newspeak
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articl…
Once a symbol of Arctic wildlife’s fierce resilience, the polar bear is now so vulnerable to the ravages of global warming that the US government placed the creature on the endangered species list yesterday.
Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said the bears’ habitat was literally melting below their feet. Bears depend almost exclusively on sea ice to hunt for ringed seals and other prey. Yet Arctic ice coverage fell to record low levels last year
Let’s just all ignore the Canadian government study that showed that polar bear population is up over the last two decades.
Let’s also ignore the fact that arctic sea ice grew faster in 2008 than ever before : 58,000 square miles of sea ice per day, for 10 days straight.
“Because polar bears are vulnerable to this loss of habitat, they are, in my judgment, likely to become endangered in the foreseeable future – in this case 45 years,” Kempthorne said at a news conference in Washington.
So if short term, potentially random variations are taken as a trend, and if we extend that trend out half a century, then polar bears are “likely” to become endangered … and therefore they are declared endangered now.
Have I suddenly just been dropped on a planet of monkeys where nothing makes sense?
Where’s the Statue of Liberty ?
May 15th, 2008 at 9:17 am
Everything makes sense. Other than that, yes. In re: Statue, I think something knocked its head off recently.
May 15th, 2008 at 10:01 am
“Bears depend almost exclusively on sea ice to hunt for ringed seals and other prey.”
That just means more seal for the rest of us. mmmmmm, baby seal.
May 15th, 2008 at 11:53 am
When I lived in California, the State Department of Fish and Game was about to allow hunting mountain lions again because their numbers were getting larger and, frankly, they were starting to attack humans inside cities. So there was a ballot initiative that declared the mountain lion off limits to hunters. It passed, but I was always upset that the state had a Department of Fish and Game which, apparently, wasn’t allowed to make decisions based on actual evidence.
This seems like the flip side to that. Instead of voters overturning a reasoned decision, politicians are making decisions in spite of available evidence. The articles I read on this suggested that polar bears today are not in any danger, but the Department of the Interior thinks that they may be in danger in the future. That doesn’t seem like a reason to classify a species as “threatened.”
Of course they tried to walk a crazy line on this one, and haven’t satisfied anyone. “Polar bears are on the threatened list because in the future Global Warming may threaten them; but by putting them on this list for this reason we will not try to regulate anything related to Global Warming.”
May 15th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
Let’s also ignore the fact that arctic sea ice grew faster in 2008 than ever before : 58,000 square miles of sea ice per day, for 10 days straight.
This is an interesting page, but I’m not sure how it supports your point. It shows that arctic sea ice grew quickly between September and November, when it normally grows, but that in both September and November it was substantially smaller than during comparable periods 1978-2002.
Now, complaining about arctic ice shrinking may, in fact, be bullshit (the fact that the 1978-2002 line is a median, and no data is provided about min/max/std-dev makes this not useful), but you’re abusing the statistics just as badly as anyone else. C’mon, TJIC, be a rational being, not a television pundit!
May 15th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
test.. got errors on that last comment…
May 15th, 2008 at 3:20 pm
Looking over the NASA page I note two interesting facts that seem to contradict (or at least not support your hypothesis) that the sea ice isn’t really going away..
1) Although there was record ice growth in 2007 (did you mean 2007 not 2008?) this wasn’t sufficient to bring the total ice levels up to seasonal averages (I don’t know if it was enough to make up for the record melt though).
2) There’s also the question of how thick the melted ice was, and how thick the new ice is. If the old ice was dozens of meters think, and the new ice only a couple meters or less, than that’s quite a difference and the new ice will melt a lot easier in the future.
As to the polar bears themselves the big question is how well can they adapt to the future loss of ice, unfortunately I don’t know enough to answer that.
May 15th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
That’s just great. Now I’ll have the songs from “Stop the Planet of the Apes! I want to get off” going around in my head for the next couple of days.
May 15th, 2008 at 6:28 pm
…. I hate you all, from chimpanz-a to chimpanzee ….