ABC environment-a good yarn

ABC pump up the alarm with this piece by "free lancer" and non climate expert Sue White:

7 of your favourite foods affected by climate change
Climate change could be coming to a supermarket near you, with a shocking list of your top seven favourite foods affected.

In her description about herself Sue says she "can compile a good yarn on almost any topic, but she mostly focuses on health/wellbeing, environment, travel, careers and productivity."

Definition of yarn:
yarn

yärn/

noun

1. 1.

   spun thread used for knitting, weaving, or sewing.

   synonyms:

   thread, cotton, wool, fiber, filament; More

2. 2.

   informal

   a long or rambling story, especially one that is implausible.

   synonyms:

   story, tale, anecdote, saga, narrative; More

verb

informal

1. 1.

   tell a long or implausible story.

   "they were yarning about local legends and superstitions

Seems that definition spot on! Your tax dollars at work.

Ignoring history-Thatcher and Climate Change

ABC's environment website is a type example of bias and mis-information. Their propaganda playbook straight out of Orwell's 1984. No surprise there, given it's run by environmental activists who enjoy trouncing ABC's editorial policies.

The latest piece of mis-information; an op ed titled "How Margaret Thatcher led the way on climate change"

Amazingly this piece omits Thatcher's comments made in her 2003 book "Statecraft" in which she almost completely recants the views contained in ABC's op ed. ABC's writer and editor willfully ignore the facts for the sake of spruiking their own agenda. Once again ABC's audience left in the dark.

Here are a few choice quotes from Statecraft, from the section "Hot Air and Global Warming" (P.449)

"The doomsters favourite subject today is climate change."

"Indeed, the lack of any sense of proportion is what characterises many pronouncements on the matter by otherwise sensible people."

"Ït would, though, be difficult to beat for apocalyptic hyperbole former Vice-President Gore." (ed. MT not aware of the dire pronouncements of our own Climate Commission!)

ABC's Man from Snowy River

ABC Environment's impression of the Man from Snowy River

With this in mind Banjo Patterson's Man from Snowy River may have had a slightly different ending...

The man from Snowy River is a household word today, 

And the stockmen tell the story of his rice.

Who's Ho?

Credit Ho New (Reuters) 

Screen shot of the offending item taken from ABC Environment's Site 25/10/2011

We have had some fun with ABC environment's woeful attempt to automatically link news headlines to stock images (see this effort for instance), however this time the incompetence relates to attribution of a photo in an opinion piece on its website (shown above).

The correct attribution is shown below in an article from MSNBC. As to who "Ho New" is, we asked Reuters and they indicated the Ho refers to "Handout".

Attribution of MSNBC article reads "Dennis Sarrazin  /  ArcticNet/Centre d'Etudes Nordiques"

You can see more amazing photos by Dennis Sarrazin at his page at the Centre d'Etudes Nordiques. The photo ABC incorrectly credited to a "Handout" from Reuters was taken in on the 20/08/2008 and shows Disraeli fjord, Ellesmere Island, Northern Canada. In Dennis Sarrazin's slideshow it's about the 20th photo in.

In regard to the content of the op ed piece, if you look up "Alarmist" in the dictionary it now simply shows a Lissajous curve. In regard to its author, based on a recent critique by Roger Pielke Jnr, I believe the label "cherry picker" is appropriate.

Update from Reuters received 29/10/2011:
Thanks for the note, and sorry for the delay. The HO is actually an internal code which is added to a picture when its put into our archive. It most likely was a technical glitch.


No, just ABC incompetence.

ABC Environment mutilate wallabies

Update Nothing abnormal about NT fires

ABC provide the reply below to our complaint regarding their claims CO2 releases from NT fires are abnormal. Tainted as it is by a groupthink mentality, lack of balance and failure to live up to normal journalistic standards on environmental reporting, ABC's exceptionally low standards are fast becoming the norm. (To see how totally normal this year's fire season is, skip to the links below ABC's response-title in red).

