Long-maligned oil platforms a haven for overfished species

Marine biologist Milton Love drives a hybrid car, displays a banner of leftist icon Che Guevara on his laboratory wall - and has backing from big oil. The reason is his finding that long-maligned oil platforms off California's Central Coast may be a haven for overfished stocks of groundfish. The research is good news to oil executives, who are looking for reasons not to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to remove the platforms once the oil stops flowing.

Environmentalists say oil companies are hiding behind fish to escape their obligation to remove the rigs. "Just because fish are there doesn't mean the platform constitutes habitat," [Huh?? What is habitat, then?] said Linda Krop, an attorney for the Santa Barbara-based Environmental Defense Center. "That's like taking a picture of birds on a telephone wire and saying it's essential habitat."

The 27 platforms - skeletal-looking structures that house dormitories, offices and massive pumps - were installed over the last four decades and now produce 72,000 barrels of oil daily. Environmentalists and coastal residents despise them for disrupting the ocean's natural ecology and otherwise flawless coastal views. Federal law requires oil companies to remove the platforms when operations are complete, though no one knows whether it will be years or decades before deposits under the sea floor run out.

Oil companies already are pressing state and federal officials to keep the rigs in place, citing Love's finding that platforms provide homes for bocaccio, cowcod and other fish. Love said many fish adopt platforms because they can't reach decimated natural reefs where they once thrived.

Claims that platforms help fish haven't convinced federal officials. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Wednesday it might eventually consider letting platforms remain as fish habitat, but wanted to know more about their effects on marine life. Since the 1950s, when heavy fishing began in the region, some species have been reduced to 6 percent of their previous numbers, according to Love. Overfishing has led to an economic disaster, leading some fisheries to close and causing the groundfish fleet to shrink by a third.

If the platforms were removed, environmentalists contend, fish would return to the natural reefs that hug Southern California's coast: boulder fields and low-lying, rocky outcroppings that can host sponges and other invertebrates.

Love, a UC Santa Barbara researcher, films fish in a submarine that hums around the platforms and then counts them in his lab. His findings: Large fish prefer crevices at the platforms' base, while smaller ones like the middle section above their predators. At Platform Gail, which stands in 739 feet of water nine miles off the Ventura coast, Love found what he believes to be the highest density of two species of overfished rockfish in Southern California. Love stresses that his research doesn't draw conclusions about whether the platforms should be removed. What's irrefutable, he says, is that some platforms are surrounded with fish packed as tightly as "cocktail wieners in a can." "If anyone wants to come up and count the fish, we'll provide the first beer," says Love. "But they're going to have to bring the rest. And they're going to need a few cases because we have 11 years of research."

Love gets about 80 percent of his research money from the government, and the rest from the California Artificial Reef Enhancement Program, a Sacramento nonprofit group funded almost entirely by oil companies. The group has contributed about $100,000 a year to Love's research since 1999, executive director George Steinbach said. Love says no amount of oil industry money can sway his research - fish either cluster at the platforms or they don't. And because they do, his personal view is that the rigs should stay in place, cut below the waterline so that ships can pass safely over them. "It's immoral to kill large numbers of animals anywhere on earth, and if you remove a platform you'll kill many millions of animals," he says.

Proposals to keep the platforms are modeled on programs in the Gulf of Mexico, where more than 200 rigs have been converted into artificial reefs either by toppling them or by cutting them below the waterline.

Krop, the environmental lawyer, says rig-to-reef conversions make more sense in the Gulf of Mexico because the waters there have a mud bottom, not natural reefs. Converting platforms between Long Beach and Point Conception north of Santa Barbara could be $600 million to $1 billion cheaper than removing them, Steinbach said. In exchange for letting the rigs stay, Steinbach said, oil companies would contribute up to half their savings to state conservation programs. Widespread opposition from environmentalists and residents has killed legislation that would have allowed such a deal

Source







Environmentalist View of Easter Island Disaster All Wrong, Researchers Say

This new paper by two anthropologists agrees with last year's paper by anthropologist Benny Peiser and debunks imaginative physiologist Jared Diamond



The first settlers on Easter Island didn't arrive until 1200 AD, up to 800 years later than previously thought, a new study suggests. The revised estimate is based on new radiocarbon dating of soil samples collected from one of oldest known sites on the island, which is in the South Pacific west of Chile.

The finding challenges the widely held notion that Easter Island's civilization experienced a sudden collapse after centuries of slow growth. If correct, the finding would mean that the island's irreversible deforestation and construction of its famous Moai statues began almost immediately after Polynesian settlers first set foot on the island.

