Gallery: A final warning from the Arctic
WHEN I was a postdoc, I was often short of money and used to earn a little extra cash by telling fortunes using a pack of 15th-century tarot cards. Like other practitioners, I was always praying that one card would not appear. It shows a grinning skeleton carrying a giant scythe standing above a field littered with severed heads. It is card number 13, Death, and few customers reward you generously after they encounter it.
Although I know the card well, I was still surprised when an image of it popped into my mind out on the Arctic seas, in the middle of a large field of broken ice floes some 1200 kilometres from the North Pole. I was in a ship that was cruising slowly off the long, low, snow-streaked island of Svenskeøya on the eastern side of Svalbard, researching a book about the Arctic.
In the far distance, a female polar bear was watching us. It was a mark of her great self-confidence that she immediately decided that our 100-metre-long ship might be worth hunting. She intercepted us quickly and tried to climb on board.
The side of the ship proved a little too high, so after half an hour of nibbling the ship's bow and scratching its sides, she tried a different strategy. She lay down on the edge of a nearby ice floe, gave a long yawn, folded her paws under her chin and apparently fell asleep. There was just something suspicious about her cocked ears.
Patient "still hunting" at the edge of an ice floe is the polar bear's number one technique for catching seals. A bear may sit or stand like this for an hour or more, utterly still but alert, until a seal surfaces for air. Then there is a flurry of bloody action. Knowing this, I was not much inclined to climb down onto the ice to take a close-up photograph, beautiful though she was.
Not long ago, tourists on ships passing through this region would amuse themselves by shooting polar bears. But since the 1970s, the Norwegian government has been protecting bears here with such seriousness that locals joke: "You are better off shooting a man than a bear - the authorities will investigate you less thoroughly."
That security no doubt helped give this female the swagger to hunt a large ship. Even so, she eventually grew bored, stood up and strolled off out to sea across a vast patchwork of broken ice floes, some not much bigger than herself. Her exit left me feeling sad. I already knew from the work of the US Geological Survey (USGS) that her grand-cubs may well be the last polar bears to live here. In 2008, the USGS combined models of the future state of the Arctic ice with what was known about the life of bears. Polar bears are utterly dependent on ice as a platform to hunt seals. As the Arctic summer ice disappears, the hunting period is growing shorter and breeding success is falling. Sometimes these days there is too much water to swim back to land and bears drown.
The bleak conclusion of one USGS model was "extirpation by 2050" for the bears of Svalbard. A few areas did better, but only in the frozen channels among the northerly Canadian islands might bears survive as rulers of the ice until the end of the century. These are grim forecasts but they are also conservative because they are based on models that aren't keeping up with the terrible speed of the ice's collapse.
In the far north, the biggest and fastest change to our planet ever caused by human activity is under way. As the Earth warms, more and more of the frozen Arctic seas are melting away. Each winter, the ice grows until it covers an area more than one and a half times as great as the US. In summer, that ice used to melt to half the winter area. Now, after a catastrophic collapse in 2007, close to two-thirds of the ice is vanishing. Compared with a decade earlier, the Arctic is losing an extra area of ice each summer six times as large as California. Estimates of when the ice will completely disappear each summer now range from 2013 to 2050.
Other charismatic Arctic beasts will also struggle. After the bear, the narwhal is most at risk. Off the coast of northern Greenland in 2008 I had the good fortune to see narwhal surface among the ice. For a brief moment, three improbably long spiral horns broke through the water and waved above the sea like magic wands. One animal twisted around and, for a second, his grey, wet body glistened in the low sunlight. Then all three dived and were gone.
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Have your say
"... telling fortunes using a pack of 15th-century tarot cards... I was always praying that one card would not appear... It is card number 13, Death". Well, why didn't you take it out of the pack in advance then?
As for the polar bears, roll on "extirpation by 2050" for these vicious and dangerous nuisances.
Well Thomas it's not surprising given your sense of ethical behaviour that you would condem the polar bears to death.
