This extraordinary picture from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has many scientists worried as the latest sign of climate change. These are estimated 35,000 pacific walrus ashore on a beach in north-west Alaska. As mammals, walrus cannot swim indefinitely so they use their tusks to “haul out,” or pull themselves onto an ice floe or rocks. However, the loss of sea ice has left them effectively stranded.
The photo was taken five miles north of Point Lay, an Inupiat Eskimo village 300 miles southwest of Barrow and 700 miles northwest of Anchorage. It was taken on September 27th as researchers traced walrus. Female walrus give birth on sea ice and use ice as a diving platform to reach snails, clams and worms on the shallow continental shelf.
As temperatures warm in summer, the edge of the sea ice recedes north. Females and their offspring ride the edge of the sea ice into the Chukchi Sea. However, sea ice has receded now beyond shallow continental shelf waters and into Arctic Ocean water. The problem is that depths at that location exceeds two miles — a depth that walrus cannot dive to the bottom.
The World Wildlife Fund’s head of Arctic programs Margaret Williams says that the gathering show extreme environmental changes occurring wit the loss of sea ice. The comparison is with the plight of polar bears in the changing Arctic.
Source: Independent
Arctic Sea Ice third highest in the 10 year mean.
Not Ice free as predicted
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/plots/icecover/icecover_current.png
maxcat, Climate science is only about 100 years old. Think of when the history of physics, medicine, biology, etc. were when they were 100 years old. We laugh @ what the science was @ that infant stage. I have some detailed thoughts on climate science and religion that hopefully will be retrieved soon. But briefly, I’m not a born again environmentalist. I recycle, use reusable shopping bags, drive small cars and walk whenever I can instead of driving. But, for the Jimmy Swaggart enviromentalists that’s not enough. I need to drop to my knees, get off the grid, stop eating meat, pay carbon taxes, etc. not gonna happen. This ain’t about science, max. It’s about power, control, and money.
Nick –
Perhaps, but when you listen to the heated denialists, so it is with them. I do what I can as well, and you may laugh, but I’ve reduced my intake of meat and actually feel much better. Some evidence is simply evident. I’ve seen Norfolk over the last 20 years, and in areas not recently developed. I also know folks in Miami Beach. All my fears aren’t hypothetical. I just don’t know the answers.
It’s the hole North Pole has melted again because the cam showed a melt pond again LOL Nothing to see here its called migration. The number of Walruses are increasing because we club the seals to save the whales.
Cheech and Chong moment.
Migration
The rest of the year (late summer and fall), walruses tend to form massive aggregations of tens of thousands of individuals on rocky beaches or outcrops. The migration between the ice and the beach can be long-distance and dramatic. In late spring and summer, for example, several hundred thousand Pacific walruses migrate from the Bering Sea into the Chukchi Sea through the relatively narrow Bering Strait.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walrus
Dredd –
I have read that we have nearly a 50% species reduction since about 40 years ago. Don’t know the source, so not sure if it’s accurate, but I haven’t seen refutations.
Stamp your widdle biddy feet some more, maybe JT will give you a cookie.
This wordpress spam horseshit is insane. How in the hell can JT put up w/ this? It is UNACCEPTABLE. The insanity is spam leaks through here like it’s a govt. built boat. I have made thousands of comments on blogger and never had ONE, NOT ONE, comment eaten. And, I NEVER see spam leak through either. This is UNACCEPTABLE.
I’m leaving a reply in general, although it says it’s a reply to Nick. The WSJ surveyed meteorologists? They have no grounding in climate science. Also, for those of you still wedded to the theory that we always have warm and cool cycles, that’s very true, but we are, right now, supposed to be in a cool cycle considering earth’s distance from the sun, and we keep on racking up global record highs. Just things to consider, folks. Don’t believe me, Al Gore or Louis Farrakind, or however he spells his name.
Nick, this blog is totally off kilter, on both ends of the spectrum. I don’t like some of the right wing screeds either, but they are appearing, too. Not so far on this topic, but let’s get onto religion and they’ll pop up. Then, too, we have the “Birther of a nation” who visits from time to time. I like him though – I’ve never laughed so hard or posted so much.
maxcat06 – you should be aware that Arizona is getting record rainfalls and probably will get record snowfall this year. Now that is weather, not climate, but it is part of the climate cycle of the Southwest. However, since I have lived in Arizona we have had 4 100-year floods and one 1000 year wind storm. Do not ask me how they decide these things, I think they magic up the numbers, but they spout them out on the TV at the right time.
No matter how many times corporations play this game there are always fools willing to buy into it.
One example is smoking cigarettes. Tobacco companies took the country from “Smoking is good for you” through “There’s no proof smoking is bad for you” through “it’s still debatable that smoking has health risks” all the way to “smoking is so obviously bad for you that it’s your fault for smoking.”
Nearly the entire time the science and the facts were against them. But they had their power, and, as importantly, they had their fools – witting and unwitting.
And, of course, they avoided responsibility.
Smoking is hardly the only example; there are many. But the climate change stakes dwarf most all others. So, of course, climate change not only requires the exercise of enormous media and political power, it also requires the complicity of enormous fools.
And just where does one find folks so eager to strongly believe in something that all evidence and knowledgeable opinion to the contrary will be automatically dismissed or ridiculed with a blithe and arrogant ignorance?
George Carlin probably knew the answer, and the fossil fuel industry most certainly does.
