Eskimos in Alaska and Canada have joined to stop polar bears from being designated as an endangered species, saying the move threatens their culture and livelihoods by relying on sketchy science for animals that are thriving.
2008
The Interior Department's Inspector General has started preliminary investigations into why the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is delaying their decision on whether polar bears ought to be listed as a threatened species due to global warming.
Bloomberg even brings breaking news today that the greens are going to sue the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service over the two months delay as compared to the initial projected processing time.
I can come up with two very good reasons for the delay:
1. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service do not consider the polar bear as threatened, but do not have the political cahones to just say so outright. The ostrich tactic of sticking their heads in the sand is not working, so they might want to consider just fess up to the lack of scientific evidence to support the claim that the bear is threatened.
2. The evidence for the polar bear status as threatened is shaky at best. It is based on selective use of statistics and models that assume that the current trends in climate change will continue perpetually, which is highly unlikely.
Morten Jødal, the chair of the Biology Society in Norway has criticized the World Wildlife Foundation's selective use of population statistics in this debate in a recent commentary in the largest newspaper in Norway. It is in Norwegian, but here is a translation:
" Polar bear populations has increased dramatically from the 1960's to our time from about 5,000 individuals to about 25,000 individuals. It appears to be stable."
"It is correct as they point out that the population is down from 1,200 individuals in 1987 to about 950 individuals in 2004. What they omit si that the same population increased from 500 individuals in 1981. That gives a different picture, which does not indicate a species on the brink of extinction."
"Another piece of information that changes the statistic is that 49 polar bears are shot annually in the Western part of Hudson Bay. 833 polar bears have been shot over 17 years from 1987 to 2004. That is far more than the ones assumed to have lost their lives due to global warming."
There is no doubt that the listing of polar bears as an endangered species will have an enormous symbolic effect for the alarmists, but I was not aware that the endangered species list was a political propaganda tool, I thought it was a conservation tool, but then again I am naïve when it comes to politics and the things people are willing to do in the name of a cause.
Canada has warned the US government that a narrow interpretation of new energy legislation would prohibit its neighbour buying fuel from Alberta’s vast oil sands, with “unintended consequences for both countries”.
In a letter to Robert Gates, US defence secretary, Canada said that it “would not want to see an expansive interpretation” of the Energy Independence and Security Act 2007.
Finally some science applied to the scientific consensus on global warming, and guess what, it does not exist! Consensus studies are not uncommon in the world of economics, and the people that claim constituency in the discourse over climate policy ranges from every academic discipline in Hayek's grand tradition of being an expert in all areas once you established your "expertdom" in one.
However, the Association of Professional Engineers, Geologists and Geophysicists of Alberta, did canvas their members with a consensus survey and here is some highlight from the results. 99 percent thinks the climite is changing, 45 percent blame both human and natural causes, and 68 percent disagree with the statement "the debate on the scientific causes of recent climate change is settled." 26 per cent attributing global warming to human activity like burning fossil fuels and 27 per cent blaming other causes such as volcanoes, sunspots, earth crust movements and natural evolution of the planet.
For those of us that talk to scientists that have gag-orders, that fear retribution from colleagues that thinks skepticism jeopardize department funding, and that feel mistreated and ridiculed by the media; this does not come as a surprise. These results was not a surprise to APEGGA executive director Neil Windsor, but then again, the man is a scientist, not a media spin doctor with political credentials.
Last week, virtually unreported in Britain, the extraordinary winter weather of 2008 elsewhere in the world continued. In the USA, there were blizzards as far south as Texas and Arkansas, while in northern states and Canada what they are calling "the winter from hell" has continued to break records going back in some cases to 1873. Meanwhile in Asia more details emerged of the catastrophe caused by the northern hemisphere's greatest snow cover since 1966.
A Victoria environmental activist was quoted in the Times Colonist in January as saying he is trying to prevent "the demise of the planet." No less a figure than UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said, at the Bali environmental summit in December: "One path leads to a comprehensive climate change agreement, the other to oblivion. The choice is clear."
Is it? Are we heading for the "demise" of the planet, to "oblivion," if carbon dioxide levels go up much beyond their current level of 380 parts per million, or if the global temperature goes up three or four or five or, for that matter, 10 degrees from its current average of 12 degrees Celsius?
Only about one in three Alberta earth scientists and engineers believe the culprit behind climate change has been identified, a new poll reported today.
The expert jury is divided, with 26 per cent attributing global warming to human activity like burning fossil fuels and 27 per cent blaming other causes such as volcanoes, sunspots, earth crust movements and natural evolution of the planet.
In the recent flurry of moves to ban plastic bags a frequently cited statistic is that more than 100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles die each year from entanglement in, or ingestion of, plastic bags.
The original scientific study upon which this estimate relied actually attributed these deaths to fishing tackle in the oceans, not plastic bags. Yet the terms “100,000 marine deaths” and “plastic bags” now circulate happily through our public discourse, solidified as established fact.
I went into the kitchen this morning and used dung instead of the firewood and crop residue that I used yesterday to cook my family’s breakfast. There was no fruit to give them, though, because more than a quarter of produce gets wasted before it gets to my market, due to lack of refrigeration and storage.
