"The Independent" is a British Leftist newspaper (the only thing it is independent of is the truth) with some pretensions to being a "quality" paper. They must however have been losing market-share lately because they have descended into scare stories that differ from what you read in the tabloids only in their being much longer. Their last ecocatastrophe scare story so outraged the scientist that they were supposedly quoting that he vowed never to speak to them again. See my post of Oct 1st.
The last story must have been good for circulation, however, because they have now come up with another story of the same ilk that leaves no stone unturned in seeking out ecological disasters. Amusingly, one of the authors is an "Andrew Buncombe" (pronounced "bunkum") so I suppose that is fair warning.
To fisk the whole thing would be a labour of Hercules as they have managed to gather together almost every Greenie distortion there is. If anybody reading this does want to do a full fisking of it, however, I will be delighted to post it. I reproduce the opening salvo from the article below and follow it with a comment that shows just how much science it is based on:
"The polar bear is one of the natural world's most famous predators - the king of the Arctic wastelands. But, like its vast Arctic home, the polar bear is under unprecedented threat. Both are disappearing with alarming speed. Thinning ice and longer summers are destroying the bears' habitat, and as the ice floes shrink, the desperate animals are driven by starvation into human settlements - to be shot. Stranded polar bears are drowning in large numbers as they try to swim hundreds of miles to find increasingly scarce ice floes. Local hunters find their corpses floating on seas once coated in a thick skin of ice.
It is a phenomenon that frightens the native people that live around the Arctic. Many fear their children will never know the polar bear. "The ice is moving further and further north," said Charlie Johnson, 64, an Alaskan Nupiak from Nome, in the state's far west. "In the Bering Sea the ice leaves earlier and earlier. On the north slope, the ice is retreating as far as 300 or 400 miles offshore." Last year, hunters found half a dozen bears that had drowned about 200 miles north of Barrow, on Alaska's northern coast. "It seems they had tried to swim for shore ... A polar bear might be able to swim 100 miles but not 400."
His alarming testimony, given at a conference on global warming and native communities held in the Alaskan capital, Anchorage, last week, is just one story of the many changes happening across the globe. Climate change threatens the survival of thousands of species - a threat unparalleled since the last ice age, which ended some 10,000 years ago.
The vast majority, scientists will warn this week, are migratory animals - sperm whales, polar bears, gazelles, garden birds and turtles - whose survival depends on the intricate web of habitats, food supplies and weather conditions which, for some species, can stretch for 6,500 miles. Every link of that chain is slowly but perceptibly altering.
Europe's most senior ecologists and conservationists are meeting in Aviemore, in the Scottish Highlands, this week for a conference on the impact of climate change on migratory species, an event organised by the British government as part of its presidency of the European Union. It is a well-chosen location. Aviemore's major winter employer - skiing - is a victim of warmer winters. Ski slopes in the Cairngorms, which once had snow caps year round on the highest peaks, have recently been closed down when the winter snow failed. The snow bunting, ptarmigan and dotterel - some of Scotland's rarest birds - are also given little chance of survival as their harsh and marginal winter environments disappear.
A report being presented this week in Aviemore reveals this is a pattern being repeated around the world. In the sub-Arctic tundra,caribou are threatened by "multiple climate change impacts". Deeper snow at higher latitudes makes it harder for caribou herds to travel. Faster and more regular "freeze-thaw" cycles make it harder to dig out food under thick crusts of ice-covered snow. Wetter and warmer winters are cutting calving success, and increasing insect attacks and disease.
So after all that uncheckable anecdotal "evidence" from Eskimos etc. about polar bears dying out (no doubt stories mostly "suggested" by the "researchers" themselves), what do the scientific experts say? They say the opposite. Here's just one excerpt:
"The world's polar bear population is on the increase despite global warming, which scientists had believed was pushing the animal towards extinction. According to new research, the numbers of the giant predator have grown by between 15 and 25 per cent over the last decade. Some authorities on Arctic wildlife even claim that hunting, and not global warming, has been the real cause of the decrease in polar bear numbers in areas where the species is in decline.
A leading Canadian authority on polar bears, Mitch Taylor, said: "We're seeing an increase in bears that's really unprecedented, and in places where we're seeing a decrease in the population it's from hunting, not from climate change." Mr Taylor estimates that during the past decade, the Canadian polar bear population has increased by 25 per cent - from 12,000 to 15,000 bears. He even suggests that global warming could actually be good for the bears, and warns that the ever-increasing proximity of the animals to local communities could mean that a cull will be required sooner rather that later if bear numbers are to be kept under control.
In the northern territories, where temperatures have risen an average of four degrees since 1950, wildlife experts such as Mr Taylor say the bears have never been healthier or more plentiful.
The findings fly directly in the face of recent warnings from the scientific community on the demise of the species, with the Canadian World Wildlife Fund currently speculating that the last polar bear could vanish from the earth within 100 years. The WWF website states: "By 2100, there may be no ice left in the Arctic in the summer. That means no polar bears. Global warming - caused by fossil fuels - is to blame."
Like the Fascists of old, Greenies just want to take over and they will lie and cheat to achieve that.
METHANE LOGIC GETTING A BIT MORE NOTICE
If it's any gas we should be worrying about it's methane, not CO2. Methane is much more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 and there is heaps of it being produced
The world may not end with a bang or even a whimper - just a burp. This is the worrying scenario sketched by a French expert, who has discovered that the world's cattle are huge contributors to global warming because of the methane emitted by their belches. The bovine role in TEOTWAWKI (The End of the World As We Know It) scenarios has so far remained remote. Until now, the spotlight has been on cars, trucks, power stations and factories that burn fossil fuels and spew out gigatons of carbon dioxide (CO2), the principal greenhouse gas.
