Cap'n Bob & the Damsel

Global Warming

The Greening of the Polar Bear

This week, the Department of the Interior caved in to the Greenbats by declaring a thriving species “endangered.”

From Planet Gore:

Polar Bears: More Journalistic Malpractice [Henry Payne]

How do you declare a species endangered when its numbers are increasing?

Once again, my profession — journalism — failed its fundamental duty to report the facts Wednesday as the Interior Department bowed to political pressure from green groups to declare polar bears an threatened species due to global warming. This, despite the fact that bear populations have increased from 5,000–10,000 in the early 1970s to between 20,000 and 25,000 today (during the very period their habitat was allegedly shrinking). This is in part due to concentrated efforts to impose harvesting controls that have allowed this once-overhunted species to recover.

Indeed, Dr. Mitchell Taylor, a bear biologist with the Canadian government, wrote in 2006: “There is no need to panic. Of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct, or even appear to be affected at present.”

polarbearparty.gifGLOBALONEY wrote an excellent article on thriving polar bears in January. Included here is a very entertaining animation of thriving bears I found on Globaloney. Click for full size.

According to new research, the numbers of the giant predator have grown by between 15 and 25 per cent over the last decade.

Some authorities on Arctic wildlife even claim that hunting, and not global arming, has been the real cause of the decrease in polar bear numbers in areas where the species is in decline.

A leading Canadian authority on polar bears, Mitch Taylor, said: “We’re seeing an increase in bears that’s really unprecedented, and in places where we’re seeing a decrease in the population it’s from hunting, not from climate change.”

Mr Taylor estimates that during the past decade, the Canadian polar bear population has increased by 25 per cent – from 12,000 to 15,000 bears.

UPDATE: Iain Murray offers that this is NOT about polar bears.

Quite right. This was nothing to do with the polar bear and everything to do with advancing a ludicrous “alternative energy now” agenda.

It appears that Interior Secretary Dick Kempthorne is listening to whoever beats the drum louder. In the case of the polar bears, science disagrees with the listing, but Kempthorne is concerned about a ‘legacy.’ In an unrelated issue, that of carrying firearms in National Parks, Kempthorne listened to 51 U.S. Senators who recommended a rules change to allow the NPS to comply with local state law on carrying.

This puts Kempthorne in a position to be embraced by greens and gunners alike.

Don’t you just love politicians?

15 May 2008 by Critters Environment Firearms Global Warming Greenbats

Greenbat Paint Job Award

April 2008 was the coldest April in 11 years. April also ranked the 29th coldest since record keeping began 114 years ago.

According to the National Climatic Data Center, the U.S. average temperature for the month was only 51 degrees, which is 1 degree below the average from 1901-2000.

Now that the coldest April over the last 11 years is in the record books, it’s probably safe to say that this fellow’s message might be a bit of overkill.

greenbatmobile.jpgNow would be a good time for this dude to check out these posts on the topic of Global Warming.

  • Earth’s Oceans – A Mesozoic Hot Tub — Scientific Evidence that Atlantic Ocean temperatures may have once reached 107° (42°C) – about 25°F (14°C) higher than ocean temperatures today and warmer than a hot tub.
  • Ultimate Global Warming – SPF 2 Million Won’t Be Enough — The Sun is a star – a main sequence star whose business is to fuse hydrogen atoms into helium atoms. Fusion is a steady but somewhat unstable and potentially violent thermonuclear process.
  • The “O” Zone — Think of the ozone layer as Earth’s sunglasses, protecting life on the surface from the harmful glare of the sun’s strongest ultraviolet rays, which can cause skin cancer and other maladies.
  • Correlating Sunspots to Global Climate — This is a study in two observations made over the last 400 years: observed annual sunspot numbers and derived global temperatures.
  • The Indefensible Hockey Stick — The “hockey stick” (since the shape of the graph resembles one) graph emerged in 1995 and purports to depict average global temperatures over the last 1000 years or so. The basis of this paradigm, however, can be shown to be flawed.
  • Cosmic Rays, Solar Flux and Global Warming — When you consider the context of this galactic radiation effect, the impact of CO2 emissions caused by humanity literally fade away into climatic insignificance.

Remember, we’re not against cleaning up the environment and we’re certainly not against lower fuel prices or curing asthma. We’re not sure why SUVs would exclusively attack children with asthma, but for this modern sandwich-sign wearing doomsayer maybe it’s a foregone conclusion and he is beyond reason.

