Delingpole invents another "--gate" for his pseudoskeptical fans

James,

I think the "consensus" is that advocacy groups such as the WWF is not a particularly good source of info.

It appears it is you who needs to look a little harder. The Nature paper is called "Large-scale Impoverishment of Amazonian Forests by Logging and Fire".

You cannot find references to this 40% statement in this paper. What is found is:

"Although logging and forest surface fires usually do not kill all trees, they severely damage forests. Logging companies in Amazonia kill or damage 10-40% of the living biomass of forests through the harvest process. Logging also increases forest flammability by reducing forest leaf canopy coverage by 14-50%, allowing sunlight to penetrate to the forest floor, where it dries out the organic debris created by the logging."

So if you can figure out what the WWF did here, great. I'm sure you will correct your blog ASAP.

http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/01/corruption-of-science.html

Like Tom Scharf, I don't see a direct quote of "40%" anything relevant in the Nature paper. But that silly -- I would not have expected a direct quote. And I do see lots of other numbers, such as dessicated land area, though, which might come out to about 40%, if one were to do the calculations.

Can someone who knows this area better than me, but yet has free time on their hands to point out the flaws in yet another conspiracy theory, point out where in the Nature paper this data is coming from. Most of the paper seems to be about logging effects, with some mentions of dessication due to El Nino.

-kevin

Why would a second-rate journalist go to primary sources when he can get a higher ranking in Google search by just making stuff up?

The BBC, to its credit, has a different take on Amazongate:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8488395.stm

Who is this Delingpole person, anyway?

Seems to me Delingpole is completely accurate in what he is saying. The fact is that the IPCC's credibility, along with that of Hadley/CRU, NOAA and people like "hockey stick" Mann is falling faster than the temperatures in Britain this winter. Even the IPCC is now admitting a lot of the AR4 report was perhaps not as scientific and "peer reviewed" as they led everyone to believe. As someone who finally decided to look up the qualifications of the "2500" climate scientists who supposedly back up the AR4 report I'm having trouble finding other than public policy graduates, economists, and other persons best described by the oxymoron "social scientist". The few with professional qualifications in climate areas seem to be preponderantly people who have been claiming "global warming" for decades. Like James Hansen, head of NASA climate who stated global warming as a fact in 1981. Do you think it would be rather career limiting at NASA to start telling the boss your latest research doesn't show a warming problem.

@Rob Herron:
Nice we have more 'honest' people on this blog.

You can start here and find the credentials
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_authors_from_Climate_Change_2007:_…

Please tell us how many public policy graduates, economists, and other persons best described by the oxymoron "social scientist" you can find in that list.

Oh, and please also tell us how many of the people on that list have Jim Hansen as their boss.

Rob Herron ,are you 'auditioning 'for the Daily Telegraph? C

"Even the IPCC is admitting that a lot of AR4 was perhaps not as scientific and "peer-reviewed" as they led everyone to believe."

They've made no such admission. There is obviously something at the Tele that rots the minds of the people who read it(and write for it)..why do people who have no standards of substantiation think they're entitled to get upset when the IPCC,which is fully referenced,slips up?

That said,the paper that supports footnote 46 of the WWF document doesn't provide a direct route to the '40%' bit. Does footnote 46 only refer to the second sentence in the 'offending' paragraph? As Patricks link demonstrates,it's not really a very contentious 'could' given a wider viewing of the literature. North is definitely scrambling for material.

The few with professional qualifications in climate areas seem to be preponderantly people who have been claiming "global warming" for decades.

It can'r possibly be because they know what they're talking about, though, can it? That's impossible.

@Kevin - I have access via my institution to Nature, so I'm using this as procrastination time (but Caveat Lector: my field is in Law)

At p507 of the Nature Article, you'll find the figures from the WWF/IUCN report:

"ENSO-related drought can desiccate large areas of Amazonian forest, creating the potential for large-scale forest fires. Because of the severe drought of 1997 and 1998, we calculate that approximately 270,000 km2 of Amazonian forest had completely depleted plant-available water stored in the upper five metres of soil by the end of the 1998 dry season. In addition, 360,000 km2 of forest had less than 250mm of plant-available soil water left by this time (Fig. 1b). By comparison, only 28,000 km2 of forests in Roraima had depleted soil water to 5m depth at the peak of the Roraima forest fires."

It can be noted that 270,000 km2 and 360,000 km2 are the figures referenced in the WWF/IUCN report. In Table 1 at Page 506, the total area of the forest in the Amazonas state is listed as being 1.5million km2. I suspect that what the WWF/IUCN report did is calculate a percentage from ([270+360] / 1531) - which gives you ~41%.

