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Loons and Bears Versus Eskimos and Oil "A petition seeking Endangered Species Act protection for a rare loon that breeds in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve has been accepted for review by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service" noted a May 29, 2007 Associated Press article. "Conservationists hope an eventual listing of the yellow-billed loon will curb petroleum development in the 23-million acre reserve that covers much of Alaska’s North Slope." So, at a time when a $100 barrel of oil makes economies around the world quiver, the "conservationists" are more interested in a yellow-billed loon than in your ability to drive to work, pick up the kids at school, or just go anywhere in your car. Thank you, environmentalists everywhere, thank you for being so obscenely oblivious to reality.
If you believe such nonsense, let me first remind you that the scientific name for polar bears is "Ursus maritimus", bespeaking their distinctive ability to swim anywhere they want. Typically, among the lies Al Gore tells in his fib-o-mentary, "An Inconvenient Truth", is the claim that polar bears "have been drowning in significant numbers", but the truth is this claim is based on a single report that four polar bears drowned as the result of a storm. Based on a total lie called "global warming", the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is trying to rush through a ruling that polar bears are an "endangered species" and that a vast swath of Alaska has to be protected against the possibility that one of them might die for any reason. Alaska’s Governor, Sarah Palin, is not a happy camper these days. In a letter to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne she said, "The listing of a currently healthy species based entirely on highly speculative and uncertain climate and ice modeling, and equally uncertain and speculative modeling of possible impacts on a species would be unprecedented." Need it be said that the locals, otherwise known as Inupiats or Eskimos, regard this as a very real threat to their interests? Representing them is the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation (ASRC) and, on October 22, 2007, they wrote a letter protesting that the "listing of the polar bear under the ESA should not be used as a land management tool or to drive climate change policy." Noting a U.S. Geological Survey report focuses "intensely on statistical analysis and modeling approaches to make key determinations regarding polar bear mortality", the ASRC identifies the core of all climate change claims, the flawed and deliberately manipulated computer models that have little relationship to real polar bears in their natural habitat. The environmentalists seeking to put the polar bears on the Endangered Species list conveniently overlook a report by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) noting there are some 22,000 polar bears in 20 distinct populations worldwide. H. Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis, noted in a 2006 commentary published by The Washington Times that, "Only two bear populations—accounting for about 16.4 percent of the total—are decreasing, and they are in areas where air temperatures have actually fallen, such as the Baffin Bay region. "By contrast, another two populations—about 13.6 percent of the total number—are growing and they are living in areas where air temperatures have risen, near the Bering Strait and Chukchi Sea", i.e., just off the coast of Alaska! The World Wildlife Fund study found the ten populations—comprising about 45.4 percent of the total—are stable, and the status of the remaining six is unknown. As Burnett points out, "These bears have survived for thousands of years, during both colder and warmer periods, and their populations are by and large in good shape. Polar bears may face many threats, but global warming is not primary among them. Global warming alarmists are like the wizard of Oz, asking the public fear the spectacle, but not to pull back the curtain and unmask them for the charlatans they are." Meanwhile, ASRC informed the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that "local and state activities, and oil and gas activity in the Arctic has not been linked to a decrease in the polar bear population." This is, however, all about oil exploration and extraction. It is not about the loons or the bears. It is just one more example of the way environmentalists seek to cripple the nation’s economy and security by finding bogus reasons to restrict access to known reserves of these energy sources. And let’s add one more black mark to the Bush Administration’s failures. The proposal to list polar bears was announced by the Secretary Kempthorne on December 27, 2006, just about a year ago. The final determination is scheduled for January 9, 2008. That leaves precious little time to let the Secretary know just how wrong he is and to stop yet another disastrous ESA listing. As 2007 winds down, the Center is already looking ahead to next year and, of course, we need your donation to insure that this website and our communications program continues. No amount (well, almost) is too small and none too big either! Please take a moment and help the Center continue its effort to debunk junk science and analyze the events that will determine the future. Living in the Global Warming Insane Asylum Not a day goes by without reading or hearing something about global warming. For those of us, dubbed "deniers", who have examined the science behind the global warming claims and found it to be utterly bogus, it must be like living in an insane asylum where you know you’re sane and everyone around you is nuts. That can get on your nerves. This is particularly true for me when it comes to the broadcast and print media whose members seem to be predominantly brain-dead when it comes to any body of facts suggesting Al Gore does not walk on water or that, perhaps, the earth is not in the midst of some horrid warming cycle that only