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Luddite
I watch Fox News
Registered: 03/23/06
Posts: 2,946
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Good reason to shoot and eat a polar bear
#8429304 - 05/21/08 03:36 PM (15 years, 9 months ago) |
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WASHINGTON (Map, News) - The world’s polar bear population, it is reported, is at its peak, has more than doubled over the past 40 years and has handled itself well in temperatures higher than today’s. The main thing suggesting possible peril decades from now are computer models about as reliable as my big toe is in predicting whether it is going to rain tomorrow.
On this basis, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne has pronounced that polar bears are threatened as defined by the Endangered Species Act, and several environmental groups are openly plotting to use the ruling to stymie fossil-fuel energy consumption. One consequence, an analyst contends, could be to deprive the country of its best chance to grow less dependent on Mideast exports and better control pump prices.
All of this amounts to still more evidence that America is in the grip of radical environmentalists who succeeded through their incessant propagandizing and court action in getting the Bush administration not only to take up the issue, but to cave in to the pressure. In considering “the scientific record,” Kempthorne said, there was no other decision he could make. Really?
The thesis is that global warming is melting Arctic ice that many polar bears need in their hunting forays. NASA thinks differently, notes Kenneth Green, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
It’s changing wind patterns that have done most of the ice damage over the past eight years, the federal agency said not many months before a study’s findings were published in Nature.
As Green writes, that study said heating in the Arctic comes from the upper atmosphere, not at a lower level indicating the work of greenhouse gases.
Even if greenhouse gases were the chief risk to Arctic ice, you cannot reliably estimate their future effect based on United Nations computer modeling that forecast net warming this past decade. Patrick Michaels, a climatologist at the University of Virginia, notes that this warming didn’t happen, and adds that “scientists recently discovered that it is likely there will be little if any [net warming] for the next decade.” So all this stuff about the polar bear plight is a matter of politics, not science, he says.
The politics does not end with the polar bear palaver, but extends to the steps that might be taken in the name of saving the creatures. Kempthorne said his ruling had been so constructed as to keep it from compelling other policies meant to quell emissions or stop oil and gas production.
But don’t underestimate the persistence and legal wiliness of environmental groups, now hugely practiced at circumventing executive decisions and representative democracy through lawsuits. One possibility will be to seek the imposition of a vast, recession-inducing, market-adverse system of energy restraints throughout the country, and here is what one think tank observer also fears: use of the polar bear ruling to fight any congressional change of heart on tapping Alaskan and off-shore oil that exists in significant amounts and just might make an equally significant difference in the lives of millions of Americans.
Keep in mind that all of this would be for the supposed sake of saving some 25,000 bears that don’t seem to need saving. Supposing for the moment that the U.N. computer predictions were unassailable, The New York Times tells us scientists still say polar bears would be safe from extinction for more than 100 years.
Put it all together, and what you get is extremists aiming to dictate America’s destiny. It’s like handing the country over to the whims of my big toe.
http://www.examiner.com/a-1401739~Jay_Ambrose__Don_t_confuse_polar_bear_advocacy_with_facts.html
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Luddite
I watch Fox News
Registered: 03/23/06
Posts: 2,946
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Re: Good reason to shoot and eat a polar bear [Re: Luddite]
#8429334 - 05/21/08 03:40 PM (15 years, 9 months ago) |
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Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age
Lorne Gunter, National Post Published: Monday, February 25, 2008
Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.
The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January "was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average."
China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.
There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has felt the pinch as home buyers have stayed home rather than venturing out looking for new houses.
In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.
And remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its "lowest levels on record? Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.
The ice is back.
Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, says the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year.
OK, so one winter does not a climate make. It would be premature to claim an Ice Age is looming just because we have had one of our most brutal winters in decades.
But if environmentalists and environment reporters can run around shrieking about the manmade destruction of the natural order every time a robin shows up on Georgian Bay two weeks early, then it is at least fair game to use this winter's weather stories to wonder whether the alarmist are being a tad premature.
And it's not just anecdotal evidence that is piling up against the climate-change dogma.
According to Robert Toggweiler of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University and Joellen Russell, assistant professor of biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona -- two prominent climate modellers -- the computer models that show polar ice-melt cooling the oceans, stopping the circulation of warm equatorial water to northern latitudes and triggering another Ice Age (a la the movie The Day After Tomorrow) are all wrong.
"We missed what was right in front of our eyes," says Prof. Russell. It's not ice melt but rather wind circulation that drives ocean currents northward from the tropics. Climate models until now have not properly accounted for the wind's effects on ocean circulation, so researchers have compensated by over-emphasizing the role of manmade warming on polar ice melt.
But when Profs. Toggweiler and Russell rejigged their model to include the 40-year cycle of winds away from the equator (then back towards it again), the role of ocean currents bringing warm southern waters to the north was obvious in the current Arctic warming.
Last month, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, shrugged off manmade climate change as "a drop in the bucket." Showing that solar activity has entered an inactive phase, Prof. Sorokhtin advised people to "stock up on fur coats."
He is not alone. Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.
The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased.
It's way too early to claim the same is about to happen again, but then it's way too early for the hysteria of the global warmers, too.
lgunter@shaw.ca
http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/story.html?id=332289
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Luddite
I watch Fox News
Registered: 03/23/06
Posts: 2,946
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Re: Good reason to shoot and eat a polar bear [Re: Luddite]
#8429343 - 05/21/08 03:41 PM (15 years, 9 months ago) |
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boomer q
Comrade General
Registered: 05/03/07
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Re: Good reason to shoot and eat a polar bear [Re: Luddite]
#8429410 - 05/21/08 03:54 PM (15 years, 9 months ago) |
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-------------------- I got bags of funk and i sell em by the tons
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zappaisgod
horrid asshole
Registered: 02/11/04
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Loc: Fractallife's gym
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Re: Good reason to shoot and eat a polar bear [Re: boomer q]
#8429637 - 05/21/08 04:50 PM (15 years, 9 months ago) |
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I thought I was going to get a recipe. What the fuck am I going to do with the rest of this rug now?