Just saying . . .

09 May 2008 by Global Warming Greenbats

Colorado State University – Greenbat Award

If you’re not into global warming doom and gloom, you could lose your standing among the best tropical weather climatologists and be cut off by the greenbats at your local liberal university, even though your hurricane forecasts and tropical weather expertise is legendary.

A pioneering expert on hurricane forecasting says he may soon lose funding due to his skepticism about man-made global warming, according to a report in the Houston Chronicle.

Bill GrayDr. William Gray, who once said that pro-global warming scientists are “brainwashing our children,” claims that Colorado State University will no longer promote his yearly North Atlantic hurricane forecasts due to his controversial views.

Gray complained in a memo to the head of Colorado State’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences that “this is obviously a flimsy excuse and seems to me to be a cover for the Department’s capitulation to the desires of some (in their own interest) who want to reign [sic] in my global warming and global warming-hurricane criticisms,” the Chronicle reports.

. . .

Gray contends it’s all a hoax contrived by scientists hungry for research funding, media professionals thirsting for Pulitzer Prizes and foreign powers seeking to create a single world government.

In fact, he says, the warming cycle will soon end, and the Earth will begin a period of temporary cooling.

Via Fox News

29 Apr 2008 by Global Warming Greenbats Science

Outraged

As a veteran, I am outraged by Time Magazine’s desecration of Joe Rosenthal’s famous photograph of the U.S. Marines raising the American Flag on Iwo Jima.

outrageWe never cease to be amazed by the inability of the left to feel shame and its lack of reverence for America and those who defend its freedoms, including the right to be stupid. The cover of the April 21 issue of Time, taking the famous Joe Rosenthal photo of Marines planting our flag on the blood-soaked island of Iwo Jima and replacing our flag with a tree, qualifies for obscenity of the year.

It echoes the greenie theme first advanced by Al Gore in his book Earth In The Balance that the internal combustion engine is the greatest threat in the history of mankind. Gore and Bill Clinton have both said that global warming is ultimately a greater threat than terrorism… This trivializing of the sacrifice of American blood and treasure to defend freedom ignores the fact that in World War II we faced a real enemy with a terrible agenda. The bombs that fell on Pearl Harbor were quite real, not the output of some badly fed computer model.

‘Global warming may or may not be a significant threat to the United States,’ Tim Holbert, a spokesman for the American Veterans Center, [said]: ‘The Japanese Empire on February 1945, however, certainly was, and this photo trivializes the most recognizable moment of one of the bloodiest battles in U.S. history’.”

—Investor’s Business Daily

I call on veterans and others outraged by this to boycott Time-Warner Corporation! If you subscribe to Road Runner, get another high-speed carrier. If you get cable from Time-Warner, it’s time to look into DirecTV, which, by the way, is owned by the parent company of the Fox News Channel. Most of all, never, ever buy another copy of Time.

Hat tip to The Patriot Post.

24 Apr 2008 by Global Warming Media Whacko Politics

Facts? We Don’t Need Facts – We Have Consensus

So say the Greenbats of the world. But, what if the consensus scientists’ theories defy actual physics? What if the CO2 gas in the atmosphere can’t behave in the manner prescribed by the consensus?

Here’s an email I got the other day from my colleague, Rick (highlights are mine):

Bob,

I don’t know if you saw this but it is jaw dropping.

I quote:

It is an interesting point that the heat conductivity of CO2 is only one half of that of nitrogen or oxygen. In a 100 percent CO2 atmosphere a conventional light bulb shines brighter than in a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere due to the lowered heat conductivity of its environment. But this has nothing to do with the supposed CO2 greenhouse effect which refers to trace gas concentrations. Global climatologists claim that the Earth’s natural greenhouse effect keeps the Earth 33 C warmer than it would be without the trace gases in the atmosphere. 80 percent of this warming is attributed to water vapor and 20 percent to the 0.03 volume percent CO2. If such an extreme effect existed, it would show up even in a laboratory experiment involving concentrated CO2 as a heat conductivity anomaly. It would be manifest itself as a new kind of `super insulation’ violating the conventional heat conduction equation. However, for CO2 such anomalous heat transport properties never have been observed.

Rick

http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/007894.html

atmospheric pie graphsImage: Pie charts showing (top) the relative volume of greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere, (middle) the volume of CO2, water vapor and other greenhouse gasses and (bottom) the ratio of human-caused CO2 to natural sources.

