Global Warming 101
Global Warming Theory in a Nutshell
Every scientific theory involves assumptions. Global warming theory starts with the assumption that the Earth naturally maintains a constant average temperature...
Monday, August 31, 2009
Global Warming 101
http://www.drroyspencer.com/global-warming-101/
Global Warming Theory in a Nutshell
Every scientific theory involves assumptions. Global warming theory starts with the assumption that the Earth naturally maintains a constant average temperature...
Global Warming Theory in a Nutshell
Every scientific theory involves assumptions. Global warming theory starts with the assumption that the Earth naturally maintains a constant average temperature...
Coolings Coming, Will the Gore Call That ManMade Global Cooling?
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/cooling_coming/
Cooling coming
Andrew Bolt Blog
Andrew BoltSunday, June 29, 2008 at 12:05am
A new paper published by the Astronomical Society of Australia has a warning to global warming believers not immediately obvious from the summary:
Based on our claim that changes in the Suns equatorial rotation rate are synchronized with changes in the Suns orbital motion about the barycentre, we propose that the mean period for the Suns meridional flow is set by a Synodic resonance between the flow period (~22.3 yr), the overall 178.7-yr repetition period for the solar orbital motion, and the 19.86-yr synodic period of Jupiter and Saturn.
Or as one of the authors, Ian Wilson, kindly explained to me:
It supports the contention that the level of activity on the Sun will significantly diminish sometime in the next decade and remain low for about 20 - 30 years. On each occasion that the Sun has done this in the past the Worlds mean temperature has dropped by ~ 1 - 2 C.
Oh. Global cooling coming, then. Obvious, really.
Cooling coming
Andrew Bolt Blog
Andrew BoltSunday, June 29, 2008 at 12:05am
A new paper published by the Astronomical Society of Australia has a warning to global warming believers not immediately obvious from the summary:
Based on our claim that changes in the Suns equatorial rotation rate are synchronized with changes in the Suns orbital motion about the barycentre, we propose that the mean period for the Suns meridional flow is set by a Synodic resonance between the flow period (~22.3 yr), the overall 178.7-yr repetition period for the solar orbital motion, and the 19.86-yr synodic period of Jupiter and Saturn.
Or as one of the authors, Ian Wilson, kindly explained to me:
It supports the contention that the level of activity on the Sun will significantly diminish sometime in the next decade and remain low for about 20 - 30 years. On each occasion that the Sun has done this in the past the Worlds mean temperature has dropped by ~ 1 - 2 C.
Oh. Global cooling coming, then. Obvious, really.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Why the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets are Not Collapsing
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/OllierPaine-NoIceSheetCollapse-AIGNewsAug.2009.pdf
Why the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets are Not Collapsing
By Cliff Ollier and Colin Pain
Global warming alarmists have suggested that the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica may collapse, causing disastrous sea level rise. This idea is based on the concept of an ice sheet sliding down an inclined plane on a base lubricated by meltwater, which is itself increasing because of global warming.
In reality the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets occupy deep basins, and cannot slide down a plane. Furthermore glacial flow depends on stress (including the important yield stress) as well as temperature, and much of the ice sheets are well below melting point...
Why the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets are Not Collapsing
By Cliff Ollier and Colin Pain
Global warming alarmists have suggested that the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica may collapse, causing disastrous sea level rise. This idea is based on the concept of an ice sheet sliding down an inclined plane on a base lubricated by meltwater, which is itself increasing because of global warming.
In reality the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets occupy deep basins, and cannot slide down a plane. Furthermore glacial flow depends on stress (including the important yield stress) as well as temperature, and much of the ice sheets are well below melting point...
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Drop in world temperatures fuels global warming debate
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/226/story/74019.htmlMcClatchy
Washington Bureau
Posted on Wed, Aug. 19, 2009
Drop in world temperatures fuels global warming debate
Robert S. Boyd McClatchy Newspapers
last updated: August 19, 2009 07:49:04 PM
WASHINGTON — Has Earth's fever broken?
Official government measurements show that the world's temperature has cooled a bit since reaching its most recent peak in 1998.
