be that as it may, whatever the reason for the greening of the Sahel over the past quarter-century, it is clear that in spite of what the world's climate alarmists claim were concomitant unprecedented increases in the "twin evils" of anthropogenic CO2 emissions and global warming, the Sahel experienced an increase in vegetative prowess that was truly, as Olsson et al. write, "remarkable."

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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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