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Luddite
I watch Fox News
Registered: 03/23/06
Posts: 2,946
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Re: Good reason to shoot and eat a polar bear [Re: zappaisgod]
#8433456 - 05/22/08 03:41 PM (15 years, 9 months ago) |
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Governor: Alaska to challenge polar bear listing
By DAN JOLING – 21 hours ago
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — The state of Alaska will sue to challenge the recent listing of polar bears as a threatened species, Gov. Sarah Palin announced Wednesday.
She and other Alaska elected officials fear a listing will cripple oil and gas development in prime polar bear habitat off the state's northern and northwestern coasts.
Palin argued that there is not enough evidence to support a listing. Polar bears are well-managed and their population has dramatically increased over 30 years as a result of conservation, she said.
Climate models that predict continued loss of sea ice, the main habitat of polar bears, during summers are unreliable, said Palin, a Republican.
The announcement drew a strong response from the primary author of the listing petition.
"She's either grossly misinformed or intentionally misleading, and both are unbecoming," said Kassie Siegel of the Center for Biological Diversity. "Alaska deserves better."
Siegel said it was unconscionable for Palin to ignore overwhelming evidence of global warming's threat to sea ice, the polar bear's habitat.
"Even the Bush administration can't deny the reality of global warming," she said. "The governor is aligning herself and the state of Alaska with the most discredited, fringe, extreme viewpoints by denying this."
As marine mammals, polar bears are regulated by the federal government, not the state. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne last week made the listing decision and said it was based on three findings.
"First, sea ice is vital to polar bear survival. Second, the polar bear's sea-ice habitat has dramatically melted in recent decades. Third, computer models suggest sea ice is likely to further recede in the future," he said.
Summer sea ice last year shrank to a record low, about 1.65 million square miles, nearly 40 percent less than the long-term average between 1979 and 2000.
Polar bears rely on sea ice for hunting ringed seals. In recent years, summer sea ice has receded far beyond the relatively shallow, biologically rich waters of the outer continental shelf, giving polar bears less time in prime feeding areas.
The bear's numbers rebounded after the 1970s, but conservation groups contend that was in response to measures taken to stop over-hunting.
Polar bear researchers fear recent effects of the loss of sea ice on Alaska polar bear populations. A 2006 study by the U.S. Geological Survey concluded that far fewer polar bear cubs in the Beaufort Sea were surviving and that adult males weighed less and had smaller skulls than those captured and measured two decades previously — trends similar to observations in Canada's western Hudson Bay before a population drop.
A U.S. Geological Survey study completed last year as part of the petition process predicted polar bears in Alaska could be wiped out by 2050.
Kempthorne said last week he considered every point Palin made, and rejected them.
However, he sought to limit the economic effect of the decision with the inclusion of "administrative guidance" that said the listing would not be used to create back-door climate policy outside the normal system of political accountability. He also said that the threat to polar bears did not come from the petroleum industry.
In response, conservation groups including the Center for Biological Diversity, Greenpeace and the Natural Resources Defense Council are seeking to overturn Kempthorne's administrative actions and seek limits on greenhouse gas emissions.
Palin and other state officials called arbitrary a decision to list a healthy species judging by what they deem uncertain modeling of future climate change and unproven long-term impact of any future climate change on the species.
State Natural Resources Commissioner Tom Irwin said it could have wide economic effects.
"Inappropriate implementation of this listing decision could result in widespread social and economic impacts, including increased power costs and further increases in fuel prices, without providing any more protection for the species," he said.
Deborah Williams, a former Interior Department special assistant for Alaska and an advocate in the state for global warming response, said Palin's lawsuit was not a prudent use of state money.
"Clearly Secretary Kempthorne put a tremendous amount of thought into the listing decision and concluded correctly that listing was required," she said.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5j9NGJ0_eVkxqgpEFC6RMHVlvT9qwD90QBMFG0
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Luddite
I watch Fox News
Registered: 03/23/06
Posts: 2,946
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Re: Good reason to shoot and eat a polar bear [Re: zappaisgod]
#8433460 - 05/22/08 03:42 PM (15 years, 9 months ago) |
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Quote:
zappaisgod said: I thought I was going to get a recipe. What the fuck am I going to do with the rest of this rug now?
How about barbecue? Are polar bears kosher?
Edited by Luddite (05/22/08 03:58 PM)
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andrewss
precariously aggrandized
Registered: 08/17/07
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Loc: ohio
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Re: Good reason to shoot and eat a polar bear [Re: Luddite]
#8435598 - 05/23/08 01:44 AM (15 years, 9 months ago) |
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I love you luddite
-------------------- Jesus loves you.
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Chemy
Jesus is Lord
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Re: Good reason to shoot and eat a polar bear [Re: Luddite]
#8435651 - 05/23/08 02:10 AM (15 years, 9 months ago) |
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Hiya Luddite,
I reviewed last weeks posts and your check will be in the mail on the 28th.
Thanks a ton,
The Texas GOP office
-------------------- Alcoholics Anonymous Narcotics Anonymous Get help, help is free and available 24/7/365. God bless you all and I hope you receive the help you need to turn away from your lives of sin. Mushrooms and drugs make you gay, you can reverse this homosexual condition with rehab, get help! Stop being gay!
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