That's given global warming skeptics new ammunition to attack the prevailing theory of climate change. The skeptics argue that the current stretch of slightly cooler temperatures means that costly measures to limit carbon dioxide emissions are ill-founded and unnecessary.
Proposals to combat global warming are "crazy" and will "destroy more than a million good American jobs and increase the average family's annual energy bill by at least $1,500 a year," the Heartland Institute, a conservative research organization based in Chicago, declared in full-page newspaper ads earlier this summer. "High levels of carbon dioxide actually benefit wildlife and human health," the ads asserted.
Many scientists agree, however, that hotter times are ahead. A decade of level or slightly lower temperatures is only a temporary dip to be expected as a result of natural, short-term variations in the enormously complex climate system, they say.
"The preponderance of evidence is that global warming will resume," Nicholas Bond, a meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, said in an e-mail.
"Natural variability can account for the slowing of the global mean temperature rise we have seen," said Jeff Knight, a climate expert at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Exeter, England.
According to data from the National Space Science and Technology Center in Huntsville, Ala., the global high temperature in 1998 was 0.76 degrees Celsius (1.37 degrees Fahrenheit) above the average for the previous 20 years.
So far this year, the high has been 0.42 degrees Celsius (0.76 degrees Fahrenheit), above the 20-year average, clearly cooler than before.
However, scientists say the skeptics' argument is misleading.
"It's entirely possible to have a period as long as a decade or two of cooling superimposed on the long-term warming trend," said David Easterling, chief of scientific services at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.
"These short term fluctuations are statistically insignificant (and) entirely due to natural internal variability," Easterling said in an essay published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters in April. "It's easy to 'cherry pick' a period to reinforce a point of view."
Climate experts say the 1998 record was partly caused by El Nino, a periodic warming of tropical Pacific Ocean waters that affects the climate worldwide.
"The temperature peak in 1998 to a large extent can be attributed to the very strong El Nino event of 1997-98," Bond said. "Temperatures for the globe as a whole tend to be higher during El Nino, and particularly events as intense as that one."
El Nino is returning this summer after a four-year absence and is expected to hang around until late next year.
"If El Nino continues to strengthen as projected, expect more (high temperature) records to fall," said Thomas Karl, who's the director of the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville.
"At least half of the years after 2009 will be warmer than 1998, the warmest year currently on record," predicted Jeff Knight, a climate variability expert at the Hadley Centre in England.
John Christy, the director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, who often sides with the skeptics, agreed that the recent cooling won't last.
"The atmosphere is just now feeling the bump in tropical Pacific temperatures related to El Nino," Christy said in an e-mail. As a result, July experienced "the largest one-month jump in our 31-year record of global satellite temperatures. We should see a warmer 2009-2010 due to El Nino."
Christy added, however: "Our ignorance of the climate system is still enormous, and our policy makers need to know that . . . We really don't know much about what causes multi-year changes like this."
In addition to newspaper ads, the Heartland Institute sponsors conferences, books, papers, videos and Web sites arguing its case against the global warming threat.
The skeptics include scientists such as Richard Lindzen, a meteorologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who thinks that climate science is too uncertain to justify drastic measures to control CO2. He calls the case for action against global warming "silly" and "grotesque."
Others go further. For example, Don Easterbrook, a geologist at Western Washington University in Bellingham, thinks the world is in a 30-year cooling phase.
"The most recent global warming that began in 1977 is over, and the Earth has entered a new phase of global cooling," Easterbrook said in a talk to the American Geophysical Union's annual meeting in San Francisco in December.
Government scientists strongly disagree. "Claims that global warming is not occurring . . . ignore this natural variability and are misleading," said NOAA's Easterling.
In reality, global warming "never ceased," said Karl, the climate data center director.
Washington Bureau
Posted on Wed, Aug. 19, 2009
Drop in world temperatures fuels global warming debate
Robert S. Boyd McClatchy Newspapers
last updated: August 19, 2009 07:49:04 PM
WASHINGTON — Has Earth's fever broken?
Official government measurements show that the world's temperature has cooled a bit since reaching its most recent peak in 1998.
