Consider Al Gore’s extraordinarily alarmist claims that the world is facing a global warming “cataclysmic catastrophe” in “The Inconvenient Truth” and now consider these facts:

•   Early in February last year, storms dumped more than 12 feet of snow on upstate Redfield, N.Y., breaking the state record of 10 feet 7 inches made just five years earlier.  
•   Jan.  3, 2007, a record snowfall buried Anchorage, Alaska, accumulating 57.60 inches.  
•   Jan. 17, 2006 a record snowfall blanketed northwest Japan, dropping more than 3 meters of snow on some areas.  More than 80 people died.  The snow started coming down in December, which was the coldest December for many areas since 1946.  
•   March 2, 2005, temperatures fell to a 100-year low in Germany.  The Swiss capital of Bern registered minus 5.6 degrees celsius, its coldest for the season since data began to be collected in 1901. France beat records set in 1971.  
•   Jan. 5, 2001, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists announced that the U.S. national temperature during the November through December two-month period was the coldest such period on record. Forty-three states within the contiguous U.S. recorded below average temperatures during the November-December period.  
•   Aug. 25, 1999, Mt. Baker, Washington set a record for the most snowfall ever measured in the United States in a single season (1140 inches), NOAA reported.

These REAL facts and statistics constitute egg on the collective faces of Al Gore and his alarmist environmental friends such as the curiously named Friends of the Earth (FOE), for the world should be getting warmer if the theory of imminent "cataclysmic catastrophe” is correct!

But the weather refuses to cooperate with these environmental opportunists.  

In any event, these weather aberrations, if they are aberrations at all, are really aberrations from the perspective of the environmental alarmists and are usually greeted by the likes of FOE with profane silence, a silence that is in sharp contrast with their hubris when it comes to using the issue of global warming to attack palm oil.

For instance, in a recent “report” called “Malaysian Palm Oil: Green Gold or Green Wash?” FOE alleges that Malaysian palm oil is responsible for massive deforestation and consequently contributes to global warming. To Deforestation Watch, these attacks are both irrational and based on falsehoods.

These allegations have no basis in fact for some very simple reasons.

First, palm oil is one of the most productive of all the oilseeds in production.  It can yield an incredible 4.5 metric tons of edible oil per hectare.  If we compare this to the typical 0.5 metric yield of most of its competitors such as soy, sunflower or canola, it is clear that palm oil requires less land to produce the same tonnage of oil as its competitors.  That means that there is no necessity for palm oil to resort to massive deforestation to meet world market demands.  This is borne out by the fact that Malaysia, despite being the world’s largest producer of palm oil for more than a hundred years, can still maintain forest cover of 65%.  That might not appear to be much until we compare it to the typical 20% forest cover found in the countries of the industrialized west from which FOE hails!

Secondly, palm oil being a tree crop would be superior to its competitors, which are all basically grains, in terms of CO2 sequestration.

Thirdly, the oil palm tree is virtually a perennial crop with a productive life of close to 30 years, which does not require the annual tilling and soil preparation ( with all the overuse of chemical fertilizers that that entails) that its competitors typically require.

To Deforestation Watch, palm oil should receive the support of all true environmentalists worth their salt.  The fact that palm oil should come under such withering and vicious attacks from environmental organizations such as the FOE raises the specter that the FOE is a hired gun employed by anti-palm oil lobbies to stop the growth of palm oil, currently the fastest growing crop in the oilseed market!  Perhaps, it is palm oils inherent high productivity and consequent price competitiveness that has made the crop such a threat to its competitors that it has to be reined in, by fair means or foul.  And there is no shortage of proxies to undertake the hatchet job.  

In the view of Deforestation Watch, the smoking gun is the sheer illogic and irrationality behind the attacks against a crop that should have received the most support from true environmentalists!  THE END.