Nor is it an surprise that Frank would condemn the species that will result in the arctic as a consequence of our actions in the next tens of thousands of years to non-existance.
Like many self-described environmentalists he longs for an Earth that is forever static; he wants to entrench polar bears for the next billion years to the detriment of countless other species that will replace them; even though they only came into existance a mere 100 000-250 000 years ago from some trapped brown bears.
You're wrong. Environmentalists, self-described or other, long for an Earth that has a rich healthy biosphere, which is absolutely vital to our survival in large numbers (billions) as well. Yourself included. That has nothing to do with something static, which environmentalists, I would imagine, know fairly well.
Of that ecosystem polar bear is a part as well. And would you please not start about relative importance of polar bear vs. some other animal.. or take that somewhere else.
On that track, I guess your comment about "detriment of other species" is meant as sarcasm and a (bad) joke. Or do you truly value your imaginary "other species" maybe coming up in a million years, over a real existing species - one that has evolved over your mere 100,000-250,000 years to fill its place perfectly (until we mess up the place)?
Natural species population changes are ok because it _maintains_ balance. Extinction by human activity is _messing up_ the balance.
Saying the latter is ok because former is, seems rather bizarre logic and lack of thought to me. Not to mention that extermination of parts of ecosystem we depend on ourselves is just plain suicidal. It has to stop somewhere. Oh - but it's ok, because "there will be countless species to replace" ... US. Yeah right. Commit suicide on your own, don't pull others into it.
And Soylent wants to make the earth an ugly smoky inner city neighborhood, with squabbling trillions shopping at walmarts and watching pathetic soaps all day.
What did we get when occultists took over the world? Nazi Germany. Another political organization that practices the occult? The Ku Klux Klan. Someone should comission a study to see why this type of mentality is attracted to the occult. A sense of control over life and death, of who should live and who should die, may be one of the components of this twisted mindset.
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The people to be scared of are the ones who believe in fairy tales. Like the fairy tale that there is no anthropogenic climate change. People who think some rumour on the internet is a better source of information than the overwhelming consensus of scientific opinion (and don't start repeating the lie there isn't a consensus, check your facts). People who would rather follow knee-jerk reactions than take the trouble to use their brains, hand in hand with the ones who would happily sell out their grandchildren's future for a fast buck. The climate denialists are the ones whose mindset is really twisted.
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When looking at the CO2 'hockey stick' chart, as with the loss of glacial ice and Greenland ice, in comparison to historical CO2 changes triggering temperature increases via whatever means (methane release, crustal expansions, etc), am I the only one willing to see and say that we are heading for Venus II, not Paradise Earth? If that is what the data shows, then say so. Whenever scientists try to moderate their views to avoid panic, they invevitably end up having to come up with bigger solutions to the panic than the problem. Now, we may be too late for any solution, but let's go through it with honesty and dignity.
Dont worry about it Dan, you are looking at a very old and long since discredited graph. Global temps havent gone up for 11 years and 2008 saw a one off drop that wiped out nearly all of the increase in the last 100 years. The polar bears will be just fine.
(long URL - click here)
http://www.john-daly.com/hockey/hockey.htm
Or not:
(long URL - click here)
There are those who still desperately cling on to the hockey stick graph because it looks good.
The basis for still using it is 'everyone knows temperature have shot up lately..right? so the graph must be about true' end of well reasoned argument.
Finally sensible people.
"Finally sensible people".
Where? I don't see any.
Stastical evidence easily demonstrates the "hockey-stick" rise in average global temperatures, again and again. Seven out of the last dozen years have experienced RECORD high temperatures. Glaciers and ice caps at both poles have experienced unprecedented rates of melting. The measured amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has been documented to have risen by nearly 200% over the last several generations. That extra CO2 has been shown to be the product of human activity. But there's no rise in global temperature, and even if there was, no discernable correlation to be aduced between any of these observations.
Isn't that right?
Yeah. Right.
