Arctic Updates

[Ben D]

BTW Mr wintler2, I just checked out that blog site you cut and pasted from and find it ironic that while you are always harping about material posted from sources with an ulterior agenda other than scientific truth, the DeSmogBlog Project is a propaganda organization with a pro-global warming agenda, and also IMO at the expense of the realization of true scientific investigation.

This site is worth a look at for its extent and sophistication, shame on you wintler2 for keeping this secret, and all this time I thought you were doing your own 'leg work'... you secret agent you.

The DeSmogBlog Project
List of Global Warming and Climate Change Experts for Media
Desmog Directory
Media Centre
Links to websites and blogs we read

[Cosmic Cowbell]

Hunters under fire in battle to save polar bear from extinction

Summit to discuss limits on hunting as starvation hits numbers of Arctic predators

By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor
Monday, 16 March 2009



Inuit hunters haul a polar bear they killed in Greenland one of 700 allowed to be shot each year

A limit on the hunting of polar bears by sportsmen and native Arctic people will top the agenda at an international summit in Norway tomorrow, seen as vital to the survival of the predator. Although few people outside the Arctic realise it, there is still a major legal hunt for the animals in four out of the five states that host the bears: Canada, Greenland, Alaska in the US, and Russia. In Norway, stalking is banned.

This hunt by Inuit native peoples and in Canada also by sportsmen – referred to as a "harvest" – claims as many as 700 polar bears killed every year, 3 per cent of the entire population. Adding the threat from climate change, which is eradicating the bear's natural habitat, the hunts are seen as no longer "sustainable". Studies from the US Geological Survey and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature suggest that the total population of 22,000 polar bears will fall by up to two-thirds over the next 50 years, leading the creature to the precipice of extinction.

In the age of global warming, Ursus maritimus is coming to replace the giant panda as the world's principal icon of threatened wildlife. Rising temperatures are rapidly melting the Arctic sea-ice the bears use in summer to hunt seals, meaning many cannot build large fat reserves to take them through the winter, and so starve. The summit is in Tromsø, the Norwegian city 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle. The five countries were party to the 1973 Polar Bear Agreement, signed by all the range states to regulate hunting, which at the time was thought to be getting out of control. The agreement in general is thought to have worked well, but on the table tomorrow will be a draft Species Action Plan for the polar bear drawn up by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), with one of its principal points being the issue of "unsustainable harvest", in other words, overhunting in the face of global warming.

The aim, said Geoff York, polar bear conservation co-ordinator for WWF's Arctic Programme, is to get the states which allow hunting to incorporate the science of climate change into their "harvest management plans". He added: "Climate change impacts are not formally taken into account with any of the polar bear populations which are harvested. We're asking the parties who manage polar bears to incorporate climate change science into their management regimes." The implication is of course that hunting quotas will have to be reduced, a difficult issue with the Inuit who see it as part of their culture. WWF says it is not opposed to hunting in principle, as long as it is sustainable. But, said Mr York, "That is quickly changing. The situation facing polar bears is dire, because of habitat loss due to climate change. If we don't do something meaningful soon, it will be very difficult for them to survive in the long run."

The question of future hunting is sensitive, not least because there is evidence that some polar bear populations are already being exploited beyond what their numbers could support, even in the absence of the climate threat. The Baffin Bay population, found between eastern Canada and Greenland, is thought to be one such, with a near 30 per cent decline in recent years from 2,100 to 1,500; the Chukotka population in eastern Siberia is thought to be another, where there may be illegal hunting.

The financial return from hunting is an important income for some indigenous people. Polar bears taken are used as food in some communities, and skins and skulls are either sold commercially, converted to handicrafts, or used privately. The draft action plan also addresses industrialisation of the Arctic, toxic substances, and how to deal with the increasing number of human-polar bear interactions as bears come ashore in larger numbers as the sea-ice disappears. Mr York said that he understood the view that hunting should be banned completely but the WWF preferred a more nuanced approach, working with local people. "If you just take away people's livelihoods, you can do short-term harm to your long-term conservation goals," he said.