That's given global warming skeptics new ammunition to attack the prevailing theory of climate change. The skeptics argue that the current stretch of slightly cooler temperatures means that costly measures to limit carbon dioxide emissions are ill-founded and unnecessary.
Proposals to combat global warming are "crazy" and will "destroy more than a million good American jobs and increase the average family's annual energy bill by at least $1,500 a year," the Heartland Institute, a conservative research organization based in Chicago, declared in full-page newspaper ads earlier this summer. "High levels of carbon dioxide actually benefit wildlife and human health," the ads asserted.
Many scientists agree, however, that hotter times are ahead. A decade of level or slightly lower temperatures is only a temporary dip to be expected as a result of natural, short-term variations in the enormously complex climate system, they say.
"The preponderance of evidence is that global warming will resume," Nicholas Bond, a meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, said in an e-mail.
"Natural variability can account for the slowing of the global mean temperature rise we have seen," said Jeff Knight, a climate expert at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Exeter, England.
According to data from the National Space Science and Technology Center in Huntsville, Ala., the global high temperature in 1998 was 0.76 degrees Celsius (1.37 degrees Fahrenheit) above the average for the previous 20 years.
So far this year, the high has been 0.42 degrees Celsius (0.76 degrees Fahrenheit), above the 20-year average, clearly cooler than before.
However, scientists say the skeptics' argument is misleading.
"It's entirely possible to have a period as long as a decade or two of cooling superimposed on the long-term warming trend," said David Easterling, chief of scientific services at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.
"These short term fluctuations are statistically insignificant (and) entirely due to natural internal variability," Easterling said in an essay published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters in April. "It's easy to 'cherry pick' a period to reinforce a point of view."
Climate experts say the 1998 record was partly caused by El Nino, a periodic warming of tropical Pacific Ocean waters that affects the climate worldwide.
"The temperature peak in 1998 to a large extent can be attributed to the very strong El Nino event of 1997-98," Bond said. "Temperatures for the globe as a whole tend to be higher during El Nino, and particularly events as intense as that one."
El Nino is returning this summer after a four-year absence and is expected to hang around until late next year.
"If El Nino continues to strengthen as projected, expect more (high temperature) records to fall," said Thomas Karl, who's the director of the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville.
"At least half of the years after 2009 will be warmer than 1998, the warmest year currently on record," predicted Jeff Knight, a climate variability expert at the Hadley Centre in England.
John Christy, the director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, who often sides with the skeptics, agreed that the recent cooling won't last.
"The atmosphere is just now feeling the bump in tropical Pacific temperatures related to El Nino," Christy said in an e-mail. As a result, July experienced "the largest one-month jump in our 31-year record of global satellite temperatures. We should see a warmer 2009-2010 due to El Nino."
Christy added, however: "Our ignorance of the climate system is still enormous, and our policy makers need to know that . . . We really don't know much about what causes multi-year changes like this."
In addition to newspaper ads, the Heartland Institute sponsors conferences, books, papers, videos and Web sites arguing its case against the global warming threat.
The skeptics include scientists such as Richard Lindzen, a meteorologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who thinks that climate science is too uncertain to justify drastic measures to control CO2. He calls the case for action against global warming "silly" and "grotesque."
Others go further. For example, Don Easterbrook, a geologist at Western Washington University in Bellingham, thinks the world is in a 30-year cooling phase.
"The most recent global warming that began in 1977 is over, and the Earth has entered a new phase of global cooling," Easterbrook said in a talk to the American Geophysical Union's annual meeting in San Francisco in December.
Government scientists strongly disagree. "Claims that global warming is not occurring . . . ignore this natural variability and are misleading," said NOAA's Easterling.
In reality, global warming "never ceased," said Karl, the climate data center director.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Polar Bear BS
http://frontpagemagazine.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=35967
Polar Bear BS
By: Bill Steigerwald
FrontPageMagazine.com Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Environmentalists and the media have successfully bamboozled half the populace and every school child in America into believing large numbers of polar bears are starving and drowning in the Arctic because of global warming.