Here's their response (in italics) received October 11, our comments in bold:
Thank you for your email of October 7 concerning the story "Science counts carbon cost of Red Centre fires".
As your correspondence raised concerns of a lack of accuracy, your email was referred to Audience and Consumer Affairs for consideration and response. The unit is separate and independent from ABC program areas (as separate as Chang and Eng) and is responsible for investigating complaints alleging a broadcast or publication was in contravention of the ABC's editorial standards (by providing a big rubber stamp for ABC's errors and misleading reports). In light of your concerns, we have reviewed the story and assessed it against the ABC’s editorial requirements for accuracy, as outlined in section 2 of the ABC’s Editorial Policies:http://www.abc.net.au/corp/pubs/edpols.htm. In the interests of procedural fairness, we have also sought and considered material from ABC News.

Your complaint is that the use of the “abnormal” in relation to the fires is a “gross distortion” of the facts. The story carefully and accurately described the fact that these fires are part of the natural cycle in the Northern Territory but are, none the less, far from common.  (In the story Dr Ashley Sparrow indicates it is "an example of the boom-and-bust ecosystem in the Red Centre at work". Only activist reporters at the ABC could construe this as abnormal. It is clearly part of a well known common natural cycle.)
That you had to go back 60 years to find reports of equivalent fires, demonstrates this.
(This is a demonstration of the ignorance and laziness of ABCs respondent. I found the news articles on the National Library Newspaper site in about 2 minutes. The Archive ends in the 1950s. A fuller account of bushfires activity in the NT is provided below, this located in about 2 mintues. It seems that large fires in the NT are quite common.)
Describing such events as “abnormal” is only intended to indicate their infrequency, which is quite clear when read in context. The story is not misleading. 

(Based on the evidence of fire activity in the NT use of the term "abnormal" is indeed misleading, sensationalist and inaccurate).

Accordingly, while noting your concerns, Audience and Consumer Affairs are satisfied the story was in keeping with the ABC’s editorial standards for accuracy (In other words it as woeful and as tainted by Groupthink as the rest of ABC's environmental reporting). Nonetheless, please be assured that your comments have been noted and conveyed to ABC News management (As the same mistakes keep on occurring in ABC's echo chamber one doubts that much notice is paid to any criticism).
Thank you for taking the time to write; your feedback is appreciated (I'm sure it is).
End Response

Some further information on NT Bush fires 
from Understanding bushfire: trends in deliberate vegetation fires in Australia-Northern Territory

Few people are aware of the role, the process or the scale of burning (controlled and uncontrolled) that occurs in the tropical savannas of northern Australia. Bushfires are a ubiquitous feature of the Northern Territory dry season, with the territory having the most frequent, largest and more poorly documented vegetation fires of any part of the continent. When considering Northern Territory bushfires it is necessary to discard all preconceptions of size, frequency and even harm, based on southern vegetation fire regimes, as they are simply not translatable to the savannas that dominate Australia’s north. 

Area burned: The frequency and area burned in any one year varies considerably. Nevertheless, by
southern standards the total and the proportion of land burned in any given year is extraordinarily large. In the higher rainfall savanna woodlands of the northern Kimberley, the Top End and Cape York up to half of the total area may be burned either every year or every second year (Anderson 1996, Dyer et al. 2001, Press 1998, Russell-Smith et al. 1997). Many of these fires are intense and therefore pose the most danger in terms of their capacity to devastate populations of fire-sensitive native plants and animals, to be costly and disruptive to pastoral operations, and to pose a threat to communities and property. The frequency of fires tends to decrease further south for a number of reasons. They include reduced rainfall and therefore vegetation density, reduced grass reserves due to intensive use of these savannas for grazing, and greater efforts to suppress fires to prevent destruction of valuable fodder resources.

