Killing Polar Bears With Carbon Dioxide?
From the AP news article, Polar Bears are listed on the endangered Species List. For all of you who are about to sigh with relief, lets discuss why this is a bad decision.
Just because they show you a picture of a Polar Bear Cub stranded on a floating sheet of ice doesn’t mean they are endangered. After all Polar Bears have been tracked swimming up to 62 miles continuously.
They show you those pictures to get you to stop thinking with the left side of your brain that handles logically thinking, and to engage the right side of your brain that does all the emotional thinking.
This is important because it’s the first time that the Endangered Species Act has been used to protect a species threatened by the impacts of global warming. This is a very dangerous president to set because there is concern that this decision could be used to regulate carbon dioxide in the future.
There is studies from the National Center for Policy Analysis, published in “Environment News” in 2007 that shows polar Bear population have risen since the 1970s from 5,000 to about 25,000 at present.
Dr. Mitchell Taylor, Polar Bear Biologist, says there is no need to worry that 11 out of the 13 populations of polar bears are thriving in the arctic and that slightly warming conditions benefits the bears by providing a better habit to find food.
And the Climate Science: Climate Change and Its Impacts study found that wind patterns have more of an effect of the habit then global warming.
So then why all the hype about polar bears going extinct. The US placing them on the Endangered Species List seems to contradict these stories here and here and here and here and here
And why is the US government setting policy instead of Biologist and Scientist?
By placing the Polar Bear on the Endangered Species List, Government now how has action to do 2 things. 1 regulate Carbon dioxide which could lead to things like carbon taxes. 2 prevents the US from drilling for oil in the arctic, which keeps gas prices high.
So the question has to be asked, who benefits more from Polar Bears being endangered: The Polars Bears or the Government?
I think the answer to your final question rests in this link: http://thinkcreatedesign.wordpress.com/2008/05/09/how-would-you-like-to-make-1300-a-second/
Look at what constricting the supply of oil has done to profits of oil companies. Why wouldn’t oil be behind the green movement? It makes their commodity have more demand which translates to high prices and higher profit margins. If they can make oil as scace as diamonds, well just look at how well that has worked out for the diamond industry and De Beers.
Here is another reason you might find interesting located at this site I just found. http://green-agenda.com/index.html
You might also like this: http://www.charlotte.com/409/story/617920.html
Also, I just saw a show on the History channel about global cooling and how devastating global cooling would be to crop production and how it was all caused by CO2 output from humans. It seems they are hedging their bets so that no matter what happens to the global climate, it’s all our fault.
Good links
heres a video that was interesting, concerning the real motive behind environmentalism. It’s nothing flshy but full of good info.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6961705772054602221&hl=en
Here’s my take on the case of polar bears. Below is an article published in a local community paper here in Davao City, Philippines.
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Climate Change: Barking up the wrong tree
In the 2007 synthesis report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a scientific body created by World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and by the United Nation Environment Programme (UNEP), it declared that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal.” The indicators are crystal clear: “increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global average sea level.”
According to the doomsayers, climate change, if unmitigated, will have irreversible consequences, one of which is the eventual demise of the polar bears living in the Arctic region. Perhaps this was effectively shown in Al Gore’s award-winning documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth. The message was made more dramatic by showing a hapless polar bear struggling to hold on to the last remaining piece of ice, which is slowly shrinking, thanks to global warming.
The plight of polar bears is, of course, remote to most of us Filipinos because there are no polar bears living in the Philippines and thus we feel no certain affinity to them, in the same manner that we have for pawikan, Philippine Eagle, and other endemic species in the Philippines. But An Inconvenient Truth has a powerful way of getting the message across different nationalities. It is no surprise, therefore, to hear people, who have presumably not seen a polar bear in person, urging the government to act swiftly and make drastic measures.
But the purported extinction of polar bears because of global warming is in fact exaggerated. According to Bjørn Lomborg, head of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, “over the past 40 years—while temperatures have risen—the global polar bear population has increased from 5,000 to 25,000.”
Dr. Perry S. Ong of UP’s Institute of Biology, in his lecture “Anthropogenic Global Warming: Beyond the Hype, Doing the Right Thing for the Right Reason,” also disputed the claim that polar bears are dying because of global warming.
Are we, then, barking up the wrong tree when we are urging the government to cut CO2 emissions in order to save the polar bears, and by extension, the rest who will be affected by global warming?
To Lomborg, yes. It’s because global warming isn’t the main culprit why polar bears are dying, but rather it’s wanton hunting. “Campaigners and the media claim that we should cut our CO2 emissions to save the polar bear,” Lomborg said. “Well, then, let’s do the math. Let’s imagine that every country in the world—including the United States and Australia—were to sign the Kyoto Protocol and cut its CO2 emissions for the rest of this century. Looking at the best-studied polar bear population of 1,000 bears, in the West Hudson Bay, how many polar bears would we save in a year? Ten? Twenty? A hundred? Actually, we would save less than one-tenth of a polar bear.”
The most effective way of saving the polar bears, according to Lomborg, is to ban hunting them. “Each year, 49 bears are shot in the West Hudson Bay alone. So why don’t we stop killing 49 bears a year before we commit trillions of dollars to do hundreds of times less good?”
The case of the polar bears, which have become the “poster children of global warming,” is just one of the many “one-sided warnings” that are constantly recited by several people—environmentalists, politician-lawmakers, etc. It is also a manifestation of how our panic about climate change and its impact, as Lomborg said, “does distort the lens through which we see the big picture.”
Thus, the goal in bringing up Dr. Perry S. Ong’s and Bjørn Lomborg’s ideas is to ensure that two sides of the story are heard. Things need to be placed in their proper perspectives lest we lose sight of the forest for the trees.