But, according to a researcher at the Climate Mission at the Caisse des Depots, a French state-owned bank, farm animals must also shoulder some of the blame. France's 20 million cows account for an astonishing 6.5% of national greenhouse-gas emissions, according to his estimates. Each year, their belches send 26 million tons of these gases into the atmosphere. Their faeces - "dejection bovine", to use the poetic-sounding French phrase - account for another 12 million tons. Compare that with the 12 million tons of gas emitted by French oil refineries, demonised by greenies as climate-killers.
Nor is bovine gas just any old gas. It comprises methane and nitrous oxide, which volume-for-volume are 21 and 310 times more effective at trapping solar heat respectively than boring CO2. By itself, methane is to blame for a fifth of the man-made greenhouse effect of the past 200 years.
The good news is that, when it comes to cow farting, we can all breathe a little easier. "Bovine flatulence plays a negligible role in global warming," is the prim assessment of researcher Benoit Leguet. His work seems offbeat, but its purpose is serious - to pinpoint major sources of greenhouse gas that have escaped notice simply because climatology is such a young science.
Agriculture and forestry have long been identified as major factors in the greenhouse debate, both as contributors to and mitigators of the problem. But accurate data is sparse, and this has made political decisions extraordinarily difficult. France has the biggest agricultural economy in the European Union. Other countries that have big bovine populations include the United States, Argentina and Australia, and these too are likely to be interested in the figures.
Higher-protein fodder or feed as soya can reduce the gastric fermentation that produces these gases, and faecal waste can be put in a closed silo that traps the methane, which can then burned as a biofuel. Australian scientists are trying a pharmaceutical approach. A prototype vaccine against three species of microbe that produce methane in sheep's stomachs reduced methane belches by eight percent in a 13-hour test. The scientists, from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CISRO), believe they can tweak the vaccine so that it combats more of the remaining methane-inducing germs.
Source
All the signs of full-blown Mother Earthism
Spending trillions of dollars to possibly lower the planet's temperature is madness, writes Bob Carter. Carter, a research professor at James Cook University, is an experienced environmental scientist
Many Australians are worried, rightly, by the possibility that avian flu might infect the nation. They should be just as concerned about the disease of Mother Earthism which has reached our shores, and is now approaching epidemic status. One of its most virulent strains is called Hansenism, after James Hansen, the high-profile NASA scientist who started the global warming scare campaign running back in 1988.
These diseases attack persons who venture public opinions on matters of environmental concern. Its most recent manifestation is in two alarmist books on climate change by popular science writers Ian Lowe ( Living in the Hothouse) and Tim Flannery ( The Weather Makers).
Mother Earthism has complex symptoms. Foremost is a touching belief in the Garden of Eden, the halcyon state of the Earth in times before the wicked Industrial Revolution. This balmy, and barmy, garden existed in a state of existential ecological balance, within an unchanging, benign environment. The roots of its philosophical trees lie with Rousseau, and those who tend these trees deny the dynamic, ever-changing character of our planet, its biota, and its climate.
Secondary symptoms of Mother Earthism include: appeal to authority rather than explanation or discussion of the science; false claims of consensus among scientists; cherry-picking of research and opinions which support a desired world view; guilt-by-association smearing and vilification of those who hold alternative views; the erection of conspiracy theories about improper industry influence; endless repetition of inaccuracies, or facts out of context; a preference for computer model predictions over real world measurements; recourse to the intellectually vapid precautionary principle; the exploitation of guilt among ordinary citizens; and, above all, an unwavering alarmism that the world is going to hell in a handbasket - and it's all our fault.
The biggest serpent in this Garden of Eden is alleged to be carbon dioxide, and we must give up our fix. Why? Because it's causing global warming, silly. And so it is. The Earth's comfortable (for us) average temperature of about 15C is maintained that way by the atmosphere. The presence of small amounts of water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide - the "greenhouse gases" which absorb Earth's outgoing heat radiation and re-emit some of it downwards - causes warming. Most of the total warming of 33 degrees is caused by water vapour (more than 30 degrees), carbon dioxide contributing only about 1.2 degrees worth. And of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, just 3per cent comes from human sources, which equates to a warming effect of about four-hundredths of a degree.
Against this, computer models suggest that a further human-caused increase in temperature of perhaps two-tenths of a degree might be averted. To crucify the world's industrialised economies by spending trillions of dollars for a possible temperature drop of 0.20 defies comprehension. The hairshirt policy exemplified by the Kyoto accord is a classic non-solution to a non-problem.
As Flannery points out in a different context in his book, the individual members of the public can exert influence by witholding their memberships and donations from the organisations (including especially green groups) responsible for spreading the disease, and by not buying alarmist books. The Government could do its bit by dis-establishing the professional greenhouse lobby groups that now dominate its own environmental and energy policy bureaucracies.
A goal to "stabilise world climate" is misplaced, not to mention unattainable. Climate is a dynamic system within which extreme events and dramatic changes will always occur, irrespective of human actions or preferences. Witness hurricanes Katrina and Rita. As for other major natural disasters, the appropriate preparation for extreme climate events is to mitigate and manage the negative effects when they occur. Climate impacts are generally slower to appear than those of other "instantaneous" disasters like earthquakes, tsunami, storms, volcanic eruptions, landslides or bushfires. This difference is not one of kind, and neither should be our response plans.
Needed is more research, together with the preparation of response plans for climatic coolings and warmings. Not needed is more futile feelgoodery espoused by those infected with the Mother Earthism syndrome.
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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.
Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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