Klimaatgekte: Regenwoudclaim IPCC blijkt leugen WWF

[Dr. Marc-Alexander Fluks]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Bron:   Aftermath News
Datum:  12 maart 2010
Auteur: Lewis Page
URL:     
http://aftermathnews.wordpress.com/2010/03/14/ipcc-rainforest-eco-tastrophe-claim-confirmed-as-bunk/
Ref:    Zie tevens,
          
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/environment/flora-fauna/IPCC-likely-to-backtrack-on-claim-that-global-warming-will-destroy-rainforests/articleshow/5686240.cms


IPCC Rainforest eco-tastrophe claim confirmed as bunk
-----------------------------------------------------
Official UN website still shows it as fact, though

More bad news today for the International Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC), as another of its extravangant ecopocalypse predictions,
sourced from green campaigners, has been confirmed as bunk by
scientists.

The UN body came under attack earlier this year for suggesting
that 40 per cent of the Amazonian rainforests ? dubbed the 'lungs
of the planet' by some for their ability to turn CO2 into oxygen,
and also seen as vital on biodiversity grounds ? might disappear
imminently. This disaster would be triggered, according to the
IPCC's assessment, by a relatively slight drop in rainfall of the
sort to be expected in a warming world.

Unfortunately it now appears that just such conditions have already
occurred, and in fact the Amazonian jungles were unaffected.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the baseless IPCC projection originated in
a study produced in 2000 by hard-green(*) ecological campaigning
group WWF, which was also implicated in the IPCC's equally invalid
prediction that the glaciers of the Himalayas will all have melted
within a generation from now.

According to the WWF report
    
http://www.wwf.de/fileadmin/fm-wwf/pdf-alt/waelder/brnde/Forest_Fires_Report.pdf
which was not subject to scientific peer review ? it was written by
a freelance journalist and published by WWF itself ? drying-up of
forests will lead to runaway wildfires that will destroy the jungle
and perhaps the entire planetary ecosystem. The document is full of
terrifying phrases such as 'the year the world caught fire'. It warns
of imminent doom caused by drought cycles:
   The world faces a positive feedback cycle in which climate change,
   exacerbated by forest fires and deforestation, increases the
   frequency of the El Nino phenomenon, which in turn causes more
   forest burning.
   The world faces warmer more violent weather, and more forest fires
   ... scientists believe the whole Amazon itself is threatened, with
   the rainforest being replaced by fire-prone vegetation. This has
   global consequences...

It was bad enough that the IPCC included this sort of speculative
scaremongering in its 2007 Fourth Assessment Report. But now it has
been conclusively disproven ? so much so that even IPCC members pour
scorn on it, though they haven't retracted or amended their original
endorsement of it.

NASA-funded scientists analysing the past decades of satellite
imagery of the Amazon basin say that in fact the rainforests are
remarkably resilient to droughts. Even during the hundred-year-peak
dry season of 2005 the jungles were basically unaffected.


'WWF made it all up' ? IPCC member speaks

'We found no big differences in the greenness level of these forests
between drought and non-drought years,' says Arindam Samanta of
Boston university, lead author of the new study based on NASA's MODIS
sat data. 'Our results certainly do not indicate such extreme
sensitivity to reductions in rainfall,' adds Sangram Ganguly of the
NASA-affiliated Bay Area Environmental Research Institute, another
study author. Even the IPCC itself now regrets listening to WWF.
'The way that the WWF report calculated this 40 per cent was totally
wrong,' according to IPCC member Jose Marengo, commenting on the new
research.

Which might beg the question of why his colleagues referenced the
bogus WWF polemic in their 2007 report on what the world can expect:
and why they still publish it today on the web
   http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg2/en/ch13s13-4.html#13-4-1
as part of their considered opinion.

Samanta, Ganguly and their colleagues also consider that their
results debunk another controversial paper
    
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1146663v1?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=Saleska+&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&resourcetype=HWCIT
published in 2007, which said that the 2005 drought was actually good
for the rainforests, causing them to 'green up' due to more sunlight
from cloudless skies.

These results are 'not reproducible', according to the new analysis,
which indicates that in fact nothing much changed down on the Amazon
during the 2005 dry spell. Samanta, Ganguly et al's paper, Amazon
forests did not green-up during the 2005 drought, is published
    
http://europa.agu.org/?view=article&uri=/journals/gl/gl1005/2009GL042154/2009GL042154.xml&t=gl,2009GL042154
in Geophysical Research Letters.


*It's WWF's position
   http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/01/uk_must_abandon_growth_to_cut_co2
for instance, that economic growth is evil and will destroy the planet.
We should actually be praying for a prolonged and massive recession
with no recovery afterwards.

The organisation started out as a fairly mainstream outfit intended to
protect wildlife, but has nowadays widened its remit into protecting
the entire planet from unsuitable human activities. The initials WWF
no longer stand for anything
    
http://www.panda.org/about_our_earth/faq/response.cfm?hdnQuestionId=3620012246264
in particular.

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