That's what I love about Government Departments. How to make up a good excuse or story for what they are aren't doing. Not to mention that the Australian government has already taken the benefits from article 3.3 (woody vegetation) and used it to their own advantage and not paid farmers a cent for their losses of productive farming land. This climate change issue as a whole is crucifying investment and development in Australia. Add to this the potential for humans having no effect on the climate and we have a disaster looming.

Will someone please tell me why agriculture is copping such a flogging while aeroplanes, spewing masses of gasses directly into the upper atmosphere where real damage can be done, don't rate a mention.

Processes often override outcomes. It is my understanding that with the first Kyoto agreement, Australia showed absolutely no interest in soil carbon, because the base year was 1990. This was a very wet year, so soil carbon levels could only head in one direction, down. However, if the base year had been the 1982 drought, then maybe we would have been interested. It is possible to reduce carbon loss in dry years. This is a POSITIVE outcome, even if the net balance is still reducing. Furthermore, management to achieve this outcome will also see a more rapid build up of carbon again when the season breaks. Minimising soil carbon loss also reduces methane produced per kg of production. This is all explained in the methane chapter on www.carbongrazing.com.au

The government has got themselves lost in their own political spin and hypocrisy. Soil carbon has never been on the public science agenda until a few years ago and they are now in catch-up mode. Also, how can the government take credit for bans on land clearing but hope to exclude the emissions from bushfires directly induced and enhanced by that lack of land management? By failing to manage the natural fuel ecology they are directly contributing to emissions and thus liable under the article 3.4 and the UNFCCC. The simple reality is that government is desperate to engineer a method to measure soil C. They do not have one and can't knock off farmers credits without one, so they are waffling in the hope that CSIRO with $20m will deliver. If they get a method they will change their tune fundamentally. This is in spite of the fact that methods have existed in private companies for the past 10 years, and they know, but do not have control of the method.

Seems this might be the reason to leave agriculture right out of ETS in Australia.

It seems to me, that in spite of our protests and govt and bureaucrat waffling, we will get some type of ets, it will cost farmers a lot of money and the middle men will make trillions out of it. We can't trust them to look after the farmers' interests. You only have to look at the Murray Darling water buybacks, where politics comes before good decisions.

Below is Article 3.4 of the Kyoto Protocol. "4. Prior to the first session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to this Protocol, each Party included in Annex I shall provide, for consideration by the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice, data to establish its level of carbon stocks in 1990 and to enable an estimate to be made of its changes in carbon stocks in subsequent years. The Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to this Protocol shall, at its first session or as soon as practicable thereafter, decide upon modalities, rules and guidelines as to how, and which, additional human-induced activities related to changes in greenhouse gas emissions by sources and removals by sinks in the agricultural soils and the land-use change and forestry categories shall be added to, or subtracted from, the assigned amounts for Parties included in Annex I, taking into account uncertainties, transparency in reporting, verifiability, the methodological work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the advice provided by the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice in accordance with Article 5 and the decisions of the Conference of the Parties. Such a decision shall apply in the second and subsequent commitment periods. A Party may choose to apply such a decision on these additional human-induced activities for its first commitment period, provided that these activities have taken place since 1990."

This says that Australia will have to account in changes soil carbon, and other land based sinks in "the second and subsequent commitment periods". The accounting rules (i.e. modalities, rules and guidelines) are set out by the IPCC (2006), and these rules allow two different ways of measuring changes in soil carbon and other land stocks for 'crop land' and 'grass land'. i.e. "There are two fundamentally different and equally valid approaches to estimating stock changes: 1) the process-based approach, which estimates the net balance of additions to and removals from a carbon stock; and 2) the stock-based approach, which estimates the difference in carbon stocks at two points in time." 'Stock based' accounting estimates the change in total carbon stocks in 'crop land' and 'grass land' and this will include changes due to above or below average seasons.

The 'process based' approach allows for changes to be estimated based on changes in land management only, and thus could ignor changes in carbon stocks due to seasonal variations such as drought. So if there is a change in management on a particular piece of land this accounting could simply compare the sequestration / emmision rate of the new practise with sequestration / emission rate of the old practise. This would allow the affect of season to be ignored.

Even with stock change accounting the suggested large emissions due to recent droughts in Australia needs to be questioned. While there have been extreme droughts in some parts of SE and SW Australia the rainfall averaged over the whole country has actually been increasing (slightly) over the last 3 decades, and the year to year variation is small. So the graph in the White paper sugesting Australia lost about 400 million t CO2e in soil carbon stocks due to a recent drought doesn't make sense, and the data behind that claim has never been made public.

Deep roots has identified one of the problems we face in this debate. When read in the context of Matt's article we note Ian Carruthers from Dept of Climate Change refers to the National Carbon Accounting System or NCAS in relation to Article 3.4 activities. This process sets the boundaries for how we measure fluxes such as soil carbon and what "deep roots" calls the "accounting rules". The values used in NCAS are so obscure as to be irrelevant at the farm scale and all attempts to access the values used in NCAS have been blocked by Carruthers and his colleagues. Every so often the UNFCCC sends an Expert Review Team in to examine the "books" or how Australia reports its net emissions. When Australia made the decision to report a zero value for 3.4 it would seem that this part of NCAS escaped scrutiny. Depending on what occurs at Copenhagen we may never know just how badly the Ag Sector has been disadvantaged by decisions that directly impact on how the sector's emissions profile is reported.

The facts are these: The combined Ag and Land Use (LULUCF) have reduced net emissions by 40% from 1990 levels (NGGI 2006). This is using NCAS with its current settings. NCAS ignores much of the increase in woody biomass in the grazed woodlands (including the retention of coarse woody debris) as it suits a pre determined outcome.

For homework read Article 3.7 of the Kyoto Protocol and ask what would be the outcome if the Landuse Sector had been a net sink in 1990. In addition now that I am wound up, ask why the Department has started using 2000 as a reporting baseline rather than 1990? Could it be that the advantage of the Ag/LUC component in the total baseline shifts to other sectors by using the later date?