Link

[compared2what?]

BTW Mr wintler2, I just checked out that blog site you cut and pasted from and find it ironic that while you are always harping about material posted from sources with an ulterior agenda other than scientific truth, the DeSmogBlog Project is a propaganda organization with a pro-global warming agenda, and also IMO at the expense of the realization of true scientific investigation.

This site is worth a look at for its extent and sophistication, shame on you wintler2 for keeping this secret, and all this time I thought you were doing your own 'leg work'... you secret agent you.

The DeSmogBlog Project
List of Global Warming and Climate Change Experts for Media
Desmog Directory
Media Centre
Links to websites and blogs we read

My Bendy friend, whoever you really are and whatever you really think, may you be forever free to continue being and thinking whatever you want to be and think.

However, I feel obliged to point out that the site in question:

(a) prominently and explicitly states that its mission is the rebuttal of what it regards as suspect anti-warming organizations and the material they produce;

(b) prominently and explicitly discloses its sources of funding; and

(c) prominently and explicitly lists the names and pedigrees of its key staff.

That's not sophisticated propaganda. That's undisguised and honest advocacy for an apparently sincerely held point of view. Unless the people running it are concealing the dark secret of their true affiliation to GW skepticism, in which case it would be very impressive and also very good at concealment. However, there's no evidence for that, and therefore no rational basis for believing it.

Since you don't specify in which post wintler2 used material from the site, and I don't have the time to go looking for it, I don't know for sure whether he attributed whatever he quoted to the site in question. But based on your ability to check it out, I tentatively assume that he did, although I'm open to evidence to the contrary. If my tentative assumption proves to be correct, though, neither are there any rational grounds to accuse wintler2 of secrecy, given that he would then not have made any attempt to keep the source of his information, you know, secret.

I wish you well.

c2w

ON EDIT: Given that wintler2 included a link to the site, in full compliance with all message-board principles of openness and transparency vis-a-vis where quoted text comes from, I'm upgrading my tentative assumption that there are no rational grounds on which to accuse him of secrecy to a flat assertion that there are no rational grounds on which to accuse him of secrecy.

I fully admit that I'm basing this affirmative conclusion solely on the single factor of his not having kept anything secret. But that's only because in this instance regarding that single factor as conclusively dispositive and unambiguous evidence of non-secrecy is not only rational, but pretty much the only not-delusional way to regard it there is.

Thanks and best,

c2w

[wintler2]

Ben D, i linked to Demos site only for and because it quoted important points from the conclusion of the sync.chaos paper that your CNN affiliate left out, namely that its authors accepted the overwhelming evidence that anthropogenic climate change is the bigger problem.

Since you have provided link to full text of paper i take it you support its conclusions. Great, welcome to the reality based community. Maybe we can get back on topic now - Arctic Updates, yes?

[Cosmic Cowbell]

Climate change blues: how scientists cope

by Marlowe Hood – Mon Mar 16, 4:01 am ET

COPENHAGEN, (AFP) – Being a climate scientist these days is not for the faint of heart, asarguably no other area of research yields a sharper contrast between "eureka!" moments, and the sometimes terrifying implications of those discoveries for the future of the planet. "Science is exciting when you make such findings," said Konrad Steffen, who heads the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) in Boulder, Colorado.

"But if you stop and look at the implications of what is coming down the road for humanity, it is rather scary. I have kids in college -- what do they have to look forward to in 50 years?" And that's not the worst of it, said top researchers gathered here last week for a climate change conference which heard, among other bits of bad news, that global sea levels are set to rise at least twice as fast over the next century as previously thought, putting hundreds of millions of people at risk.

What haunts scientists most, many said, is the feeling that -- despite an overwhelming consensus on the science -- they are not able to convey to a wider public just how close Earth is to climate catastrophe. That audience includes world leaders who have pledged to craft, by year's end, a global climate treaty to slash the world's output of dangerous greenhouse gases. It's as if scientists know a bomb will go off, but can't find the right words to warn the people who might be able to defuse it. French glaciologist Claude Lorius, one of the first scientists to publish, in 1987, evidence that global warming was real, has despaired of getting the message across.

