Polar bear expert barred by global warmists

[Groenewolf]

Daily Bell

Mitchell Taylor, who has studied the animals for 30 years, was told his views 'are extremely unhelpful' , reveals Christopher Booker. According to the world's leading expert on polar bears, their numbers are higher than they were 30 years ago. Over the coming days a curiously revealing event will be taking place in Copenhagen. Top of the agenda at a meeting of the Polar Bear Specialist Group (set up under the International Union for the Conservation of Nature/Species Survival Commission) will be the need to produce a suitably scary report on how polar bears are being threatened with extinction by man-made global warming. This is one of a steady drizzle of events planned to stoke up alarm in the run-up to the UN's major conference on climate change in Copenhagen next December. But one of the world's leading experts on polar bears has been told to stay away from this week's meeting, specifically because his views on global warming do not accord with those of the rest of the group. - Telegraph

Dominant Social Theme: The time for debate is ovah!

Free-Market Analysis: The above excerpted article is yet another example of why The Daily Bell focuses on dominant social themes and how they manifest themselves. A leading scientist is apparently not able to contribute to a political and academic conversation that deals directly with his expertise. Such events, (and in our opinion they occur over and over again) must inevitably lead to the conclusion that Western socio-political conversations are manipulated, certainly to a degree.

[...]

[Cato]

Evidence of this sort proves my contention that global warming is bilge pushed by the left. 30 or so years ago, the fearmongering was about ice ages; now it's the opposite. What a load.

[Freomæg]

Creating a universal fear, such as Global Warming™, is the most effective way of keeping the public in order. It creates a severe reliance (or the illusion of) on the established authority and allows the justification of suppression for everyone who steps out of line.

This, in addition to all of the profits to be made from carbon-taxing and other Global Warming™ related endeavours.

[SwordoftheVistula]

On the radio today they were interviewing a Harvard PhD/professor who has had his research rejected from publication because the global warmists find it 'offensive'. He pointed out that the bible also uses fear of weather/climate events to force people in line

[Cato]

The bible has some pretty freakish phenomenae, like global floods and the sun stopping completely in its place in the sky. The global warming fearmongers have already latched onto the global flooding bit, at least in part.

[TheWingedHussar]

I think perhaps you are all feeling just a little bit too anarchistic. Global warming is a reality; nobody can deny that. What is up for debate is the exact cause of global warming. I have been fortunate enough to meet with a head of department at University College London who has a PhD in physical geography (or a related subject. The actual title was quite long) who, like yourselves, believes climate change is as much a political matter as it is scientific.

What he suggests is that climate change is -most likely- the result of man-made greenhouse gas emissions. The main problem is that fossil fuels have only began to be burned on an unmanageable scale in recent history and detailed climate records have only really began during the last century, so absolute proof of the responsibility for global warming is hard to attain, but there is evidence enough to suggest that the combustion of fossil fuels is to blame.

He also stresses that this is not merely another phase in the Earth's natural cycle, because not only is this modern change happening at a relatively fast rate, but also because previous major climate changes have occurred due to alterations in the Earth's orbit around the sun, and not due to a change in atmospheric composition.

As for the barring of the polar bear expert, I believe it was rightly done. I have been fortunate enough to see polar bears in their natural habitat and know that the polar bear population is currently healthy and slowly growing (which is a good thing). Nevertheless, polar bears are still endangered because there is the potential that their summer hunting grounds on the Arctic ice (their main hunting season, because they hibernate in winter) will not longer be accessible, or even exist in the future. If somebody comes into the middle of the debate with the view that global warming isn't a threat, it does no good for progression. We have already had those debates before, and drawn conclusions. Going back to old arguments when it isn't necessary and when decisions need to be made quickly is not helpful in the least.

[SwordoftheVistula]

Global warming is a reality; nobody can deny that.

Then why are so many places setting record low temperatures over the past year and a half?

He also stresses that this is not merely another phase in the Earth's natural cycle, because not only is this modern change happening at a relatively fast rate, but also because previous major climate changes have occurred due to alterations in the Earth's orbit around the sun, and not due to a change in atmospheric composition.

There hasn't been much of any change in atmospheric composition, and the recent movements in overall climate have been correlated with the level of solar flares.


http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ed...al_warming_go/

THE STARK headline appeared just over a year ago. "2007 to be 'warmest on record,' " BBC News reported on Jan. 4, 2007. Citing experts in the British government's Meteorological Office, the story announced that "the world is likely to experience the warmest year on record in 2007," surpassing the all-time high reached in 1998.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the planetary hot flash: Much of the planet grew bitterly cold.

In South America, for example, the start of winter last year was one of the coldest ever observed. According to Eugenio Hackbart, chief meteorologist of the MetSul Weather Center in Brazil, "a brutal cold wave brought record low temperatures, widespread frost, snow, and major energy disruption." In Buenos Aires, it snowed for the first time in 89 years, while in Peru the cold was so intense that hundreds of people died and the government declared a state of emergency in 14 of the country's 24 provinces. In August, Chile's agriculture minister lamented "the toughest winter we have seen in the past 50 years," which caused losses of at least $200 million in destroyed crops and livestock.

