This post is dedicated to certain well-meaning but misguided young lady whose high school education has convinced her, despite all my evidence to the contrary, that polar bears are going extinct and that it’s the fault of man-made global warming climate change. A.R., this one’s for you.
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Question: What’s more frightening than a scientist being suppressed and silenced by power-hungry bureaucrats because his work jeopardizes their whole motivation to enact legislation for fighting man-made
global warming climate change?
Answer: Two scientists being suppressed and silenced.
Not even the Soviet premiers and their politburos could have thought this up. Just days ago, EPA researcher Alan Carlin was forbidden by his own agency to publicize a report that would have put a crater-sized hole in the entire man-made global warming climate change theory that undergirds the C(r)ap and Trade Bill being pushed by Congress and the White House.
That's right, kids. The science is sooo settled on man-made global warming climate change that the contradictory scientific work has to be censored. Not addressed, not confronted, not refuted, as real scientists do. It has to be suppressed, censored, covered up by power-hungry politicians who keep telling us the debate is over.
And to think I keep hearing about this Republican war on science ...
The second instance in a week of science suppression comes from the U.K. Telegraph (Doesn’t the U.S. mainstream media to any real journalism anymore???):
Polar bear expert barred by global warmists
Mitchell Taylor, who has studied the animals for 30 years, was told his views 'are extremely unhelpful’ , reveals Christopher Booker.
Christopher Booker
Published: 5:20PM BST 27 Jun 2009
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.
Dr Mitchell Taylor has been researching the status and management of polar bears in Canada and around the Arctic Circle for 30 years, as both an academic and a government employee. More than once since 2006 he has made headlines by insisting that polar bear numbers, far from decreasing, are much higher than they were 30 years ago. Of the 19 different bear populations, almost all are increasing or at optimum levels, only two have for local reasons modestly declined.
Dr Taylor agrees that the Arctic has been warming over the last 30 years. But he ascribes this not to rising levels of CO2 – as is dictated by the computer models of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and believed by his PBSG colleagues – but to currents bringing warm water into the Arctic from the Pacific and the effect of winds blowing in from the Bering Sea.
He has also observed, however, how the melting of Arctic ice, supposedly threatening the survival of the bears, has rocketed to the top of the warmists’ agenda as their most iconic single cause. The famous photograph of two bears standing forlornly on a melting iceberg was produced thousands of times by Al Gore, the WWF and others as an emblem of how the bears faced extinction – until last year the photographer, Amanda Byrd, revealed that the bears, just off the Alaska coast, were in no danger. Her picture had nothing to do with global warming and was only taken because the wind-sculpted ice they were standing on made such a striking image.
Dr Taylor had obtained funding to attend this week’s meeting of the PBSG, but this was voted down by its members because of his views on global warming. The chairman, Dr Andy Derocher, a former university pupil of Dr Taylor’s, frankly explained in an email (which I was not sent by Dr Taylor) that his rejection had nothing to do with his undoubted expertise on polar bears: “it was the position you’ve taken on global warming that brought opposition”.
Dr Taylor was told that his views running “counter to human-induced climate change are extremely unhelpful”. His signing of the Manhattan Declaration – a statement by 500 scientists that the causes of climate change are not CO2 but natural, such as changes in the radiation of the sun and ocean currents – was “inconsistent with the position taken by the PBSG”.
So, as the great Copenhagen bandwagon rolls on, stand by this week for reports along the lines of “scientists say polar bears are threatened with extinction by vanishing Arctic ice”. But also check out Anthony Watt’s Watts Up With That website for the latest news of what is actually happening in the Arctic. The average temperature at midsummer is still below zero, the latest date that this has happened in 50 years of record-keeping. After last year’s recovery from its September 2007 low, this year’s ice melt is likely to be substantially less than for some time. The bears are doing fine.
Is this un-freaking-believable or what?
I’ve heard of Dr. Taylor. In every article and book on global warming climate change that I have read, he has been the go-to guy on polar bears. And now he’s being banned because his scientific findings don’t support the ideological party line.
Another eye-opening article comes from the Artic Sounder, a newspaper that serves the Northwest Arctic and North Slope [h/t The Astute Blogger] :
Polar bear appearances grow on oil fields
Alex DeMarban
June 24, 2009 at 12:04PM AKST
Polar bear encounters on the North Slope oil fields have risen to record levels the last two years, a sign that increasing numbers of the white giants may be prowling on land because the sea ice they prefer is shrinking, scientists said.
Oil field sightings along the southern Beaufort Sea coast jumped to 321 in 2007 and 313 in 2008, said Craig Perham, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist in Anchorage.
That’s more than double the 15-year average of 138. It’s also a sharp rise from 232, the previous high in 2005. […]
Um, does this sound like polar bears going extinct to you?
Even as far back as May 2007 the polar bear population were known to be fine and flourishing, as seen from this graphic posted at Small Dead Animals [h/t Gateway Pundit]:
(See also this post at the Riehl World View blog pertaining to the famous “polar bears on the ice floe” picture. You can read statements from the actual photographer that the polar bears were not in trouble and that her photo was coopted by Al Gore and other environ-mental-ists for man-made global warming climate change propaganda.)
I am so sick of these power-hungry bureaucrats who are on the verge of passing one of the most destructive bills in U.S. history based
When the EPA and environ-mental-ist fellow travelers (including our own president!) call CO2 a pollutant, they are full of crap.
When Barack Obama declares that “the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over,” he is full of crap.
When Barack Obama tells us the C(r)ap and Trade bill will benefit the U.S. economy and save jobs, he is full of crap.
When Al Gore says “The science is settled,” he is full of crap.
When the loathsome Henry Waxman (D-CA) says that “the consensus is overwhelming,” he is full of crap.
(While we’re on the topic, Waxman is also full of crap when he calls the opposition to the bill by most Republicans “playing politics” and “rooting against the country and … against the world.” This guy couldn’t support one thing that was trying to be achieved by the Bush administration for the good of the country and/or the world, from tax cuts to the War on Terror. Calling this guy a disgrace would be too kind.)
And when anyone says “The debate is over,” it’s only because they have covered their ears, shut out anybody with evidence contradictory to their own radical ideology, and declared it to be over.
Go read Matt Taibbi's piece in Rolling Stone, where he hints at how Goldman-Sachs is positioning itself to make a permanent killing in the carbon markets.
Oh... and since polar bears appear to thrive in oil fields, then the best thing to do to save them is open up ANWR to drilling!
Posted by: Ike | Friday, July 03, 2009 at 07:58 PM