The study, conducted by Terry Hunt of the University of Hawaii, Manoa and Carl Lipo of California State University, Long Beach, is detailed today in the online version of the journal Science.

The conventional story [As per Jared Diamond]:

According to one widely held view, a small band of Polynesian settlers, perhaps no more than a few dozen people, arrived on the Easter Island sometime between 400 and 1000 AD. The settlers lived in harmony with the environment for hundreds of years and the population slowly grew. Some scientists estimate that at its height, Easter Island's population may have been as much as 20,000 people. Around 1200 AD, the story goes, the inhabitants began cutting down the island's subtropical trees and giant palms in large numbers to build canoes and to transport the giant stone statues, which started going up around this time.

The large-scale deforestation led to soil erosion and over a span of several centuries, the island's ability to support wildlife and farming was compromised. People began to starve. In a last ditch effort at survival, they became cannibals.

The collapse of both the island's ecology and civilization was so complete that by the time the Dutch arrived in the 1700s, Easter Island was a sandy grassland void of nearly all its native wildlife; its human inhabitants were reduced to a starving population of 3,000 or less. This is the story pieced together by researchers over the past several decades, but Hunt and Lipo think it is wrong.

No Garden of Eden:

Crucial to the conventional account of events on Easter Island is the time when settlers first arrived. If colonization didn't begin until 1200 AD, then the island's population wouldn't have had time to swell to tens of thousands of people. "You don't have this Garden of Eden period for 400 to 800 years," Hunt said in an accompanying Science article. "Instead, [humans] have an immediate impact."

Also, the few thousand people Europeans encountered when they first arrived on Easter Island might not have been the remnants of a once great and populous civilization as widely believed. The researchers think a few thousand people might have been all the island was ever able to support. "There may not have actually been any collapse," Lipo told LiveScience. "With only 500 years, there's no reason to believe there had to have been a huge [population] growth."

Europeans and rats to blame:

The researchers also dispute the claim that Easter Island's human inhabitants were responsible for their own demise. Instead, they think the culprits may have been Europeans, who brought disease and took islanders away as slaves, and rats, which quickly multiplied after arriving with the first Polynesian settlers. "The collapse was really a function of European disease being introduced," Lipo said. "The story that's been told about these populations going crazy and creating their own demise may just be simply an artifact of [Christian] missionaries telling stories."

At a scientific meeting last year, Hunt presented evidence that the island's rat population spiked to 20 million from the years 1200 to 1300. Rats had no predators on the island other than humans and they would have made quick work of the island's palm seeds. After the trees were gone, the island's rat population dropped off to a mere one million.

Lipo thinks the story of Easter Island's civilization being responsible for its own demise might better reflect the psychological baggage of our own society than the archeological evidence. "It fits our 20th century view of us as ecological monsters," Lipo said. "There's no doubt that we do terrible things ecologically, but we're passing that on to the past, which may not have actually been the case. To stick our plight onto them is unfair."

Source

Below are excerpts from the actual paper summarized above:

Late Colonization of Easter Island

By Terry L. Hunt and Carl P. Lipo

Department of Anthropology, University of Hawai'i-Manoa
Department of Anthropology and IIRMES, California State University Long Beach

Abstract: Easter Island (Rapa Nui) provides a model of human-induced environmental degradation. A reliable chronology is central to understanding the cultural, ecological, and demographic processes involved. Radiocarbon dates for the earliest stratigraphic layers at Anakena, Easter Island, and analysis of previous radiocarbon dates imply that the island was colonized late, about 1200 AD. Significant ecological impacts and major cultural investments in monumental architecture and statuary thus began soon after initial settlement.

[...]

Our analysis and dates for Rapa Nui imply that colonists arrived around AD 1200. The founding Polynesian population then grew rapidly, had immediate, major, and visible impacts on the island's biota and physical landscape, and began investing in monumental architecture and statuary within the first century or two of settlement. Although still poorly dated, monumental architecture and statuary are known from islands such as the Societies, Marquesas, and Austral Islands perhaps as early as AD 1200. Nearly immediate building of monuments, carving giant statues, and transporting them to every corner of the island may have been cultural investments, homologous to forms elsewhere in eastern Polynesia, that mediated against over-population and resource shortfalls in an unpredictable environment. Such a model would help to explain the success of ancient Polynesians on tiny, remote Rapa Nui. Demographic and cultural collapse resulted from European contact beginning in AD 1722 with the devastating consequences of newly introduced Old World diseases to a non-immune Polynesian population.






