Alarmism appears to be the stock-in-trade of environmental organizations. Curiously, hyperbole and worst case scenarios seems to go hand-in-hand with the “reports” that they trudge out with from time to time.

We are constantly inundated with stories of how sea levels will rise, and how one study after another finds that it will be much worse than what the IPCC predicts. But most models find results within the IPCC range of a sea-level increase of 18cm to 59cm this century. This is, of course, why the thousands of IPCC scientists projected that range. Yet studies claiming 1m or more obviously make for better headlines.

Since 1992, we have had satellites measuring the rise in global sea levels and they have shown a stable increase of 3.2mm a year: spot on compared with the IPCC projection. Moreover, over the past two years, sea levels have not increased at all; actually, they show a slight drop. Should we not be told that this is much better than expected?
 
Hurricanes were the stock image of former US vice-president Al Gore's famous film on climate change, and certainly the US was battered in 2004 and 2005, leading to wild claims of ever stronger and costlier storms in the future. But in the two years since, the costs have been well below average, virtually disappearing in 2006. That is definitely better than expected.Gore quoted Massachusetts Institute of Technology hurricane researcher Kerry Emanuel to support an alleged scientific consensus that global warming is making hurricanes much more damaging. But Emanuel has published a new study showing that even in a dramatically warming world, hurricane frequency and intensity may not substantially rise during the next two centuries. That conclusion did not get much exposure in the media.

Of course, not all things are less bad than we thought. But one-sided exaggeration is not the way forward. We urgently need balance if we are to make sensible choices.

In keeping with their “tradition” to peddle the worst case scenario, environmental organizations like the Friends of the Earth (FOE) have been pulling out the stops to try to curtail the growth of palm oil.  In a ‘report’ called “Malaysian Palm Oil: Green Gold or Green Wash” the FOE sought to paint a distorted picture of the Malaysian State of Sarawak, accusing it of causing massive deforestation expanding oil palm plantations at the expense of tropical rainforests.

The “report” neglects to tell its readers that Sarawak has an incredible agriculture to forest ratio of 8:76.   With agricultural land covering only 8% of the State, Sarawak should rightfully be commended for conserving 76% of its land as forest cover, which should put to shame the countries of the industrialized West from which these paragons of environmental virtue hails!

Even if we leave aside the State of Sarawak, Malaysia by itself can still boast forest cover exceeding 55%.  This makes it abundantly clear that palm oil does not require quite as much land as the FOE would want us to believe. This is despite it being the world’s largest producer of palm oil for over a century, a function of the crops incredible yield of 4-5 metric tons per hectare which is close to 10 times higher than its closest competitors. This explains why palm oil which occupies less than 1% of the world agricultural land can produce 30% of the world'ssupply of edible oils!

In the view of Deforestation Watch, it is indeed baffling that Malaysia and the State of Sarawak, with such a preponderance of forest cover, and palm oil, of all oilseed crops should be subjected to such unfair and unjustified attacks.  THE END.