"At first, I thought that we could convince people. But there is a terrible inertia," he told AFP. "I fear that society is not up to the challenge of a crisis like this. Today, as a human being I am pessimistic." John Church, an expert on sea levels at the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystem Cooperative Research Centre in Hobart, Tasmania, takes an equally dim view of our collective capacity for denial. "Perhaps society has realised the seriousness, but it certainly hasn't realised the urgency," he said. "But even if you are pessimistic -- and sometimes I am -- it does not help. What are you going to do? Chop off your hands and give up? That's not a solution either," he said.

Most scientists, while no less alarmed by snowballing evidence of a planet out of kilter, still think there is time to act. "We are actually going to have to decrease the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere if we want to stabilise climate and avoid some highly undesirable effects," said James Hansen, director since 1981 of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. "It is still possible to do that." Some of those undesirable effects include massive droughts, more intense hurricanes and a panoply of human misery including expanded disease and tens of millions of climate refugees.

Even gloomier scenarios see a world map redrawn by sea levels rising tens of metres and a planet able to sustain only a fraction of the nine billion people projected to become, as of 2050, Earth's stable population. But even if it is urgent to let the world know just how bad it could be, there is also a danger of frightening people into inaction, said other scientists.

"I do worry that people just can't deal, psychologically, with the enormity of the problem, and that they may revert to doing nothing," said William Howard, a researcher at the University of Tasmania. "As a scientist, I deal with climate change on a time scale of hundreds of thousands of years, and even I have a hard time dealing with it," added Howard, who reported last week that tiny marine animals called forams are losing their capacity to absorb huge amounts of carbon pollution from the atmosphere. "The risk is that when science pumps out more and more evidence that we are facing dangerous tipping points" -- triggers that would make climate change irreversible -- "that you put your head in the sand and move from denial to despair," said Johan Rockstrom, director of the Stockholm Environment Institute.

Hanging over the conference proceedings like an invisible cloud were the apocalyptic predictions of the monstre sacre of Earth sciences, 90-year-old British scientist James Lovelock. A true iconoclast, Lovelock commands respect because he understood decades before his peers that Earth behaves as a single, self-regulating system composed of physical, chemical and biological components, a concept he dubbed the Gaia principle.

In his just-released book "The Vanishing Face of Gaia", he basically says we have already passed a point of no return, and that it is now impossible "to save the planet as we know it." "Efforts to stabilise carbon dioxide and temperature are no better than planetary alternative medicine," he wrote. It is perhaps telling that more than a dozen scientists interviewed could only say that they hoped Lovelock was wrong.

None could say -- based on the science -- that they knew he was wrong.


link

[Ben D]

Thank you friend compared2what, for your comments concerning the freedom to be and expression of one's views, the feeling is mutual.

So naturally it follows I acknowledge your position on the site in question, and the following comments are just an expression of my present understanding, and not meant to continue a discussion.

The nature of truth is a very elusive one, and when it comes to the evaluation of the global warming and/or cooling claims emerging from the scientific bodies representing vested interests whose agenda is the subject of speculation rather than known facts on both sides, it is particularly difficult to weed out the inevitable spin and disinformation present, given the vast amount of stuff being disseminated.

Sites like the one in question in this environment do not exist to further understanding of Earth's climate, but act as "right" public relations to what they perceive as "wrong" public relations on the question of global climate change.

True understanding will not come about by applying an either/or dichotomy to climate research but may through a direct non-compromised mind approach.

TU & Rgds.

[Ben D]

Ben D, i linked to Demos site only for and because it quoted important points from the conclusion of the sync.chaos paper that your CNN affiliate left out, namely that its authors accepted the overwhelming evidence that anthropogenic climate change is the bigger problem.

Since you have provided link to full text of paper i take it you support its conclusions. Great, welcome to the reality based community. Maybe we can get back on topic now - Arctic Updates, yes?