we, you and me, can avoid if we just stop producing carbon dioxide (CO2). The problem is that humans, all 6.6 billion of us, produce about 2.2 pounds of CO2 every day just by breathing. Yes, breathing. Together we generate 2.4 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide and that doesn’t even begin to include all the various mammals that do the same thing. What we have is a "theory" of global warming, not a known, reproducible, agreed upon set of facts that says, yes, the earth is warming and it is not from solar radiation or any other natural factor, but is the direct result of "human activity." Moreover, this theory is based entirely on computer models whose predictive capability is best demonstrated by the existing models used by the U.S. weather bureau. At best these models can predict weather conditions outward by perhaps three, maybe four days. This is why, when told to bring an umbrella with you on the nightly forecast, you often discover the sun shining the following morning. The weather changes and does so hourly, but climate changes over far longer cycles of time and many of those cycles are well known to scientists. Those climatologists trying to hold onto their sanity and dignity uniformly denounce others who have sold their souls to the global warming propagandists. At the heart of the theory is the bizarre belief that carbon dioxide (CO2) is a "pollutant" that must be regulated and controlled. I say bizarre because, other than the oxygen on which all human and other animal life depends, CO2 is solely responsible for all the vegetation on earth. Reducing CO2 actually reduces the capacity of crops to grow and forests to thrive. Without CO2 there were be no parks in which to walk and play, and most certainly no farms. Carbon Dioxide is a miniscule part of the vast belt of greenhouse gases surrounding the earth. The atmosphere that protects the earth is composed of 78% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen,0.93% argon, and barely 0.038% carbon dioxide. The rest is trace amounts of other gases and, finally, an average of about 1% water vapor, the stuff of which clouds are made. Clouds are another climate factor that computer models ignore because it is literally impossible to keep track of clouds that can occur and disappear within in a minute’s time. Passing laws to limit CO2 emissions is literally insane. If Congress does this, it will ignore the CO2 emissions produced in China and India, to name just two nations, each of which has a population of more than a billion people. Europe, which signed onto the Kyoto Climate Control Protocol, has never been able to meet the limits it agreed to and continues to produce more in response to its need for energy to power its economy. On top of that, creating a "cap-and-trade" system is comparable to the former practice of the Catholic Church that sold "indulgences" that forgave one’s sins on earth. It raised a lot of money to build St. Peter’s Basilica, but it also so enraged Martin Luther that he started the Protestant Reformation. A system to trade "credits" or permission to emit CO2 will show up, as it currently does, as a way for a company to demonstrate how environmentally correct it is. Thousands of dollars that would otherwise be invested more wisely by a company is flushed down the environmental toilet. Other companies, however, can add to their bottom line by selling unused credits. There are literally thousands of environmental organizations and they cost Americans billions of dollars every year in unnecessary costs intended to "save the planet." No one is arguing for dirty air or water. The laws that have been around since the 1970s have done a good job, but laws such as the Endangered Species Act are a known failure and yet keep being reenacted. Laws that forbid 85% of the U.S. Continental Shelf from being explored for new reservoirs of natural gas and oil are crazy. Laws that will not allow drilling for oil in Alaska’s ANWR are crazy. There aren’t fewer caribou or polar bears. They are more today than when oil was found. Meanwhile, just 90 miles off of Florida, the Chinese have teamed with Cuba to drill for oil! A large part of California was reduced to ashes in October because of environmental efforts to limit proper forest management programs that would have removed diseased or dead trees and cleared away dry underbrush. Some laws actually forbid homeowners from clearing the underbrush. Cataclysmic forest fires have been occurring now for decades because of the environmental insistence that all of nature must be left in its "pristine" state. The result is that it all becomes tinder and, guess what wild fires do? They release huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere! Finally, scientists know that increases in atmospheric CO2 follow increases of global temperatures by several hundred years. This indicates that CO2 is a byproduct of increasing temperatures, not the cause. We are living in an insane asylum built, operated, and occupied by environmentalists. They haven’t any interest in scientific fact or anything resembling the truth that most people can see with their own eyes. It is a huge edifice of lies because that is the single predicate of environmentalism, the lies that began with Rachel Carson in "Silent Spring" and all that followed from that polluted stream of hubris. Have you visited our daily blog yet? For news of often under-reported events, some excellent new books, the threats environmental organizations pose, and other topics, bookmark the site as an additional source of commentary.
©
2007 Alan Caruba. |
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However, yellow-billed loons are not sufficiently illustrative of alleged dangers tospecies in the frozen North. Polar bears, however, are. Polar bears are the poster children of global warming and we all "know" that all the ice is melting in the Arctic, the bears are drowning or just damn well running out of food because "human activity" is affecting an environment in which they have lived and thrived for millennia.