The polar bear has become the symbol of the plight of animals in the face of global warming. A new report appears to reaffirm the plight of these incredible animals. A study in the Ecological Applications journal reports that the number of polar bears in eastern Alaska and western Canada has declined by 40%. Perhaps the most unnerving disclosure is that just two of 80 polar bear cubs that the international team tracked between 2003 and 2007 have survived.
The numbers are staggering. The bear population in the area shrank to about 900 in 2010, down from about 1,600 in 2004.
Polar bears serve as a tragic type of canary in a cage for climatologists charting the progress of global warming. The news is obviously not good for them or for us.
The bears rely on ice flows and seal populations to survive. The distance at which they are required to swim has now gotten longer and more painful according to scientists. In one case, a mother had to swim nine days and 426 miles — resulting in her loss of 22% of her body weight. Her cub died.
There was a bear stabilization between 2008-2010 due to unusual oceanographic conditions and other conditions. However, experts now predict that more than two-thirds of the world’s polar bear subpopulations could be extinct by 2050.
Source: LA Times
I’m not sure what question you are referring to, Karen.
Are there slimy people operating in all levels of business and government? Yes. Are they all slimy people? No. You go with the best information available. I am not saying ACA is a healthcare panacea (I think it’s overly complex and difficult to understand in many cases). I am not saying all computer models are accurate and need to be trusted 100% of the time. If there are 100 scientists in a room, maybe 2 are tainted? I don’t know. But the vast majority are likely very dedicated to getting at the truth.
Not everything is black and white. Most of the world is a gray area. Did I trust the right wing nut job machine when they were screaming close the border and stop all air travel when one person died of Ebola? Or did I trust the medical community to make the best information available, although there may be some corrupt physicians? No contest for me The medical community is a much better source of medical information and it appears it has been correct in its its advice and decisions.
Do I trust Jim Hansen’s understanding of climate change http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/hansen_17/ or Jim Inhofe’s ?
“Their goal is not to protect the American people, it is to control them,” Inhofe said. “They want top-down control, and carbon dioxide regulations will give this to them.”
Inhofe argued that the administration is furthering its ends by giving talking points to “alarmists” who, he explained, are “people who believe the world is coming to an end, and it’s all man’s fault.”
Hansen wins that contest for me. All I’m saying is to ignore science because it may have a couple of bad actors is ignoring a large body of evidence that points to a warming planet accelerated by man’s actions. And listening to people like Inhofe is strictly for laughs, since he works on people’s emotions with hyperbole and fear.
@LloydBlankfien
Here is a long and thoughtful response to you.
You are missing my point. I don’t know whether the globe is trending towards being warmer, or trending towards being cooler. I am not one of those 6,000 year old Earth people. I am not really all that partisan because I think Republicans suck, but I just think Democrats suck a whole lot more, and in more dangerous ways. Sooo, why am I a climate change skeptic???
It’s simple. My government tells sooo many lies, and sooo many people aid them in that lie to make money, that I don’t have any realistic belief that I am being told the true story or even the full story. The people who push global warming, and want to cut down on gasoline are the same people who have been going on and on about “mass transportation” since the days when a New Ice Age was the fear.
The people who push global warming want some sort of scheme where your company, Goldman Sachs, can makes trillions of dollars in fees and speculation in carbon credits. Gee, if CO2 is that bad, can’t we just legislate its reduction without including Wall Street in the mix??? And why is somebody like Al Gore heavily invested in green energy while he lives in 10,000+ sq. ft. house, flies in a private jet, and sails around in a big motorized yacht.
The people who push global warming are lying geeks like Gruber who see nothing wrong with lying their asses off to get what they want. Scientists who push global warming stuff get huge government grants which make me suspicious of what they publish. Then, people like you, mix in politics into what should be a scientific issue. You blame Republicans, and Christians, and Rush Limbaugh, and all the Left’s typical boogeymen, sooo are you pushing a political agenda, or a scientific agenda. You have to admit there is some room there for doubt.