VERIFICATION STATISTICS: STEVE MCINTYRE IS HAVING A LOT OF FUN

A post by Lubos Motl, 8 March 2006 commenting on and explaining "Verification r2 revealed" in Climate Audit

As we discussed many times, the fundamental scientific statement that is used to justify various global policies to fight the so-called "global warming" is the conjecture that the warming in the 20th century is unprecedented. The primary experimental evidence is based on the reconstruction of temperatures in the past millenium.

We did not have thermometers 500 years ago. Instead, we must use "proxies" such as tree rings etc. The hypothesis behind this scheme is that a good estimate of the past temperatures can be obtained as a particular linear combination of vectors of numbers extracted from these proxies. You try to find the right linear combination that optimally reproduces the observed temperatures in the calibration period (probably something like 1850-2000) and then you extrapolate the same linear combination of the proxies to guess the temperatures in the past, before we had any thermometers.

Can this procedure be trusted? In order to answer this question, you need verification statistics, a certain kind of generalized correlation coefficients for multi-variable linear regression. Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have shown in their papers - especially the latest paper in Geophysical Research Letters - that the statistical procedures used by Mann, Bradley, Hughes (MBH98, MBH99) in their "hockey stick" papers are flawed. Quantitatively, this fact shows up through very poor values of the R2 verification statistic.

Although a theoretical physicist would always prefer the R2 statistic, there also exist alternative formulae to quantify the quality of a "model", such as the RE statistic. In all cases, these numbers are between 0 and 1, with a value below 0.2 indicating a poor model. In previous climate papers, R2 was widely used. However, because it turns out that the R2 coefficient may be very low for various reconstructions, R2 suddenly became politically incorrect and some climate scientists even argue that it is "silly" to calculate R2 and only RE should be looked at because of something and especially because its values are higher.

Because Ross McKitrick and Steve McIntyre published a paper that has shown that the results of MBH are statistically insignificant and because the global warming and the hockey stick is a kind of dogma for a certain segment of the climate scientists, they have spent a significant portion of the last year or two by attempts to create and publish a paper that would invalidate the results of McKitrick and McIntyre. Otherwise, the state-of-the-art situation is that the hockey stick reconstruction has been proved to be an artifact of flawed statistical methods.

The paper of Ammann and Wahl could have become such a paper that could potentially save the most important part of the global warming theory. However, it turns out that according to Ammann and Wahl, the R2 verification coefficients for the early stages of the MBH paper are extremely low, just like McKitrick and McIntyre argued. The debate on that page attracted some people who are well educated in statistics. A typical interpretation of a low squared statistic combined with a higher RE statistic is that they deal with overfitting - the "model" for calculating the past temperature depends on too many variables. At any rate, the predictions can't be trusted. The RE statistic is spuriously high only due to self-correlations of the proxies in the calibration period.

It seems that once you analyze papers that were proposed as evidence for "extraordinary" warming in the 20th century, you will see that they are based on estimates of the temperature in the past millenium that look like worthless noise and guessing. You won't read these mathematical analyses in the media. Instead, the media will offer you irrational and hysterical whining of politicized scientists, politicians, and polar bears.






"Green" policies hurt Australia's State of Queensland

Instead of dammed rainwater, Queenslanders will now be getting unpalatable and possibly unhealthy water from underground. And water restrictions make it VERY hard for gardeners -- people whom you might (if you were foolish) think Greenies would be sympathetic to



The decision to scrap the Wolffdene Dam was "stupid" and Queenslanders are now paying the price with water restrictions, according to State Opposition Leader Lawrence Springborg. In 1989, then-premier Mike Ahern decided to fast-track a $167 million-plus plan to build the Wolffdene Dam across the Albert River, south of Beenleigh, to serve the fast-growing population between Brisbane and the Gold Coast. But it would also have destroyed a stretch of the picturesque Albert Valley and inundated 1100 houses, forcing more than 3000 residents from their homes in the villages of Tamborine, Wolffdene, Luscombe and Cedar Creek.

Residents, backed by supporters from around the state, mounted one of the strongest and most effective protest campaigns in Queensland. The Labor Party backed the residents and newly-elected premier Wayne Goss scrapped the dam project in his first week in power.

Mr Springborg said the decision was short-sighted."It was one of the best sites in Queensland for a dam and it would have ensured there was ample water for south-east Queensland for generations to come." University of Queensland civil engineering Emeritus Professor Colin Apelt agrees. But he said the major mistake was made years earlier by the National Government in not restricting residential development in the area....

More here

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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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