Intense fires commonly started by lightning strikes during particularly dry seasons have occurred
throughout the Northern Territory’s modern history. The amounts of land burned in these events are extraordinary. The Council of Australian Governments report (Ellis, Kanowski & Whelan 2004) lists four major bushfire seasons in the territory since the late 1960s that collectively burned 168,000,000 ha. In 2002, approximately 38,000,000 ha burned in planned and unplanned fires. This represents 29 percent of the Northern Territory. In comparison, the January 2003 fires burned ‘only’ 226,000 ha in the Australian Capital Territory and 1,000,000 ha in Victoria. See Table 1 above.

So nothing "abnormal" about large bush fires in the NT!

See also this animation of fires around Central Australia for the period May 1999 to April 2004:
http://www.nt.gov.au/nreta/natres/bushfires/research/desertfire.html

NASA image from 2007...Below Huge fires scorched grassland and savanna in the Barkly Tableland region of Australia’s Northern Territory in October 2007. 

Based on ABC's story one wonders where Fred Williams got the inspiration for this series of paintings?...

Bushfire in Northern Territory 12) (1976)

How much of Kakadu Burnt each year? Did I hear an average of 46%? And that's abnormal?

Abnormal? According to the paper...Fire frequency and biodiversity conservation in Australian tropical savannas: implications from the Kapalga fire experiment

Every year large proportions of northern Australia's tropical savanna landscapes are burnt, resulting in high fire frequencies and short intervals between fires.

Austral Ecology

Volume 30, Issue 2, pages 155–167, April 2005

From...Fire and Sustainable Agricultural and Forestry Development in Eastern Indonesia and Northern Australia Proceedings of an international workshop held at  Northern Territory University, Darwin, Australia, 13–15 April 1999. (Link Here) From Russell-Smith et al, on page 95... In northwestern and northern Australia, and possibly also on parts of Cape York in the northeast, intense wild fires typically late in the dry season burn vast tracts annually. 


Vast Tracts! And to the ABC this year's fires are somehow "abnormal"!

Image mix up - Animal Special

Slow posting this month, so here's a selection of recent mixed messages from ABC Environment to make up for it. Add your own commentary!

 

 

   

 

New Dolphin Species!

ABC Environment report on the discovery of a new species of dolphin in Victoria...

Can anyone suggest a name for the new beastie? Yertle, perhaps?
I guess that image problem left in the too hard basket.

working on a solution

Seems ABC innovation are still working hard, battling those image problems on the ABC's environment news page...

We initially advised ABC of the issue on the 4th of April. According to those in the know..."ABC Innovation has advised that stories from across the ABC that are filed with no image are randomly assigned an image on the Environment portal from a pool of images. I understand relevant ABC Innovation staff are aware of the discordant match-ups that this system has produced and have been working on a solution. The examples published on your website have been brought to the attention of ABC Innovation management."

Image problem continues

About our inquires about it's problem coordinating headlines and images on the ABC environment site ABC recently replied (on 13/5/2011)
"ABC Innovation has advised that stories from across the ABC that are filed with no image are randomly assigned an image on the Environment portal from a pool of images. I understand relevant ABC Innovation staff are aware of the discordant match-ups that this system has produced and have been working on a solution. The examples published on your website have been brought to the attention of ABC Innovation management."


We initially advised ABC of the issue on the 4th of April. It's now July and the problem is still not fixed!

ABC's collared dingos

image problem - on the back burner

About our inquires about it's problem coordinating headlines and images on the ABC environment site ABC recently replied (13/5/2011)
"ABC Innovation has advised that stories from across the ABC that are filed with no image are randomly assigned an image on the Environment portal from a pool of images. I understand relevant ABC Innovation staff are aware of the discordant match-ups that this system has produced and have been working on a solution. The examples published on your website have been brought to the attention of ABC Innovation management."


We initially advised ABC of the issue on the 4th of April. It's now June and the problem is still not fixed!

ABC's lobster harvester in action.

Can you define exclusive Sir Humphrey?

ABC find a new definition of "exclusive".