Latin Americans weren't the only ones shivering.

University of Oklahoma geophysicist David Deming, a specialist in temperature and heat flow, notes in the Washington Times that "unexpected bitter cold swept the entire Southern Hemisphere in 2007." Johannesburg experienced its first significant snowfall in a quarter-century. Australia had its coldest ever June. New Zealand's vineyards lost much of their 2007 harvest when spring temperatures dropped to record lows.

Closer to home, 44.5 inches of snow fell in New Hampshire last month, breaking the previous record of 43 inches, set in 1876. And the Canadian government is forecasting the coldest winter in 15 years.

Now all of these may be short-lived weather anomalies, mere blips in the path of the global climatic warming that Al Gore and a host of alarmists proclaim the deadliest threat we face. But what if the frigid conditions that have caused so much distress in recent months signal an impending era of global cooling?

"Stock up on fur coats and felt boots!" advises Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and senior scientist at Moscow's Shirshov Institute of Oceanography. "The latest data . . . say that earth has passed the peak of its warmer period, and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012."

Sorokhtin dismisses the conventional global warming theory that greenhouse gases, especially human-emitted carbon dioxide, is causing the earth to grow hotter. Like a number of other scientists, he points to solar activity - sunspots and solar flares, which wax and wane over time - as having the greatest effect on climate.

"Carbon dioxide is not to blame for global climate change," Sorokhtin writes in an essay for Novosti. "Solar activity is many times more powerful than the energy produced by the whole of humankind." In a recent paper for the Danish National Space Center, physicists Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen concur: "The sun . . . appears to be the main forcing agent in global climate change," they write.

Given the number of worldwide cold events, it is no surprise that 2007 didn't turn out to be the warmest ever. In fact, 2007's global temperature was essentially the same as that in 2006 - and 2005, and 2004, and every year back to 2001. The record set in 1998 has not been surpassed. For nearly a decade now, there has been no global warming. Even though atmospheric carbon dioxide continues to accumulate - it's up about 4 percent since 1998 - the global mean temperature has remained flat. That raises some obvious questions about the theory that CO2 is the cause of climate change.

Yet so relentlessly has the alarmist scenario been hyped, and so disdainfully have dissenting views been dismissed, that millions of people assume Gore must be right when he insists: "The debate in the scientific community is over."

But it isn't. Just last month, more than 100 scientists signed a strongly worded open letter pointing out that climate change is a well-known natural phenomenon, and that adapting to it is far more sensible than attempting to prevent it. Because slashing carbon dioxide emissions means retarding economic development, they warned, "the current UN approach of CO2 reduction is likely to increase human suffering from future climate change rather than to decrease it."

Climate science isn't a religion, and those who dispute its leading theory are not heretics. Much remains to be learned about how and why climate changes, and there is neither virtue nor wisdom in an emotional rush to counter global warming - especially if what's coming is a global Big Chill.

[TheWingedHussar]

Then why are so many places setting record low temperatures over the past year and a half?

Probably due to the fact that climate change can have many diverse effects. A record low temperature is not the same as a record low average temperature, which not that many places have been setting. It may have more to do with a change in wind patterns, so more cold air from the poles is being circulated around the rest of the world.

You do not understand enough about the science behind global warming to make a reasonably educated decision over which academic to listen to. Instead, consider the social and political advantages of halting the combustion of fossil fuels -less harmful pollution (reduced acid rain etc.), less dependence on politically unstable regions for oil, the ability for most nations to become more self-sufficient in terms of energy and a better preparation for when we eventually do run out of oil to burn.

Even if, as you seem to think, these "global warmists" are trying to manipulate people, what actual harm are they doing? I can only see benefits to "green" energy.

[SwordoftheVistula]

You do not understand enough about the science behind global warming to make a reasonably educated decision over which academic to listen to.

And I suppose you have a doctorate in science? My friends that have science degrees are more against the 'global warming' scam than anyone else I know.

Even if, as you seem to think, these "global warmists" are trying to manipulate people, what actual harm are they doing?

Plenty, including the destruction of the western industrial base, centralization and control of industrial policy, increases in road accident fatalities and serious injuries, and massive increases in energy costs which are bothersome enough in their own right but also lead to this: http://www.theapricity.com/forum/showthread.php?t=6365

[TheWingedHussar]

And I suppose you have a doctorate in science? My friends that have science degrees are more against the 'global warming' scam than anyone else I know.

And my friend who does have a doctorate in a relevant field is one of the most outspoken people when it comes to climate change.

Plenty, including the destruction of the western industrial base, centralization and control of industrial policy, increases in road accident fatalities and serious injuries, and massive increases in energy costs which are bothersome enough in their own right but also lead to this: http://www.theapricity.com/forum/showthread.php?t=6365

Why, those are a lot of wild and sweeping assumptions, without a shred of evidence. Did you know that in 20 years time we will harvest the moon for cheese?