I then tended to my terminally-ill toddler as best I could despite my near blindness; my child has an acute respiratory infection. Later in the morning my neighbor visited me, complaining of how a village child recently died of a snake bite—our clinic doesn’t have the refrigeration for the anti-venom serum.
The electricity to our village was restored today after three days without it, so my husband’s crops hopefully won’t die, now that he has electricity for the water pumps. Our village is very fortunate to even have electricity, though.
In the evening my husband came home from the fields saying he said he heard that many in the United States want us Indians to use less energy.
Data from Barun Mitra, LibertyIndia.org; Jyothi Parekh, et al, 2003.
88% of kitchens in Indian villages use dung, firewood or crop residue for fuel.
11% of women that use these traditional fuels have eye diseases.
2.6% children under 5 in rural India die from acute respiratory infections.
50,000 people die yearly from snake bites because of lack of medical facilities, including lack of refrigeration to store the anti-venom serums.
Only 13% of Indian villages have electricity.
Being a little behind on my reading I just encountered former Bush speechwriter and current Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson’s friday column weighing in to add context to Sen. Hillary Clinton’s claim that “the world was with us after 9/11. We have so squandered that goodwill and we’ve got to rebuild it”. Along the way he lends some unjustified support to it.
Yes, hers is a standard talking point since, oh, 2002. Yes, the point isn’t that Congress caused this rift but President Bush. And, yes, there is something to it, if generally not that which is attributed to the problem. Recall the late Tom Lantos’ observations how relations between the U.S. and its two greatest 2001-2006 antagonists, France and Germany, improved remarkably not with any change in our leadership, but changes in theirs.
Typically associated with this cooling of the relations are two complaints specifically echoed by Gerson, Guantanamo and global warming. The relevant tension will be remedied because “the next president, Republican of Democrat, is likely to close Guantanamo and sign legislation to restrict American carbon emissions, mollifying two justified European criticisms.” (emphasis added)
Leaving the Gitmo issue to Andrew McCarthy and the gang at the Corner, let’s walk through our progressions on the other point, shall we?
Gerson’s implication of course is that part of the Bush-driven rift with Europe (which he, too, admits has lessened appreciably) arises from said lack of CO2 legislation.
Question: how does such legislation come to be signed by presidents? If you guessed “Congress first passes it” you are correct. So once Bush is gone Congress will pass such a law, which they have chosen to not do to date. Congressional inaction driven by fear of a Bush veto is logically Gerson’s presumption in possible explanation why this point goes without elaboration.
Question: has this Congress shown a reluctance to pass bills on the fear – or even express promise – that Bush will veto them? If you also guessed “no” you’re at the head of the class.
So, at this point we know that if Congress acts in a way that to date they have chosen to not act if without a good excuse, Bush’s rift will be healed. But this wasn’t clear from the piece.
Also unspoken was the whole Kyoto thing, which hangs over Gerson’s column like those plumes of other-than-CO2 emissions (CO2 is invisible) that the media show you to dramatize any story about CO2 emissions (for fun, Google “squander post-9/11 goodwill Kyoto”, and gape in slack-jawed amazement at the number of returns).
To repeat: Bush articulated his Kyoto policy on March 17, 2001. Whatever your calendar – Julian, Gregorian, Wookie… – this event came six months before 9/11 and is very ill-timed for anything that might be described fairly as having contributed to “squandering post-9/11 goodwill.”
Further, that position that Bush articulated on 3/17/01 was that he had no interest in seeking Senate ratification. Period. The mythical “unsigning” is as real as the silly, contradictory news stories claiming that Bush “refused to sign” Kyoto. Clinton (specifically, then-Acting Ambassador to the U.S.’s UN Mission, Peter Burleigh) signed it on November 12, 1998.
It is inarguable that as a substantive matter this position articulated six months before the world was united beside us was an affirmation of the Clinton-Gore policy, regardless of whether the latter ever had a press conference to announce it (they tried to keep word of signing the thing as quiet as such things can be – go ahead and find it on the internet, you’ll see one Planet Ark story – so I assure you they never did that). I'm not saying the French liked him actually saying that, just that that's all he did and said.
So for over three years after Gore originally agreed to the pact for us on December 11, 1997 until they left office, the Clinton-Gore administration’s policy was the Bush policy.
Finally, why might Europe "justifiably criticize" us for not passing a law to cap CO2 emissions? Presumably because they are doing that themselves, right? Somehow capping emissions, that is, not passing laws at the EU level which we by now know to be unenforceable and more subject to gaming than even domestic carbon laws. See below, aware that when this chart is updated, likely in the last week or so of June, after a drop of about 0.8% in 2005 these emissions will have risen 2006-over-2005 by about a percent and a half, according to member-state data already in the public domain.
In short, Europe has absolutely zero grounds for claiming that CO2 or Kyoto justified their anti-American snit(s) after we were dealt with ground zero. Period.
Everyone’s emissions are increasing; everyone’s. Of course, not everyone’s are increasing as fast as Europe’s. And as regards the U.S., our emissions went down the last year on record, 2006; over the period since 1997 when Europe began its grandiose promises, US CO2 emissions performance is to have increased emissions at an annual rate that is half of Europe’s, even while our economy and population grew faster than theirs. Since 2000, the gap widens significantly. Europe’s criticisms are not justified. Period.
In a normal election year, this would be an issue, and these facts would become more widely known. This clearly, however, is not a normal election year.
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