What I can't be sure of is whether when the authors of the Nature article refer to the "Amazonian forest" that they just mean that in the Amazonas state. However, in the cited paragraph from Nature, the text differentiates between the Amazonian forest and the Roraima forest. As a layman I'd deduce they meant to distinguish the Amazonian forest from all of the different forests in listed in Table 1.

The WWF/IUCD report may be a little sloppy insofar as the "offending" paragraph changes terminology from the "Amazon forest" to refer to the "Brazilian forest" as it's not clear if they mean the Brazilian forest as a whole (which from Table 1 of the Nature Report is 4m km2) or the Brazilian portion of the Amazon forest.

If we need to go back to the nub of Delingpole's assertion that the claim in IPCC or WWF/IUCN is not supported by the scientific literature, the Nature article at Page 507 states:

"The area of forest surface fires may be much larger during periods of severe drought, such as occurred during the 1997±98 El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) episode when 15,000 km2 of standing forest may have burned in the northern Amazonian state of Roraima alone (Brazilian Government, unpublished report)."

So really it looks like yet another Delingpole invented controversy.

Hari, while that might be how they arrived at 40%, it's wrong. The denominator should be the total forest area, so the dried forest percentage should be 15%. I confirmed this by counting the pixels in their map.

@Tim

Agreed. In any event from cross checking against a state map of Brazil, most of the driest areas seem to be in Para state.

While the IPCC report refs

"Up to 40% of the Brazilian forest is extremely sensitive to small reductions in the amount
of rainfall. In the 1998 dry season, some 270,000 sq. km of forest became vulnerable to fire,
due to completely depleted plant-available water stored in the upper five metres of soil. A
further 360,000 sq. km of forest had only 250 mm of plant-available soil water left.4 6"

from the WWF report, I beieve the WWF repot is only referencing the 2nd sentence on from the Science paper "In the 1998...". That leaves the "40%" sentence without a reference. But on the other hand if you google around, you will find similar sentiments expressed in a number of media summaries of scientific papers. Perhaps it is common knowledge by the time the WWF report was written.

Again, all I had to do was search for some for a relevant pieces of English in the WWF/IUCN report to come across the 40% passage. It's there, on page 15 (as counted by the PDF). Why is it so hard for y'all to find it?--jh

b b b bbbb b b bbbbut but 3 parts per million of plant food catastrophe!!

hahahahahaahhaahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

I'm surprised to see Richard North mixed up in this nonsense.
If its Richard D North http://richarddnorth.com/ , he is well known as a hack with a libertarian bent, who regularly turns up on the BBC spouting stuff about how capitalism is so wonderful.
He used to talk about climate change, but got out of that game when it started to look just a little like a fringe activity to diss it, so I'm a bit surprised he's talking about it now. I suspect that they are not one and the same, although the article about climate change on North's website is just a bit strange (custard?). If you want a view into a confused mind, take a look.

Actually the psedo-scientists at the IPCC have done all the "inventing". Delingpole is just shining a light on it so we can watch the cockroaches scatter.

Remember the pseudo-journalist that was cheering the IPCC on to make their scam report even more alarmist?

http://scienceblogs.com/islandofdoubt/2007/04/ipcc_warning_read_with_ca…

The United Nations' expert panel on climate change based claims about ice disappearing from the world's mountain tops on a student's dissertation and an article in a mountaineering magazine. Move along. All is normal.

JH,

I must have been unclear. The 40% is in the WWF report, but not in the Science article. My theory is that the WFF report is not referencing that claim, just the claim about 270,000 square KM.

I think you mean the Nature article. On that note:

When The Sunday Telegraph contacted the lead scientists behind the two papers in Nature, they expressed surprise that their research was not cited directly but said the IPCC had accurately represented their work.

The "two papers" reference puzzles me, but still, the point is made.

I

From: Mick Kelly
To:
c.c. James Hrynyshyn

Subject: RE: Global temperature
Date: Sun, 26 Oct 2008 09:02:00 +1300

Yeah, it wasnât so much 1998 and all that that I was concerned about, used
to dealing with that, but the possibility that we might be going through a
longer â 10 year â period of relatively stable temperatures beyond what you
might expect from La Nina etc.

Speculation, but if I see this as a possibility then others might also. Anyway, Iâll maybe cut the last few points off the filtered curve before I give the talk again as thatâs trending down as a result of the end effects and the recent cold-ish years. The mindless AGW pseudo-journalists will eat it up.

Enjoy Iceland and pass on my best wishes to Astrid.

Mick

No, Bird Harrasser, the IPCC did not base its claim that ice was disappearing on the Mountaineering article and the dissertation. Those were only one line in a table on some observed effects of reduction of cryosphere. See here. If you want to look for claims of ice disappearing, there's a whole chapter on the cryosphere in AR4 WGI: Chapter 4.