WHY IT IS SILLY TO PREDICT THE DEMISE OF POLAR BEARS

A polar bear expert debunks the scares

Tim Flannery is one of Australia's best-known scientists and authors. That doesn't mean what he says is correct or accurate. That was clearly demonstrated when he recently ventured into the subject of climate change and polar bears. Climate change is threatening to drive polar bears into extinction within 25 years, according to Flannery. That is a startling conclusion and certainly is a surprising revelation to the polar bear researchers who work here and to the people who live here. We really had no idea.

The evidence for climate change effects on polar bears described by Flannery is incorrect. He says polar bears typically gave birth to triplets, but now they usually have just one cub. That is wrong. All research and traditional knowledge shows that triplets, though they do occur, are very infrequent and are by no means typical. Polar bears generally have two cubs - sometimes three and sometimes one. He says the bears' weaning time has risen to 18 months from 12. That is wrong. The weaning period has not changed. Polar bears worldwide have a three-year reproduction cycle, except for one part of Hudson Bay for a period in the mid-1980s when the cycle was shorter.

One polar bear population (western Hudson Bay) has declined since the 1980s and the reproductive success of females in that area seems to have decreased. We are not certain why, but it appears that ecological conditions in the mid-1980s were exceptionally good. Climate change is having an effect on the west Hudson population of polar bears, but really, there is no need to panic. Of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct, or even appear to be affected at present. It is noteworthy that the neighbouring population of southern Hudson Bay does not appear to have declined, and another southern population (Davis Strait) may actually be over-abundant.

I understand that people who do not live in the north generally have difficulty grasping the concept of too many polar bears in an area. People who live here have a pretty good grasp of what that is like to have too many polar bears around. This complexity is why so many people find the truth less entertaining than a good story. It is entirely appropriate to be concerned about climate change, but it is just silly to predict the demise of polar bears in 25 years based on media-assisted hysteria.






Religious Climate Change?

The Religious Left thinks that global warming is about to break-up the Religious Right

On the religious Left, the great hope these days is that the Religious Right is melting down over Global Warming. Liberal evangelical activist Jim Wallis rejoiced about the crack-up in a recent column, claiming that "the Religious Right is losing control" thanks to environmentalist evangelicals. Wallis, head of "Sojourners" and author of God's Politics: Why the American Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Just Does Not Get It, is predicting a "sea change" among evangelicals since the Religious Right has "now lost control of the environmental issue."

The reason for Wallis's optimism is the newly-created Evangelical Climate Initiative (ECI), endorsed by 86 religious leaders, which declared early this year that "human-induced climate change is real" and which urged legislation limiting carbon dioxide emissions. Those endorsing the ECI were mostly academics from evangelical colleges, with the notable exception of mega-church pastor and best-selling author Rick Warren. The New York Times and other media outlets lavished much attention on ECI's stance.

Absent from the ECI endorsement was the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) and its long-time Washington representative, Richard Cizik. An enthusiast for environmental causes, Cizik is prominently included in Vanity Fair's May 2006 "Green Issue," which features the cover-line, "A Graver Threat than Terrorism: Global Warming." Inside is a full-page shot of Cizik, clad in clerical black and walking barefoot across the water, back-dropped by an apocalyptic and no doubt very hot landscape. Vanity Fair reports that Cizik often cites Revelation 11:18's ostensible warning that God will "destroy those who destroy the earth". Amen to that," Vanity Fair concludes.

Why has the ECI gotten so much play? Evangelicals have become the Republican party's largest and most reliable voting constituency, thanks in large part to concerns about abortion and homosexuality. If environmental issues can divide these voters, it might spell doom for the Republican coalition. So Jim Wallis is excited. "The Evangelical Climate Initiative is of enormous importance and could be a tipping point in the climate change debate, according to one secular environmental leader I talked to," he writes. Concern about the environment, he hopes, will lead to an evangelical embrace other issues of the Left. All of which hopes are somewhat dampened by the National Association of Evangelicals' decision not to join the ECI.

According to Wallis, Cizik and NAE president Ted Haggard, a Colorado mega-church pastor, attended environmental seminars and have experienced an "epiphany" on climate change. They were fully onboard with the issue. That is, Wallis laments, until the "Religious Right reared its head." Twenty-two of the "Right's prominent leaders" publicly asked the NAE not to adopt a position on climate change. "Global Warming is not a consensus issue," warned conservatives, including Focus on the Family's James Dobson, Prison Fellowship's Charles Colson, and the Southern Baptist Convention's Richard Land. (This statement was also signed by the then-interim president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, for which I work.)