But it's obviously not even close to being true. How do we know this?
Because if even just one emaciated drowned polar bear's body had been fished from Arctic waters in the last five years, we'd have seen its sorry carcass a thousand times on TV and on the covers of Time and Vanity Fair.
By now the poor dead bear would have been given a trademarked first name, marketed as the official victim of Exxon Mobil-caused climate change and starred in three Pixar movies.
Alas, not a single drowned polar bear corpse has come along. Until one does, professional polar bear-saving groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council will have to scare up money and new members with traditional direct-mail campaigns like "Polar Bear SOS!"
NRDC's latest effort to save the iconic, majestic, magnificent, precious polar bear cleverly combines the environmental left's blind hatred of Sarah Palin with the general public's mindless love for cuddly polar bears.
With six pages of exclamation points, underlined sentences, boldfaced type fonts and apocalyptic predictions about imminent planetary and polar bear doom, it looked like a direct-mail parody when I first pulled it from my mailbox the first week of August.
It was the real thing, however.
NRDC celebrity senior attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spent two pages warning that unless we act swiftly and join NRDC or send it money, "Governor Palin" and "some of America's biggest polluters could help push America's polar bears to the very brink of extinction" by 2050.
NRDC -- which has an $87 million annual budget, 1.2 million members and a staff of 400 busy lawyers, scientists and lobbyists - can get a little loony when it's shaking down its target audience of unquestioning "caring Americans."
For example, Kennedy's cry for help was backed up by four pages of polar bear pathos from Frances Beinecke, the group's distraught $300,000-plus-per-year president.
Evidently chosen as NRDC's emoticon-in-chief because she can channel the distress signals of polar bears all the way from the melting Arctic ice packs, she presumed -- incorrectly in my case - that it probably pained the reader as deeply as it pained her to imagine:
"... The last gasp of a polar bear before it drowns in the vast waters of the Arctic, unable to reach the increasingly distant ice floes it needs to find food."
"... The muffled cries of newborn polar bear cubs as they are buried alive when their snowy den collapses from unseasonable rains."
"... The exhaustion of a mother polar bear and her young as they succumb to starvation after enduring longer and longer periods without food."
Beinecke's Arctic soap opera blathered and blubbered on and on, ultimately leaving the impression that it was a proven fact many polar bears were starving, drowning and even eating each other in heretofore unseen numbers because global warming is melting more and more of the sea ice they live on and hunt from.
Beinecke didn't use her great imagination to interview any polar bears for NRDC's unintentionally hilarious package of tear-jerky propaganda.
But since it's apparently OK to make up anything you want about polar bears, let's imagine how a wise old bear might react to his proud species being defamed by NRDC as helpless victims and having their allegedly endangered lives exploited for money-raising purposes.
"Dear NRDC," the average Grandpa polar bear might write. "Thanks a lot for your love and concern. But please don't worry so much about us. In fact, please leave us alone.
"We and the Arctic sea ice are doing just fine. We've lived on the frozen top of the world for 250,000 years. We've survived two ice ages and a meteor that killed off the wooly mammoths.
"We've seen a lot of climate change and a lot of pack ice come and go over the eons. Believe us, it's natural. It's cyclical. It's unpredictable. But we'll adapt, as we always have.
"We are not endangered. We are not going to go extinct in 30 years -- or 10,000 years. There are at least 25,000 of us living quite well up here and, trust me, we're going to survive the coming ice age with a lot less trouble than you will."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Steigerwald is the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review's associate editor. Call him at (412) 320-7983. E-mail him at: bsteigerwald@tribweb.com.
Polar Bear BS
By: Bill Steigerwald
FrontPageMagazine.com Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Environmentalists and the media have successfully bamboozled half the populace and every school child in America into believing large numbers of polar bears are starving and drowning in the Arctic because of global warming.
But it's obviously not even close to being true. How do we know this?
Because if even just one emaciated drowned polar bear's body had been fished from Arctic waters in the last five years, we'd have seen its sorry carcass a thousand times on TV and on the covers of Time and Vanity Fair.