To those who obnoxiously keep inviting others to commit suicide because they dismiss the notion that human overpopulation is the root cause of nearly every environmental problem we confront, and that the planet can "easily" sustain nearly 7 billion people (and more), listen carefully: NOBODY ever says that anybody ought to cut their lives short. That is a bald-faced LIE, a practice you guys seem to have become quite familiar with, so much so it's hard to imagine that you actually notice doing it.
But people DO die natural deaths all the time, you know: it's known as the "death rate". Perhaps you have heard of it but would prefer to deny that too.
SENSIBLE people concerned with overpopulation already know how it may be reduced to sane levels, and it is really quite simple: reducing the birth rate. That can be done with the use of something else called "birth control".
Okay? Does that much make any sense to you now? Or do you imagine that EVERY sexual relationship MUST result in a pregnancy?
If we can reduce our numbers down to around a 10th of its currently obscene levels, the Earth can continue to sustain our growing civilization and we can continue on with the important business of living prosperous lives and explore the universe and our living world indefinitely without wrecking it and our neighbors.
Is that really so much to ask?
The thing is this: there are people who ARE concernbed about overpopulation and what it is doing to our environment. Those ARE "sensible people" and, believe it or not, they would rather live their lives in relative comfort and in a world where some semblance of relatively natural wilderness and wildlife remains intact.
Consider this fact: nowhere in the fossil record that stretches back to the Cambrian is there ANY evidence for any single macroscopic terrestrial animal of a single species of a size comparable to that of the average human being ever come close to achieving a global population of 7 billion individuals AT ANY GIVEN INSTANT. If you really believe the Earth can sustain any such population, surely you must think the earth had done so frequewntly over the last several hundred million years. We've risen from only a few hundred million world-wide to nearly 35 TIMES that number (and still counting) in only a matter of several centuries. Care to look again at your cherished denialist beliefs which you claim is so much better at reflecting the data?
" The basis for still using it is 'everyone knows temperature have shot up lately..right? so the graph must be about true' "
No, the basis is EVIDENCE. You know, that stuff that comes from the real world, that those nasty scientists go on about. The basis for your "polar bears will be fine" argument is NOTHING AT ALL. Please finally learn the difference between these two concepts.
"There are those who still desperately cling on to the hockey satick graph because it looks good." -Tony.
But which one?. There's soooo many now.
You are mixing up 2 hockey charts. The CO2 hockey chart is no matter of discussion at all. The average temperature chart maybe. The interesting question is the correlation between these. Maybe have a look at the Vostok ice core data and then start to think.
Venus II, hopefully not, though. In earths history, there were much higher CO2 levels without a runaway greenhouse effect. But the UK citizens would mostly need to evolve into marine mammals ;-)
Question for you...What happens when you pull backwards on the control stick of an aircraft.
Hint, it's got something to do with a zero in the right hand side of the S-plane.
The answer is of course...the aircraft initially looses altitude and then starts lifting.
The whole point of this is to demonstrate that applying a stimulus to a system can result in the opposite action occurring. For example, increasing CO2 in the atmosphere may actually trigger a brief period of cooling.
Climate models just require a little more information to account for the observed temperature drop.
Personally, it would would like to see a plot of energy retained by the Earth (most probably increasing in line with CO2) but alas, this can only be measured through secondary measurements like temperature etc.
Maybe the temperature drop is a result of a delay/lag in the melting of ice (it is quite a good insulator), the drop resulting from the increasing amount of energy being used to change state.
Actually, polar bear populations are growing strongly. Geological records show they do best in warm periods WHEN THERE'S MORE FOOD! DUH!
There isn't a single assertion of the Warming Alarmists that is valid or truthful.
Dan C, please make a note to yourself that the hockey stick is -forever- broken. Ask Briffa or Mann, if you can find either of them.
If the author has cheated customers using tarot cards in order to pay his school fees, it is possible now that he is cheating the readers using his new academic title in order to pay his mortgage.
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