Then, seems to be a hiatus in the warming which is not explained by the models. Finally, there are seeds of an undifferentiated distrust of government that did not arise with Republicans and Christians, as Mike Appleton posited. No that huge elephant of distrust arose from Watergate, the Vietnam War, and the cultural revolutions of the 60’s. What is that the Baby Boomers used to say??? DON’T TRUST ANYBODY OVER 30!
Well, those seeds that were planted in the 60’s have sprouted in our culture, and I am one of the little flowers.
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
And, sorry, a 26-year-old is not a “child.”
And Gruber also admitted that Obamacare was never intended to save the middle class money. It was designed so that healthy people would pay a lot more so that the sick and the poor could get more.
Lloyd:
Do you care to address my concern raised above, since Max will not?
And you may be interested to know that only 29% of Caucasians now support Obamacare, according to the latest Gallop poll. And black support has waned from a high of around 72% to now under 60%.
Are the vast majority of Americans fools about Obamacare? Are you BFF with Gruber? Because your attitude towards your detractors is strikingly similar . . .
The answer is simple. President Obama should issue an executive order that will give all polar bears work papers and government healthcare.
What could be better than that?
Trooper York – I am not sure that Obama could give green cards to polar bears, where would they carry them? Not sure I would want to be the one who delivers them.
Believe it or not, Paul, computer modeling is not considered a fools errand:
Computer simulation modeling can assist in the design, creation, and evaluation of complex systems. Designers, program managers, analysts, and engineers use computer simulation modeling to understand and evaluate ‘what if’ case scenarios. It can model a real or proposed system using computer software and is useful when changes to the actual system are difficult to implement, involve high costs, or are impractical. Some examples of computer simulation modeling familiar to most of us include: weather forecasting, flight simulators used for training pilots, building bridges and car crash modeling.
It’s not voodoo……unless you are Jim Inhofe and his followers.
Lloyd Blankfien – when the computer model cannot predict the past climate, how can it predict the future climate. I have worked on computers since 1964. I am well aware of what they can and cannot do. Garbage in, garbage out.
The right is out in force tonight with anecdotal stories of all type:
Karen S
97% of Liberals claimed that Obamacare would save you money.
Across the country, 20%-25% more insurers are participating than last year. In Illinois, for example, the department of insurance said the number of qualified plans on that state’s exchange “more than doubled from 165 plans offered in 2014 to more than 400 plans being offered in 2015.”
The additional offerings across the country comes from health insurance giants like Aetna AET +1.09% (AET) and UnitedHealth Group UNH +1.78% (UNH), which expanded their offerings from the first year to compete with more dominant individual products sold by Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans.
The new competition is keeping prices in check, according to a new report funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation from researchers at the Urban Institute, which found that consumers in most markets are purchasing plans at a “lower cost than in 2014, or a small increase of less than 5%.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/brucejapsen/2014/11/09/costs-slow-choices-abound-in-new-obamacare-open-enrollment/
Eliminates lifetime limits on essential medical expenses;
Prohibits insurers from dropping your coverage or raising your premiums if you get sick — or from denying coverage if you have a preexisting condition;
Ensures that your child can stay on your health plan until age 26;
Caps annual out-of-pocket medical and drug expenses up to an estimated $6,400 for individuals and $12,800 for families.
http://www.aarp.org/health/health-insurance/info-08-2013/affordable-care-act-health-benefits.html
Kaiser: Healthcare costs for a family increased 47%, under the GOP from 2001-2007, but since 2007 the increase has been 26%.
“Total healthcare spending in 2012 came in at $2.79 trillion—up just 3.7 percent over the previous year and continuing a four-year trend of significantly reducing the amount of growth in annual healthcare expenditures.
By way of comparison, before the recent recession, we were averaging annual increases in health care spending of over 7 percent during the calendar years 2000-2008.
And what is the right’s’ pan? Crickets…
I could go on, but this is not the forum.
