Posted on 01/03/2007 7:52:36 AM PST by presidio9
Unless you've been hibernating for the winter, you have no doubt heard the many alarms about global warming. Now even the Bush Administration is getting into the act, at least judging from last week's decision by Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne to recommend that the majestic polar bear be listed as "threatened" under the Endangered Species Act. The closer you inspect this decision, however, the more it looks like the triumph of politics over science.
"We are concerned," said Mr. Kempthorne, that "the polar bears' habitat may literally be melting" due to warmer Arctic temperatures. However, when we called Interior spokesman Hugh Vickery for some elaboration, he was a lot less categorical, even a tad defensive. The "endangered" designation is based less on the actual number of bears in Alaska than on "projections into the future," Mr. Vickery said, adding that these "projection models" are "tricky business."
Apparently so, because there are in fact more polar bears in the world now than there were 40 years ago, as the nearby chart shows. The main threat to polar bears in recent decades has been from hunting, with estimates as low as 5,000 to 10,000 bears in the 1950s and 1960s. But thanks to conservation efforts, and some cross-border cooperation among the U.S., Canada and Russia, the best estimate today is that the polar bear population is 20,000 to 25,000.
It also turns out that most of the alarm over the polar bear's future stems from a single, peer-reviewed study, which found that the bear population had declined by some 250, or 25%, in Western Hudson Bay in the last decade. But the polar bear's range is far more extensive than Hudson Bay. A 2002 U.S. Geological Survey of wildlife in the Arctic Refuge Coastal Plain concluded that the ice
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
I suspect there will be some amorous interchange between Polar and Kodiaks in the not too distant future.
Dr. Ian Malcolm: No, I'm simply saying that life, uh... finds a way. ...
Chairwoman Boxer will make Global Warming a priority and many anti-biz laws will be signed. Elections do have consequences
Signed and vetoed. Yawn.
Signed and vetoed. Yawn.
I dont know if thats an automatic
"Reporters for the Wall Street Journal routinely distance themselves from the editorial page. Many of the paper's own reporters laugh or cringe at the anti-scientific posture of the editorials, and advise the rest of us simply not to read them. Nevertheless, the consequences of those editorials are significant. The Wall Street Journal is the most widely read business paper in the world. Its influence is extensive. Yet it gets a free pass on editorial irresponsibility."
In response to these growing political pressures, the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences conducted a major independent scientific review and updating of the hockey stick data and analysis. While acknowledging a range of uncertainties, that report came down squarely on the side of the Mann study. The NRC noted that "presently available proxy evidence indicates that temperatures at many, but not all, individual locations were higher during the past 25 years than during any period of comparable length since A.D. 900." It went on to say "the committee finds it plausible that the Northern Hemisphere was warmer during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period over the preceding millennium." They noted significant uncertainties that remain for global temperatures before 1600, but emphasized "surface temperature reconstructions for periods prior to the industrial era are only one of multiple lines of evidence supporting the conclusion that climatic warming is occurring in response to human activities, and they are not the primary evidence." (emphasis added)
So, let me get this straight: We have proxy evidence, with a range of uncertainties that many but not all individual locations were warmer in the last 25 years than anytime in the previous 1000 years, even though there are significant uncertainties regarding the estimated temperatures prior to 1600, and all of this data causes the committee to find it PLAUSIBLE that we are seeing global warming and that man is responsible for it. But according to the author, the skeptics who refuse to take the leap of faith from plausibility to universally accepted truth are the ones who should be criticized on scientific grounds?
The WSJ editorial board doesn't recognize any of the multiple lines of evidence. That's the problem. Focusing on one, which has acknowledged uncertainties (and did even before critical focus was turned on it) is an argumentative ploy. And that's why the WSJ editorial board did it -- the uncertainties were aligned with their obvious slant on global warming topics.
The socialist solution to the alleged polar bear problem:
Enact Kyoto and so on.
My solution.
Repeal the ESA! No more property owners made miserable, or shooting, shoveling, and shutting up!
Already happened. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12738644
Of course. And, surprise! it turns out people in the north are liking their 50 degree winter. The only people bitching are the ones who need a bogey man to rally people around at election time. It's all El Nino this winter anyway. And doesn't the earth have the capacity to recalibrate? If all that freezing cold fresh water is dumping into the gulf stream aren't the oceans going to cool down and turn the weather the other way? I am no expert but figure I know about as much as the experts on this subject.
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