By now the poor dead bear would have been given a trademarked first name, marketed as the official victim of Exxon Mobil-caused climate change and starred in three Pixar movies.
Alas, not a single drowned polar bear corpse has come along. Until one does, professional polar bear-saving groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council will have to scare up money and new members with traditional direct-mail campaigns like "Polar Bear SOS!"
NRDC's latest effort to save the iconic, majestic, magnificent, precious polar bear cleverly combines the environmental left's blind hatred of Sarah Palin with the general public's mindless love for cuddly polar bears.
With six pages of exclamation points, underlined sentences, boldfaced type fonts and apocalyptic predictions about imminent planetary and polar bear doom, it looked like a direct-mail parody when I first pulled it from my mailbox the first week of August.
It was the real thing, however.
NRDC celebrity senior attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spent two pages warning that unless we act swiftly and join NRDC or send it money, "Governor Palin" and "some of America's biggest polluters could help push America's polar bears to the very brink of extinction" by 2050.
NRDC -- which has an $87 million annual budget, 1.2 million members and a staff of 400 busy lawyers, scientists and lobbyists - can get a little loony when it's shaking down its target audience of unquestioning "caring Americans."
For example, Kennedy's cry for help was backed up by four pages of polar bear pathos from Frances Beinecke, the group's distraught $300,000-plus-per-year president.
Evidently chosen as NRDC's emoticon-in-chief because she can channel the distress signals of polar bears all the way from the melting Arctic ice packs, she presumed -- incorrectly in my case - that it probably pained the reader as deeply as it pained her to imagine:
"... The last gasp of a polar bear before it drowns in the vast waters of the Arctic, unable to reach the increasingly distant ice floes it needs to find food."
"... The muffled cries of newborn polar bear cubs as they are buried alive when their snowy den collapses from unseasonable rains."
"... The exhaustion of a mother polar bear and her young as they succumb to starvation after enduring longer and longer periods without food."
Beinecke's Arctic soap opera blathered and blubbered on and on, ultimately leaving the impression that it was a proven fact many polar bears were starving, drowning and even eating each other in heretofore unseen numbers because global warming is melting more and more of the sea ice they live on and hunt from.
Beinecke didn't use her great imagination to interview any polar bears for NRDC's unintentionally hilarious package of tear-jerky propaganda.
But since it's apparently OK to make up anything you want about polar bears, let's imagine how a wise old bear might react to his proud species being defamed by NRDC as helpless victims and having their allegedly endangered lives exploited for money-raising purposes.
"Dear NRDC," the average Grandpa polar bear might write. "Thanks a lot for your love and concern. But please don't worry so much about us. In fact, please leave us alone.
"We and the Arctic sea ice are doing just fine. We've lived on the frozen top of the world for 250,000 years. We've survived two ice ages and a meteor that killed off the wooly mammoths.
"We've seen a lot of climate change and a lot of pack ice come and go over the eons. Believe us, it's natural. It's cyclical. It's unpredictable. But we'll adapt, as we always have.
"We are not endangered. We are not going to go extinct in 30 years -- or 10,000 years. There are at least 25,000 of us living quite well up here and, trust me, we're going to survive the coming ice age with a lot less trouble than you will."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Steigerwald is the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review's associate editor. Call him at (412) 320-7983. E-mail him at: bsteigerwald@tribweb.com.
Polar Bear BS
http://frontpagemagazine.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=35967
Polar Bear BS
By: Bill Steigerwald
FrontPageMagazine.com | Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Environmentalists and the media have successfully bamboozled half the populace and every school child in America into believing large numbers of polar bears are starving and drowning in the Arctic because of global warming.
But it's obviously not even close to being true. How do we know this?
Because if even just one emaciated drowned polar bear's body had been fished from Arctic waters in the last five years, we'd have seen its sorry carcass a thousand times on TV and on the covers of Time and Vanity Fair.
By now the poor dead bear would have been given a trademarked first name, marketed as the official victim of Exxon Mobil-caused climate change and starred in three Pixar movies.
Alas, not a single drowned polar bear corpse has come along. Until one does, professional polar bear-saving groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council will have to scare up money and new members with traditional direct-mail campaigns like "Polar Bear SOS!"