Why the right is so averse to fact is striking. …
Dick Cheney, the right’s unabashedly confident shining star, had a 1% doctrine: “If there’s a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It’s not about our analysis … It’s about our response.”
Yet that same group ignores and disparages overwhelming scientific evidence about ACC.
Gary T, I read about global cooling during the 1970s, but that was not the near entire climatological community that was expressing that sentiment. And climate science has come a long way in 40 years. Didn’t bans on cfcs occur in the 1980s and it is just now that the ozone layer is beginning to recover? I am sure that at least 3% of the scientists thought that was a waste of time, but apparently it wasn’t, unless you think it was all a hoax.
And not all ulcers are caused by bacteria. I heard the same Freak program and thought it was fascinating. It takes a special person to fight the system.
Squeeky, Al Gore is not a scientist. He has a big house and flies all across the globe in private jets. That doesn’t mean climate change is a hoax, it means Al Gore is not a good representative of his own message. Ever see a doctor who smoked?
Yes, climate models are complex and may not always agree, and time and additional analysis may change current thinking, but to ignore the current science seems foolhardy.
Would I be more inclined to believe this group of highly respected groups or Jim Inhofe and Rush Limbaugh….
http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/
http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
I know some think that NASA lied about the moon landing, but to most it has high credibility.
Bottom line is that you will leave your distaste of science and the consequences to your children who will be the ones that pay the highest price.
Squeeky – there is a terrible double standard applied to Al Gore AKA Al Jazeerah profiteer Gore.
97% of Liberals claimed that Obamacare would save you money. There was a huge consensus that it would be wonderful, you could keep your doctor, your policy, and that Republicans and Libertarians were stupid fear mongers.
Well, it turns out that huge consensus was based on lies and deceptions orchestrated by the likes of Gruber, Pelosi, and Obama.
If everyone is drawing the same conclusion based on tainted data, it does not make it true.
Again, before anyone can draw a meaningful conclusion, the serious wrongdoings at the IPCC et al need to be rectified. Only then can we begin to accurately study global climate.
Lloyd:
Here is where your analogy fails.
Let’s say a doctor says you have a 97% chance of a cure if you take Drug X. That chance is based off of FDA clinical trials that takes about 10 years to go from investigational new drug to approved for human use. Multiple studies, under controlled conditions, accurately predicted the outcome of administration of Drug X at a certain dosage. Even then, it is entirely possible that, when released into the variations among the human population, that drug could be recalled because a side effect pops up that was not significant among the smaller clinical trials study population.
In this case, not a single computer model, literally, has made an accurate prediction. Zero. Not even 0.000001%. If this had been an FDA trial, it would have failed. Basing any type of medical advice on a study that had a zero % success rate would be a trail lawyer’s fantasy come true. If the media came out and said that every single study failed to accurately predict an outcome, and yet doctors everywhere were prescribing it to the general population, there would be mass hysteria.
Squeeky – when I was in college, a professor I really respected discussed how global cooling was likely the next change. And there was no question that climate would eventually change. It always has.
Lloyd:
“Do I believe Mann or Inhofe”
So that is how you achieve scientific surety? That is how we are going to make public policy that will cost trillions and likely cause economic suffering across the globe?
One level removed from the actual science and data?
As Inhofe would say, you’re no scientist, but do you care to even learn about the scientific method? To analyze the scientific propositions that make up global warming theory?
No you do not. You would prefer to use Chicken Little logic, and literally think the sky is falling instead.
If a High Priest says it is true, then it must be so.
Well, I am feeling kind of doomsday-y, sooo here is a video of Jill Tracy’s Doomsday Serenade, with lyrics below it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBSREg4DKBM
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
@LloydB
It is still a post-Gruber world. Here is how Gruber is now affecting the global warming argument:
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?singlepost=3368771
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
Lloyd:
A fact of reality is not dependent upon the ratio of popularity of of the number of experts supporting an opinion, vs the number of experts opposing it.