Thank you for your email of 29 March (see our post Exclusive opinion).
In response to your first query, I understand the Environment portal is an aggregation site which draws in content from other ABC websites, and also publishes some original material not found elsewhere on the ABC. ABC Innovation has advised that audience feedback suggested there was so much content from across the ABC that the original pieces were lost. I am advised that the 'Exclusives' tab was set up as a navigation aid to assist users to find content which has been published on the portal and which does not appear anywhere else on the ABC; that is, content that is exclusive to the portal in the sense that it did not come from elsewhere on the ABC. This was the case for the opinion piece 'Why I think climate change is real', which appeared in the 'Opinion' and 'Exclusives' sections of the Environment portal and nowhere else on the ABC. (This article first appeared on The Conversation-ed)

In response to your second query, I am advised that ABC Innovation does not commission original news stories for the Environment portal. However, I understand there have been many feature stories and opinion pieces published exclusively on the portal.

Your feedback, including your request for the 'Exclusives' section to include only news stories which are exclusive to the ABC, has been conveyed to relevant staff in ABC Innovation. (Received 13/5/2011)


That's "Innovation" for you!


A slightly different definition of exclusive: "a piece of news, or the reporting of a piece of news, obtained by a newspaper or other news organization, along with the privilege of using it first."

Image problem

ABC provide the following explanation for the image problem with ABC Environment 's Online News Section
Received 13/5/2011
ABC Innovation has advised that stories from across the ABC that are filed with no image are randomly assigned an image on the Environment portal from a pool of images. I understand relevant ABC Innovation staff are aware of the discordant match-ups that this system has produced and have been working on a solution. The examples published on your website have been brought to the attention of ABC Innovation management.



This mixed up headline published the same day suggests work is proceeding at the usual rate. Note that we first informed ABC on 4 April, 2011.

Not sure if that's Robyn or Fran (or Julia) under that hat.

ABC Environment: the insults continue

ABC Environment continue their visual insults to Vietnamese farmers. We look forward to their apology.

 

ABC find the Real Julia

ABC have found the real Julia! Photo evidence to boot.
Either that or they are:
A). Comparing the Australian PM with a Vietnamese Peasant
B). Comparing the Japanese people with a Vietnamese Peasant
C). Too lazy to take a few moments to select the appropriate image from ABC's extensive image library
D). All of the above.
We've asked ABC to confirm which one they wanted to imply when they juxtaposed the headline with our favourite ABC environment image. We also sent a copy to the PM's department.

 

 ABC Environment too lazy to find the right picture? Or perhaps they just don't give a shit.
We asked the PM's department the following question:
Can the PM's department please enquire whether the ABC were seeking to traduce the position of PM, or the Japanese people?

Mountain cattlemen not what they used to be.

According to images used by ABC environment mountain cattlemen are not what they used to be.

Likewise, cane farmers,

Sodden Tassie Farmers,

 cassowaries,

tuna, and

burping sheep.

ABC Environment, where the incompetence never ceases.

ABC-Uranium mine in the snowy West Australian Alps!

Screen capture from ABC environment portal 14/2/2011

Based on the image (see screenshot above) ABC Environment use to accompany an ABC news story about Uranium exploration near Wiluna, in West Australia it appears the West Australian's have been hiding an alpine wonderland from the rest of Australia. Perhaps this is the way ABC environment staff view every potential mine site?

Here's a Google earth image of the Wiluna Region. Can anyone pin point those snowy mountains here? Anyone? There's a copy of the Prince of Precaution for the winning entry.

...and yes that is a meteorite crater in the upper central part of the image. It's Lake Nabberu, the site of the Shoemaker Meteorite impact crater.

UPDATE 15/2/2011: The image to accompany this news article on developing the Potosi Mine near Broken Hill suggest the effects of climate change already quite pronounced in outback NSW. Come to Broken Hill and see the coral wonderland.

Tourism opportunities in NSW's Hunter region now look much brighter with an Alpine wonderland at Sydney front door...

Barrier Reefs now found at Bathurst!