NRDC's latest effort to save the iconic, majestic, magnificent, precious polar bear cleverly combines the environmental left's blind hatred of Sarah Palin with the general public's mindless love for cuddly polar bears.
With six pages of exclamation points, underlined sentences, boldfaced type fonts and apocalyptic predictions about imminent planetary and polar bear doom, it looked like a direct-mail parody when I first pulled it from my mailbox the first week of August.
It was the real thing, however.
NRDC celebrity senior attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spent two pages warning that unless we act swiftly and join NRDC or send it money, "Governor Palin" and "some of America's biggest polluters could help push America's polar bears to the very brink of extinction" by 2050.
NRDC -- which has an $87 million annual budget, 1.2 million members and a staff of 400 busy lawyers, scientists and lobbyists - can get a little loony when it's shaking down its target audience of unquestioning "caring Americans."
For example, Kennedy's cry for help was backed up by four pages of polar bear pathos from Frances Beinecke, the group's distraught $300,000-plus-per-year president.
Evidently chosen as NRDC's emoticon-in-chief because she can channel the distress signals of polar bears all the way from the melting Arctic ice packs, she presumed -- incorrectly in my case - that it probably pained the reader as deeply as it pained her to imagine:
"... The last gasp of a polar bear before it drowns in the vast waters of the Arctic, unable to reach the increasingly distant ice floes it needs to find food."
"... The muffled cries of newborn polar bear cubs as they are buried alive when their snowy den collapses from unseasonable rains."
"... The exhaustion of a mother polar bear and her young as they succumb to starvation after enduring longer and longer periods without food."
Beinecke's Arctic soap opera blathered and blubbered on and on, ultimately leaving the impression that it was a proven fact many polar bears were starving, drowning and even eating each other in heretofore unseen numbers because global warming is melting more and more of the sea ice they live on and hunt from.
Beinecke didn't use her great imagination to interview any polar bears for NRDC's unintentionally hilarious package of tear-jerky propaganda.
But since it's apparently OK to make up anything you want about polar bears, let's imagine how a wise old bear might react to his proud species being defamed by NRDC as helpless victims and having their allegedly endangered lives exploited for money-raising purposes.
"Dear NRDC," the average Grandpa polar bear might write. "Thanks a lot for your love and concern. But please don't worry so much about us. In fact, please leave us alone.
"We and the Arctic sea ice are doing just fine. We've lived on the frozen top of the world for 250,000 years. We've survived two ice ages and a meteor that killed off the wooly mammoths.
"We've seen a lot of climate change and a lot of pack ice come and go over the eons. Believe us, it's natural. It's cyclical. It's unpredictable. But we'll adapt, as we always have.
"We are not endangered. We are not going to go extinct in 30 years -- or 10,000 years. There are at least 25,000 of us living quite well up here and, trust me, we're going to survive the coming ice age with a lot less trouble than you will."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Steigerwald is the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review's associate editor. Call him at (412) 320-7983. E-mail him at: bsteigerwald@tribweb.com.
Polar Bear BS
By: Bill Steigerwald
FrontPageMagazine.com | Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Environmentalists and the media have successfully bamboozled half the populace and every school child in America into believing large numbers of polar bears are starving and drowning in the Arctic because of global warming.
But it's obviously not even close to being true. How do we know this?
Because if even just one emaciated drowned polar bear's body had been fished from Arctic waters in the last five years, we'd have seen its sorry carcass a thousand times on TV and on the covers of Time and Vanity Fair.
By now the poor dead bear would have been given a trademarked first name, marketed as the official victim of Exxon Mobil-caused climate change and starred in three Pixar movies.
Alas, not a single drowned polar bear corpse has come along. Until one does, professional polar bear-saving groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council will have to scare up money and new members with traditional direct-mail campaigns like "Polar Bear SOS!"
NRDC's latest effort to save the iconic, majestic, magnificent, precious polar bear cleverly combines the environmental left's blind hatred of Sarah Palin with the general public's mindless love for cuddly polar bears.