Thus, even if you could show 97% of experts publically supporting an interpretation (which even that I believe to be inflated) of global warming hypothesis, that does not peg the reality of it. It is the basic science, provable or disprovable via the scientific method, with theory and prior science to guide it, that proves whether something is true or not.
In currently global warming theory, I do not believe we have enough information to make viable predictions. Need I point out that in the 70’s it was a belief of global cooling that most experts in the field supported. Global cooling would actually be something to fear more than global warming.
So your analogy of some ill person going to the doctor fails.
You are juxtaposing probabilities from very different scenarios.
Max-1 I wasn’t referring to your agenda mention, but the one by Gary T. Yes, it’s amazing that so many doubt so much evidence. I hate to make it political, but if Reagan said, “Mr. Gorbachev, decrease your carbon emissions!” the right would be driving electric cars. But the right has tainted, confused and belittled the science to a point where Americans on the right consider it heresy to even acknowledge anthropogenic climate change exists at any level.
Doctor, I have a debilitating health issue that appears to be getting worse. What do you recommend? Well, the science says you have a 97% chance of curing your condition by taking a certain prescription drug and following these health guidelines. Or you have a 3% chance of survival by ignoring my advice and continuing with your current lifestyle. Thanks for the information doctor, but I think I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing and hope for the best…..
October was tied for the warmest on record. Nothing to see here. Move along….
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/imageo/2014/11/17/october-tied-warmest-record-global-warming-hiatus/#.VGvZ5Yv3FMg
“Politicians continue to exploit the slow-down for partisan purposes. As Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the incoming chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, said recently:
“While some Democrats may be convinced that global warming is continuing to occur, the scientific record does not agree . . . In fact, for the past 15 years, temperatures have not increased.”
He conveniently ignores the fact that each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth’s surface than any preceding decade since 1850,”
Think about it. anti-science James Inhofe is the incoming chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee and he is is responsible for dealing with matters related to the environment. Might as well have a voodoo priest as Surgeon General….
Not that it is directly on point, but it is instructive that . . .
There have been many academic and then political, environments, where the majority of experts in a field have concluded that some fact or premise was true, and that state of expert opinion stayed stable for years; then some maverick, who had been mocked by most and followed by some, and who had been shouting all along “It is NOT true”, comes along and proves what the majority of respected scientists or experts believed.
The one that comes to my mind is the general practitioner in Australia, who single handedly proved that stomach ulcers were not caused by stress and bad foods, but rather by an infection of h. pylori.
It is not consensus that proves whether something is scientifically viable, although it is often a good measure of that, it is actual science that proves or disproves something.
In global warming theory, the “proof” comes in the form of computer models whose dozens of variables are infinitely “tunable”, by biased investigators, with no falsifiable hypotheses to base it upon. It depends on unstable, non-linear, proposed positive feedback mechanisms that walk right into the admonitions of trying to predict based upon Lorenz fractals and recursive feedback dynamicals, i.e., butterfly effect type equations.
The premise is further based upon a proposed linear relationship between a primary greenhouse gas, like CO2 and methane, and the secondary greenhouse gas water vapor. This proposition alone fails, because the relationship is not linear, rather logarithmic, which results in significantly smaller forcings of heat transfer and retention.
There are just so many maybes, and probably ifs, and we thinks. It is not a science, and barely an art.
It is what happens when you have a lack of predictive knowledge, but you demand that you can predict it anyway, with a subconscious bias for a certain result.
You wind up with a pseudo-science that can only predict things retrospectively.
Gary T – the computer model cannot predict last year’s climate, much less anything in the future, but they keep using them.
@KarenS
Here is a duplicate post from Mike A’s thread of the other day. But, it is relevant here, too:
Some scientists think we are in for Global Cooling, and make a pretty convincing argument: There are two really good 5 minute videos at the link. They also explain why the greenhouse gas stuff is being pushed sooo hard:
http://www.newsmax.com/newswidget/dark-winter-cold-global-cooling/2014/11/16/id/607672/
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
The next big decline in population will be of the human race. The earth can only support so many