"We are evangelicals and we care about God's creation," read the Dobson-Colson-Land letter. "However, we believe there should be room for Bible-believing evangelicals to disagree about the cause, severity, and solutions to the global warming issue." The letter urged NAE to foster "unity" in the Christian community.

NAE President Haggard wrote to the Dobson-Colson-Land group that the NAE executive committee recognized the "ongoing debate regarding the causes and origins of global warming" and understood the "lack of consensus among the evangelical community on this issue." NAE staffers were directed to "not exceed in any fashion our approved and adopted statements concerning the environment," as found in a 2003 document called "For the Health of a Nation: An Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility."

No doubt the NAE was responding to Dobson, Colson, et al. But their response also reflected the truth that evangelicals do not have a clear scriptural or historical teaching on Global Warming--as they do on an issue such as same-sex marriage.

After the NAE vote, Cizik withdrew his signature from the Evangelical Climate Initiative, telling Christianity Today that he wanted "to display an accommodating spirit to those who don't yet accept the science on the severity of the problem." Undoubtedly the organizers of the ECI were disappointed about the absence of the NAE, which represents 45,000 churches.

Undeterred, Wallis insists that the Religious Right has been able to win with its "wedge issues" only when it could "control a monologue on the relationship between faith and politics." He wants to deflect evangelical attention away from abortion and homosexuality and towards Global Warming and poverty, focusing on an expanded welfare and regulatory state and reduced U.S. sovereignty in the world.

But contrary to Wallis's hopes, it does not appear that most mainstream evangelicals are likely to flip politically as a result of global warming. Those who argued against NAE's adopting a Global Warming stance, like Dobson and Colson, head popular para-church ministries with hundreds of thousands of supporters. In contrast, almost all of the ECI signers are academics from seminaries and Christian colleges.

Among many evangelical academics there is an ongoing self-consciousness and about their evangelical identity. Some of them want to disassociate themselves from the traditional Religious Right and its seeming preoccupation with issues of personal morality. Embracing legislation to reduce carbon emissions, backed up by a few vague scripture verses, has become an easy way to disassociate from old evangelical stereotypes.

According to Wallis, "biblically-faithful Christians" are soon going to turn against the Religious Right and instead follow his Religious Left. Instead, it seems more likely that an easy acceptance of apocalyptic warnings about a burning planet will ultimately confirm, not overturn, the political leanings of conservative evangelicals.

Source






OH NO! THE 'NOBLE SAVAGES' COULD NOT HAVE HUNTED ANYTHING TO EXTINCTION!

The Green/Left twist and turn on this issue as they do with so many other issues. Their simple worldview must not be challenged by facts. Some Australian findings

A claim that disturbed sediments at an archeological site in western NSW point the finger at humans for the extinction of Australia's megafauna has reignited the debate about what killed the giant beasts. Scientists have long argued about the fate of the animals, which included the two-tonne wombat-like Diprotodon, the two-metre-tall flightless bird Genyornis and giant kangaroos. A team led by archeologist Judith Field of the University of Sydney, who found megafauna bones and stone tools at Cuddie Springs in western NSW in the early 1990s, say climate change - Ice Age aridity - killed the megafauna, about 30,000 years ago. But others, such as Richard Gillespie and Barry Brook, who have made the latest claim, say that Aborigines caused the mass extinction either by hunting or by habitat destruction, about 45,000 years ago.

Gillespie, a radiocarbon dating expert and a visiting fellow at the Australian National University, and Brook, a population ecologist and senior research fellow in the school of environmental research at Charles Darwin University, say the animal bones, artefacts and charcoal in the sediments at Cuddie Springs do not age with depth. They say this suggests the sediments have been mixed. University of Sydney archeologist Richard Fullagar, a colleague of Field's, concedes there is "some interesting discussion on radiocarbon dating statistics", but says "the explanation they put forward is fundamentally flawed. It's wrong". "It's not like a city in the Middle East; you've got sediments where Aboriginal people have been camping for long periods of time, the artefacts are going to be scuffed around and moved around a bit," he says.

Field's people say there was a 15,000-year overlap between the time of arrival of humans and the extinction of the megafauna, suggesting long co-existence before a natural death for the animals. Gillespie, Brook and others say the overlap is about 5000 years. "The coincidence of the time of arrival [of humans] to the megafauna extinction to us looks horribly suspicious," Gillespie says.