With six pages of exclamation points, underlined sentences, boldfaced type fonts and apocalyptic predictions about imminent planetary and polar bear doom, it looked like a direct-mail parody when I first pulled it from my mailbox the first week of August.
It was the real thing, however.
NRDC celebrity senior attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spent two pages warning that unless we act swiftly and join NRDC or send it money, "Governor Palin" and "some of America's biggest polluters could help push America's polar bears to the very brink of extinction" by 2050.
NRDC -- which has an $87 million annual budget, 1.2 million members and a staff of 400 busy lawyers, scientists and lobbyists - can get a little loony when it's shaking down its target audience of unquestioning "caring Americans."
For example, Kennedy's cry for help was backed up by four pages of polar bear pathos from Frances Beinecke, the group's distraught $300,000-plus-per-year president.
Evidently chosen as NRDC's emoticon-in-chief because she can channel the distress signals of polar bears all the way from the melting Arctic ice packs, she presumed -- incorrectly in my case - that it probably pained the reader as deeply as it pained her to imagine:
"... The last gasp of a polar bear before it drowns in the vast waters of the Arctic, unable to reach the increasingly distant ice floes it needs to find food."
"... The muffled cries of newborn polar bear cubs as they are buried alive when their snowy den collapses from unseasonable rains."
"... The exhaustion of a mother polar bear and her young as they succumb to starvation after enduring longer and longer periods without food."
Beinecke's Arctic soap opera blathered and blubbered on and on, ultimately leaving the impression that it was a proven fact many polar bears were starving, drowning and even eating each other in heretofore unseen numbers because global warming is melting more and more of the sea ice they live on and hunt from.
Beinecke didn't use her great imagination to interview any polar bears for NRDC's unintentionally hilarious package of tear-jerky propaganda.
But since it's apparently OK to make up anything you want about polar bears, let's imagine how a wise old bear might react to his proud species being defamed by NRDC as helpless victims and having their allegedly endangered lives exploited for money-raising purposes.
"Dear NRDC," the average Grandpa polar bear might write. "Thanks a lot for your love and concern. But please don't worry so much about us. In fact, please leave us alone.
"We and the Arctic sea ice are doing just fine. We've lived on the frozen top of the world for 250,000 years. We've survived two ice ages and a meteor that killed off the wooly mammoths.
"We've seen a lot of climate change and a lot of pack ice come and go over the eons. Believe us, it's natural. It's cyclical. It's unpredictable. But we'll adapt, as we always have.
"We are not endangered. We are not going to go extinct in 30 years -- or 10,000 years. There are at least 25,000 of us living quite well up here and, trust me, we're going to survive the coming ice age with a lot less trouble than you will."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Steigerwald is the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review's associate editor. Call him at (412) 320-7983. E-mail him at: bsteigerwald@tribweb.com.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Prominent scientists push to revise physics society climate statement
http://icecap.us/index.php/go/political-climate
Aug 16, 2009
Prominent scientists push to revise physics society climate statement
Cobb County Conservative Examiner
Eighty prominent scientists, researchers and environmental business leaders - many of them physicists - have called on the American Physical Society (APS), the nation’s leading physics organization, to revise its policy statement on climate change. The century-old APS is the premier scholarly group in the U.S. dedicated to the advancement and dissemination of the knowledge of physics.
The signers of an open letter to the APS Council, the governing body of APS, are current and past members of APS. They disagree with the current APS policy statement on climate change, which contains such language as, “Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate,” and “The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring.” ...
Aug 16, 2009
Prominent scientists push to revise physics society climate statement
Cobb County Conservative Examiner
Eighty prominent scientists, researchers and environmental business leaders - many of them physicists - have called on the American Physical Society (APS), the nation’s leading physics organization, to revise its policy statement on climate change. The century-old APS is the premier scholarly group in the U.S. dedicated to the advancement and dissemination of the knowledge of physics.
The signers of an open letter to the APS Council, the governing body of APS, are current and past members of APS. They disagree with the current APS policy statement on climate change, which contains such language as, “Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate,” and “The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring.” ...