Help, please. I had a lengthy and thoughtful response to BillW, eaten. Thank you for your help.
BillW, I plead guilty to sometimes being condescending, but only when I am condescended to. That said, I think we have the mutual respect to discuss this. I really am not condescending about the secular religion. I have read and heard comparisons and they are spot on. Allow me to paraphrase and give my own thoughts as well.
Firstly, I believe in God but have little use for organized religion. My faith is private and not evangelical. But, I realize it is faith, a belief. Many of the most intelligent people in this world are atheists. They only believe in the temporal. But, I think we are all hardwired to have a spiritual component. I believe, I don’t know but believe, we are body, mind and spirit. So many ancient cultures that had no connection to each other came to the same conclusions. The spirit part manifested itself in different ways, but it was a craving for something not temporal. For atheists, they found that “spirituality” in environmentalism. Like many religions they have an Eden, Nirvana, a place/time when the world was pure. When indigenous people roamed the world and were in harmony w/ nature. Like religions belief in Eden, it is not true. The indigenous people wiped out species, polluted, pillaged, etc. But, integral to their religion, their faith, is that there was a pure time on this earth.
All religions have a fall from the grace of Eden, perfection. We all know the Adam and Eve story. Well, for the environmental religion, it was Western man and industrialization, the polluters. That is their fall from grace. So, we polluters are the sinners, and we must be saved. For if we are not saved, than the planet is doomed. I can hear Jimmy Swaggart prechin’ the environmental religion just as he does Christianity. If you paid him you know he would.
So, that’s my analysis. I have said here many times, I keep my environmental thoughts and beliefs as I do my religious ones. I don’t speak about it unless someone tries to force their religion, be it Christianity or environmental, down my throat. On the environment, I’m a good citizen. I recycle, I use cloth grocery bags, I drive 4 cylinder cars, I walk whenever possible[healthy so it’s a win/win]. But, many environmentalist evangelicals don’t abide that. I am a sinner that needs to accept all their beliefs. I must repent, pay carbon taxes, get off the grid, stop eating meat, need I go one. Well, that ain’t gonna happen Bill. It ain’t gonna happen.
Nick, I retrieved your comment at 12:48.
Nick – I simply responded to a comment (indigenous people know more then scientists) you brought up – a comment you seemingly made with no qualifiers or uncertainty.
I do not believe I’ve ever said that any science is 100% settled – believe you were the one who brought up the term “settled science”. And even the 99% number we hear bandied about by climate experts (or those who claim to be experts) is not an exact number. I’ll grant that. That you state with such certainty that the 99% number is a lie is where you and I likely diverge.
Maybe the only answer to “Climate Change” “Global Warming” is just to legislate the language out, use individual weather events as a counter argument to longer term global data, use outdated flood maps for future planning, etc………. Do you think those strategies (right now in use by one political party/TV network) are the prudent way to proceed?
btw – Condescending/insulting comments (like yours comparing climate change believers with a secular religion, etc……..) can be a two way street. Are you really prepared to only “give” but then feign indignation on the return?
The databases that are used to show climate change is dangerously real are available for download so anyone can know rather than having trust and faith (Databases Galore – 2).
That way at least one can know what they are taliking about rather than having faith and trust in what someone else is talking about.
The major question for scientists is: will the walruses adapt to the new situation? Isn’t that the key to Darwinism? Adaptation of the fittest?
Not a very intelligent showing today on the comment page.
I am always amazed that folks who do not accept or believe in climate change or other issues involved with, ultimately the fate of the planet, seem to prefer to err on the side of, let’s just wait it out, no point in trying to effect change.
The “99%” (or more often 97%) claim of endorsement of an anthropogenic global warming crisis is an oft-repeated lie, Nick, already debunked hundreds of times. Here’s the WSJ’s evenhanded examination.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303480304579578462813553136
The real number is closer to 39.5% (of meteorologists, as quoted in the above article) or 36% as quoted in this peer-reviewed survey by Forbes:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2013/02/13/peer-reviewed-survey-finds-majority-of-scientists-skeptical-of-global-warming-crisis/
I don’t claim to know the right answer–I’m open to scientific evidence and having done glacier work in the 80’s myself there seems to be a at least a strong visual case for Arctic warming–but after 17 years with no measured global warming, I’d say skepticism is the rational choice at this point and any rush to burden our economy based on Doomsday guesswork is foolhardy.
Of the 10,000 vertibrates (mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish), like walruses, that are tracked, half of their population has perished since 1970.
At this rate all of those 10,000 will be extinct by 2054 (Civilization Is Now On Suicide Watch – 4).
“Each summer, nine million pounds of walrus flesh packs the beaches of Round Island, off the southwest coast of Alaska in the Bering Sea. Scientists aren’t exactly sure why, but for a few months each summer, about 12,000 male Pacific walruses congregate on the two mile (3.2 km) long island. From the base of the cliffs to the bubbly surf, all you can see is walrus.”
http://animals.howstuffworks.com/mammals/walrus.htm
I guess it was time to recycle old news.
http://www.earthend-newbeginning.com/wholesale-christian-sweat-shirts/307-endangered-animals-nature%E2%80%99s-warning-signs/
From Professor Turley; “As mammals, walrus cannot swim indefinitely…”
And some people have the nerve to push the whales, dolphins, and porpoises (also mammals) who beach themselves, right back into the ocean. These stupid people must not know that, as mammals, they cannot swim indefinitely. 🙂