That's OK friend wintler2, so long as you believe that Earth climate is only understood by 'your' side and that the other side is wrong, then please proceed as normal for it seems you have nothing more to learn.

But please, I know it's hard for you to conceive that I'm not on other side, do consider the middle path, i.e. the pursuit of truth for its own sake without prejudice and concern for the outcome.

[wintler2]

..But please, I know it's hard for you to conceive that I'm not on other side, do consider the middle path, i.e. the pursuit of truth for its own sake without prejudice and concern for the outcome.

Cool, then pursue the truth in your own reading of paper and offer a summary of its credibility and significance to those you suggest read it, a.k.a rigor.

Your last article like the ones before was coined across RightThink media and used as a springboard for "those crazy scientists/greenies" rants by numerous professional ranters. You post it here with no explanation, summary or criticism, in my view spamming the thread with disinformation. If you truly pursue truth, maybe you could showing your workings.

[Ben D]

..But please, I know it's hard for you to conceive that I'm not on other side, do consider the middle path, i.e. the pursuit of truth for its own sake without prejudice and concern for the outcome.

Cool, then pursue the truth in your own reading of paper and offer a summary of its credibility and significance to those you suggest read it, a.k.a rigor.

Your last article like the ones before was coined across RightThink media and used as a springboard for "those crazy scientists/greenies" rants by numerous professional ranters. You post it here with no explanation, summary or criticism, in my view spamming the thread with disinformation. If you truly pursue truth, maybe you could showing your workings.

You really are an exasperating scallywag wintler, has not anyone told you that before?

Any article I post will be at my discretion, not yours friend wintler, and for your information, IMO all msm is suspect. What is more, I don't do dualistic RightThink/LeftThink dichotomy when I'm assessing the worth of what I'm reading but rather assess its credibility on many factors including intuition, scientific soundness, etc..
However it is not my intention to waste my time explaining anything to you that I already know you will reject, I mean... your position of climate change is unlike the climate itself, its unchangeable

Try to be patient with me and I will do the same for you.

[compared2what?]

So naturally it follows I acknowledge your position on the site in question, and the following comments are just an expression of my present understanding, and not meant to continue a discussion.

Please forgive my delay in writing to thank you for your gracious acknowledgment my position. I have no excuse to offer for it other than that since I didn't really have any intention of continuing the discussion, I was somewhat more remiss in staying on top of the thread than I might otherwise have been.

Now, then. Given the above-quoted, I wouldn't want you to feel in any way obligated to answer me. But as it happens, I find that much to my surprise, I do actually want to ask you something:

When the expression of one's present understanding of a topic isn't meant to continue a discussion, what on God's green earth could the point of writing it up and posting it to a discussion board possibly be?

Best from your baffled correspondent,

c2w

[Ben D]

So naturally it follows I acknowledge your position on the site in question, and the following comments are just an expression of my present understanding, and not meant to continue a discussion.

Please forgive my delay in writing to thank you for your gracious acknowledgment my position. I have no excuse to offer for it other than that since I didn't really have any intention of continuing the discussion, I was somewhat more remiss in staying on top of the thread than I might otherwise have been.

Now, then. Given the above-quoted, I wouldn't want you to feel in any way obligated to answer me. But as it happens, I find that much to my surprise, I do actually want to ask you something:

When the expression of one's present understanding of a topic isn't meant to continue a discussion, what on God's green earth could the point of writing it up and posting it to a discussion board possibly be?

Best from your baffled correspondent,

c2w

Touche c2w, I suppose I must confess.

The self appointed policeman of this thread runs a pretty tight ship and in the post he addressed to me after your first post to me, he asked me to get back on topic of "Arctic Updates", and so I considered it appropriate to respect his request.

Unfortunately it appears I was not sufficiently articulate to do it in a way that was respectful to both of you.

For that I apologize and assure you that I'm delighted to correspond with you.

Respectfully, Bendy.

[compared2what?]

Okey-doke. Although for your acknowledging convenience, my position on your explanation is that the rational grounds for referring to wintler2 as a "self-appointed policeman" are, if anything, even less solid than they are for calling him a secret agent. It's totally within bounds to request that straying posters stay on topic. And there's no reason at all for said straying posters to respond rancorously to that request, assuming that their interest in the topic is legitimate.