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Wyoming Set For Late Summer Snowstorm
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/08/15/wyoming-set-for-late-summer-mountain-snowstorm/#more-9926
Roger Pielke Sr. passes this on to me with the note:
Hi Anthony, This is quite unusual! Source: NWS, Riverton, WY
Bighorn Mountains - view from I-90 - Image courtesy City-Data.comURGENT - WINTER WEATHER MESSAGE
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE RIVERTON WY
309 AM MDT SAT AUG 15 2009
...LATE SUMMER SNOWSTORM EXPECTED FOR THE BIG HORN MOUNTAINS
TODAY...
.AN UNSEASONABLY EARLY SNOWSTORM IS EXPECTED TO AFFECT THE BIG
HORN MOUNTAINS ABOVE 9000 FEET TODAY AS A STRONG PACIFIC TROUGH
OF LOW PRESSURE TRACKS EAST ACROSS THE AREA...
WYZ008-009-151800-
/O.NEW.KRIW.WW.Y.0030.090815T1500Z-090816T0000Z/
BIGHORN MOUNTAINS WEST-BIGHORN MOUNTAINS SOUTHEAST-
309 AM MDT SAT AUG 15 2009
...WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY IN EFFECT FROM 9 AM THIS MORNING TO
6 PM MDT THIS EVENING FOR ELEVATIONS ABOVE 9000 FEET...
THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN RIVERTON HAS ISSUED A WINTER
WEATHER ADVISORY FOR THE BIG HORN MOUNTAINS ABOVE 9000 FEET WHICH
IS IN EFFECT FROM 9 AM THIS MORNING TO 6 PM MDT THIS EVENING.
RAINFALL ALONG WITH A FEW EMBEDDED THUNDERSTORMS WILL OCCUR THIS
MORNING BEFORE CHANGING OVER TO SNOW ABOVE 9000 FEET BY 9 AM. SNOW
WILL CONTINUE THROUGH THE AFTERNOON ALONG WITH ACCUMULATIONS OF 3
TO 4 INCHES AT 9000 FEET ALONG WITH UP TO 6 TO 7 INCHES AT 10000 FEET.
ISOLATED EMBEDDED THUNDERSTORMS ARE EXPECTED THROUGHOUT THE DAY
WHICH COULD CAUSE LOCALLY HIGHER AMOUNTS OF SNOWFALL.
PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...
A WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY FOR SNOW MEANS THAT PERIODS OF SNOW
WILL CAUSE PRIMARILY TRAVEL DIFFICULTIES. BE PREPARED FOR SNOW
COVERED ROADS AND LIMITED VISIBILITIES WHILE DRIVING OVER GRANITE
AND POWDER RIVER PASSES TODAY...AND USE CAUTION WHILE DRIVING.
CAMPERS AND HIKERS SHOULD PREPARE FOR DRAMATICALLY COLDER AND WET
WEATHER TODAY
Tuesday, August 04, 2009
60 German Scientists Dissent Over Global Warming Claims! Call Climate Fears ‘Pseudo Religion’
http://icecap.us/
Aug 04, 2009
60 German Scientists Dissent Over Global Warming Claims! Call Climate Fears ‘Pseudo Religion’
Marc Morano, Climate Depot
More than 60 prominent German scientists have publicly declared their dissent from man-made global warming fears in an Open Letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The more than 60 signers of the letter include several United Nations IPCC scientists.
The scientists declared that global warming has become a “pseudo religion” and they noted that rising CO2 has “had no measurable effect” on temperatures. The German scientists, also wrote that the “UN IPCC has lost its scientific credibility.”...
Aug 04, 2009
60 German Scientists Dissent Over Global Warming Claims! Call Climate Fears ‘Pseudo Religion’
Marc Morano, Climate Depot
More than 60 prominent German scientists have publicly declared their dissent from man-made global warming fears in an Open Letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The more than 60 signers of the letter include several United Nations IPCC scientists.
The scientists declared that global warming has become a “pseudo religion” and they noted that rising CO2 has “had no measurable effect” on temperatures. The German scientists, also wrote that the “UN IPCC has lost its scientific credibility.”...
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