From National Center for Policy Analysis: Global Warming Primer (PDF)

CO2 is a naturally occurring greenhouse gas. Humans and other animals emit CO2 into the atmosphere when they exhale, and plants absorb it. CO2 and other trace gases are only 5 percent of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Water vapor makes up the other 95 percent.

Humans contribute about 3.4 percent of annual CO2 emissions. But, small increases in annual CO2 emissions, whether from humans or any other source, can lead to a large CO2 accumulation over time because CO2 molecules can remain in the atmosphere for more than a century.

Humanity is responsible for about one-quarter of one percent of the greenhouse effect.

It is indeed jaw-dropping when you consider that consensus science wants you to believe that atmospheric CO2 – a mere 0.03 percent of the total volume of the atmosphere – is said to elevate global temperature by massively disobeying physical science.

You don’t get to ‘vote’ on how the elements behave. You can’t have a ‘consensus’ on the freezing temperature of water nor any other physical properties, including the heat conduction of CO2.

06 Feb 2008 by Environment Global Warming Greenbats

Extreme Solar Images

NASA’s SOHO Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT) scientific instrument has captured a complete solar cycle in the ultraviolet (extremely short wavelength light waves) spectrum. This remarkable collage demonstrates the extent to which the Sun changes over its cycle. Solar cycles have been documented for several hundred years, but never with so much detailed information as over this past cycle.

solar cycle

Every eleven years, our Sun goes through a solar cycle. A complete solar cycle has now been imaged by the sun-orbiting SOHO spacecraft, celebrating the 12th anniversary of its launch yesterday. A solar cycle is caused by the changing magnetic field of the Sun, and varies from solar maximum, when sunspot, coronal mass ejection, and flare phenomena are most frequent, to solar minimum, when such activity is relatively infrequent. Solar minimums occurred in 1996 and 2007, while the last solar maximum occurred in 2001 Pictured above is a SOHO image of the Sun in extreme ultraviolet light for each year of the last solar cycle, with images picked to illustrate the relative activity of the Sun.

Image, story courtesy SOHO – EIT Consortium, ESA, NASA & Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Please read our previous post about what the Sun is and what it does. Also read about how Solar activity can be correlated with global climate fluctuations. Then please refer to our Global Warming Resources page.

Educate yourselves – don’t trust good-intentioned but misinformed sources, and be wary of political opportunists whose goal is not to save mankind, but to cripple free enterprise and democracy.

03 Dec 2007 by Aerospace Global Warming Rocket Science

Saint Al of the Ecopalypse

gore-finger.jpgMark Steyn offers an excellent summary of the Goreacle in his current syndicated article “Doom if Saint Al Loses Carbs.” Some of the excerpted highlights:

  • Michael Burton, an English High Court judge and apparently a fine film critic, ruled that Al’s Oscar-winner An Inconvenient Truth was prone to “alarmism and exaggeration” and identified nine major factual errors.
  • The so-called scientific consensus of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests rising sea levels across the next century of somewhere between 15cm and 60cm, with about 30cm being most likely. An Inconvenient Truth insouciantly adds a zero to the worst-case scenario.
  • [Gore’s movie] fulfills the same role in the schoolhouses of the guilt-ridden developed world that the Koran does in Pakistani madrassas. Gore’s rise is as remorseless as those sea levels. I assumed Gore’s clammy embrace would do for the environmental movement what his belated endorsement had done for Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential candidacy: kill it stone dead.
  • No matter how you raise the stakes [. . .], Saint Al of the Ecopalypse can raise them higher. Climate change, he says, is the most important moral, ethical, spiritual and political issue humankind has ever faced. Ever. And not just humankind, but alienkind, too. “We are,” warns Gore, “altering the balance of energy between our planet and the rest of the universe“.
  • [T]he average US household consumes 10,656 kilowatt-hours of electricity. In 2006, the Gores wolfed down nearly 221,000kWh. 221,000kWh? What’s he doing in there? As his spokesperson explained it, his high energy usage derives from his brave calls for low energy usage. He’s burning up all that electricity by sending out faxes every couple of minutes urging you wastrels to use less electricity. Insofar as he’s made any contribution to global peace, it’s in persuading large swaths of a narcissistic Western world to busy itself with non-solutions to pseudo-crises to such a distracting degree that al-Qa’ida may wind up imposing the global caliphate without having to fire a shot.

Read the entire article.

15 Oct 2007 by Global Warming Greenbats Media

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