Pirate's Cove

I ran across this early August piece from the Huffington Post while I was looking for monkey pictures for Surrender Monkey posts, and, I just had to laugh at the spin

Today Dr. Birute Galdikas is considered one of the foremost experts on Orangutans. To this day she remains in Borneo, huddled in the dense peat swap forests – surrounded by foreign owned palm oil plantations, poachers, illegal loggers and gold miners – a single voice fending off the rapidly developing world and defending the last of these great apes.

According to Dr. Gladikas, the extinction of the Orangutan and the dire predictions of global climate change share a very similar root.

In short, the very events that are driving the Orangutan to extinction are the same that threaten our planet’s climate.

In the name of business, specifically, palm oil and mining, thousand of miles of peat swamp forest are burned in Borneo and many other regions throughout the world every year. Sadly, these forests also contain vast amounts of carbon, which when burned is released into the atmosphere, making Borneo, a small an non-industrial island, one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gas in the world.

Tragically, thousands of orangutans are also exterminated in the process.

The author, Todd Carmichael, misses the reality of the situation by inches. It is not global warming that is killing off the orangutans, nor the carbon released from the trees, but the need to plan the crops for palm oil, which is turned into a bio-fuel, heavily in demand, particularly in Europe. So, more land is needed, meaning less land for animals, in particular the Orangutans, Asian Elephants, and the Sumatran Tigers.

Think I am kidding about Orangutans being killed off by Climahysterics? Check out Friends of the Earth. One of the growing uses of palm oil is biodiesel. From The Guardian

The numbers are damning. Within 15 years 98% of the rainforests of Indonesia and Malaysia will be gone, little more than a footnote in history. With them will disappear some of the world’s most important wildlife species, victims of the rapacious destruction of their habitat in what conservationists see as a lost cause.

Yet this gloomy script was supposed to have included a small but significant glimmer of hope. Oil palm for biofuel was to have been one of the best solutions in saving the planet from greenhouse gases and global warming. Instead the forests are being torn down in the headlong rush to boost palm oil production.

“In reality it’s over for the tiger, the elephant and the orang-utan,” said Mr Smits, who founded the Borneo Orang-utan Survival Foundation. “Their entire lowland forest habitat is essentially gone already. We find orang-utan burned, or their heads cut off. Hunters are paid 150,000 rupiah [£8.30] for the right hand of an orang-utan to prove they’ve killed them.”

Way to go, AGW Believers.