And obviously, I am myself not only in breach of topicality-related thread etiquette right now, it's actually getting worse with every word I type. For which I very sincerely apologize to everyone.

I suggest that from now on, unless one of us specifies otherwise, we should both just take it as a given that my position wrt any future unjustified pejorative characterizations of wintler2 by you is that they're groundless on the grounds that they are groundless. and that you graciously acknowledge it. To be my position. Because that way, arctic updates can resume without further interruption and with no significant sacrifice of principle on either side.

Thanks in advance for your consideration, and best,

c2w

[Ben D]

Hi c2w, ok if you insist, here's the sequence,...

I posted to wintler2 re the desmog web site.

You posted to me questioning my characterization of it as sophisticated, and upbraided me for implying secrecy on the part of wintler2.

Wintler2 then posted me explaining the reason he cut and pasted from the desmog web site, and then indicated that he was ready to move on,.. quote " Maybe we can get back on topic now - Arctic Updates, yes?"

My next post was to you, where I acknowledged the positon you were taking about my opinion of the desmog website. Like wintler2, I was also not interested in staying off topic in discussing the desmog organization further, and so my suggesting that while I was prepared to offer you an on topic brief but honest appraisal of my position on the conjecture concerning global climate change, I was not wanting to stay off topic by discussing the issues you raised, and hence the point I made about not wanting to continue that discussion.
Please note friend c2w that not only was there no rancour towards wintler2 concerning his suggestion that we should get back to topic, it was mutual.

However you will note that the momentum of digs and counterdigs continued for a few more posts with a sequence of,..ben d followed by wintler2, followed by ben d. (BTW wintler2, according to my count, you started it so all is even at this point so seriously, maybe we can get back to - Arctic Updates, yes? )

Next c2w posted me concerning your bafflement as to why I posted and yet conveyed to you that I was not particularly interested in an ongoing discussion..

ben d then posted c2w explaining that the reason was that it was in respect to the request from wintler2 that we get back to topic'.

Now c2w has posted this,..

Okey-doke. Although for your acknowledging convenience, my position on your explanation is that the rational grounds for referring to wintler2 as a "self-appointed policeman" are, if anything, even less solid than they are for calling him a secret agent. It's totally within bounds to request that straying posters stay on topic. And there's no reason at all for said straying posters to respond rancorously to that request, assuming that their interest in the topic is legitimate.

And obviously, I am myself not only in breach of topicality-related thread etiquette right now, it's actually getting worse with every word I type. For which I very sincerely apologize to everyone.

I suggest that from now on, unless one of us specifies otherwise, we should both just take it as a given that my position wrt any future unjustified pejorative characterizations of wintler2 by you is that they're groundless on the grounds that they are groundless. and that you graciously acknowledge it. To be my position. Because that way, arctic updates can resume without further interruption and with no significant sacrifice of principle on either side.

Thanks in advance for your consideration, and best,

c2w

You will note that in this post you are implying that I was rancorous towards wintler2 because I consider him out of bounds to request straying posters to stay on topic. This is not the case as should be clear now that some context has been added.

Finally c2w, addressing your concern for my reference to friend wintler2 as a "self appointed policeman who runs a tight ship",. as well as the "..you secret agent, you..".dig, don't read into this more than there is. I mean wintler2 is no angel and gives as good as he takes. However I do not make light of your concerns and so be assured I will try to be more correct wrt to thread etiquette as a result of our exchange.

Respectfully, bendy.

[vigilant]

i'm printing last posts here and there...

BenD.....you are the man...

anyone that thinks global warming is the product of humans overstates their prominence in the universe....how laughable....14000 years ago we did this all again...and always will.........wake up humans....my god...this is an open book test you know? you dumbasses......

[Ben D]

Honored that you dropped by vigilant.

Yes, so true, a thousand years is but a day in the life of Earth, see you around in a couple of weeks,... or maybe sooner
!