Gillespie and Brook, in the journal Archaeology in Oceania, say the sediments have been mixed over time, probably in floods. They studied 20 published datings on material from the layers bearing bones, artefacts and charcoal. If the layers were undisturbed, as the excavators say, the ages should increase with depth. But Gillespie and Brook found that all the charcoal dates were statistically the same age, about 36,000 years old. And sand in the two upper layers was much younger than charcoal from the same levels, suggesting that the sediments had been mixed, and that some of the charcoal had been redeposited.

They also studied the animal bones for traces of protein, which have been found in stone tools at the site. "The bones from Cuddie Springs that we looked at ... there wasn't any protein there," Gillespie says. "This suggests that the bones are very old. Some of the stone tools have got hair and blood residues on them where the protein has survived ... this is anomalous if you don't find any protein in the bones in the same layer."

Gillespie says the animals were probably hunted into oblivion - "You don't have to kill every one of them for them to go extinct" - and that "people altered the landscape a bit when they turned up". Fullagar places himself in the "multi-causal" camp but rules out hunting: "There's certainly scavenging but there's no spear points or spears stuck in bones. "Hunting is very difficult and potentially dangerous," Fullagar says. "Hunters are not very successful and the chance of it causing extinction is very low. "It seems a mix of things have caused it and climate is probably standing out."

The debate goes on. Gillespie says: "It's getting to a point where two camps are down in their bunkers and there's a fair bit of heat about but nobody wants to give in. "Some people are never going to change their opinion but I think a consensus will probably be reached. It will turn up soon ... the evidence is mounting for our side. "They don't want to see the Aborigines as anything except the 'noble green'."

The Australian, 3 May 2006






ICE AGE HORSES MAY HAVE BEEN KILLED OFF BY HUMANS, STUDY FINDS

Some 12,000 years ago, North American mammoths, ancient horses, and many other large mammals vanished within the short span of perhaps 400 years. Scientists cannot be sure what killed them, but a new study suggests that humans aren't off the hook just yet. The large animals' disappearance at the end of the Pleistocene era (50,000 to 10,000 years ago) happened at about the same time that many large animals, or megafauna, went extinct around the globe. Victims included species such as the saber-toothed cat and the diprotodon-a rhinolike beast that was the world's largest marsupial. Now a new study of the fossil record fuels the debate about the cause of the creatures' fate.

In North America two major events occurred at about the same time as the megafaunal extinctions: The planet cooled, and early humans arrived from Asia to populate the continent. For decades scientists have debated which of these factors was responsible for widespread megafaunal extinctions. Was the climate change simply too much for the animals to withstand? Or did the ancient mammals succumb to human hunting pressure? Many experts suggest a combination of these factors and perhaps others, such as disease. "It's hard to see this as one of those things where a single piece of evidence will make it obvious what happened," said Scott Wing, a paleobiologist at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History. "The phenomenon that people are trying to explain is not something that happened in one place at one time. It happened across the globe, at different times on different continents. I think that there are clearly multiple factors involved."

Previous research had suggested that Alaska's caballoid horse species became extinct some 500 years before the first humans arrived. Those dates would mean that overhunting could not have contributed to the extinction of Alaska's ancient horses-though humans could have contributed to the demise of North American mammoths, which stayed on the scene for perhaps another thousand years. But Andrew Solow, a geostatistician at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, and colleagues have published a statistical evaluation of the fossil record that suggests that humans shouldn't be exonerated just yet. Their data, to be published in tomorrow's issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveal that horses did disappear before mammoths, though only by perhaps 200 years. Their findings also suggest that both species may not have gone extinct until after human arrival-so human hunting may well have played a role in their demise.

"You can't just take the latest fossil remains [and assign their date] as the time of extinction," Solow said. "There's a sampling issue. "We constructed a confidence region-that's the set of dates that you can't rule out with confidence as the extinction times." Those dates suggested the possibility that both caballoid horses and mammoths survived well past the generally accepted arrival dates for humans.

The results don't identify the cause of the extinctions, and experts say a fossilized "smoking gun" seems unlikely. "Even if a fossil told you that [species] survived past the arrival of humans, it's still the case that there was climate change going on as well as hunting pressure," Solow said. "I think the notion that there was a single cause is probably not right. It's probably more complicated than that."

The Smithsonian's Wing believes that the complicated circumstances leave paleobiologists and others with their work cut out for them to determine just why so many of the world's large animals vanished. "I think that leaves everyone with a big job to do to investigate new sites, date remains, date human occupations, and try to do the best that they can," he said. "It may take a long time to accumulate enough evidence. But this is the kind of thing that has to happen."

National Geographic, 1 May 2006

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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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