Sunday, March 11, 2007
It's the End of the World as We Know It
The scientist written part of the IPCC report on global warming, as opposed to the bureaucrat written summary which came out earlier this year (sentence first, trial afterwards) is being leaked and part of it is available at Drudge.
Ann Coulter complimented the Warmies on picking a method to hamstring current capitalist commerce which would not be revealed as complete hokum for a hundred years. I join her in the compliment, but I'm a very patient man.
Here is a detail to seize on and watch--the popular predator Polar Bear (the largest land carnivore extant). The report says: By 2050, polar bears will mostly be found in zoos, their habitats gone.
OK, warmies, you're on. I think there are about 30,000 polar bears outside zoos, up from just 5,000 in 1955. But let's use the conservative figures from the IUCN, which says there are about 22,000. 43 years to lose 22,000 bears, that's roughly 500 a year. (We're allowing yearly hunting of 700 a year by non-native hunters and an unknown number by the Inuit et al., but let's just ingnore those figures). I'm not saying that there will be a straight line loss, surely it will accelerate as the sea ice melts (even though sea ice forms and then melts now, through the seasons). But surely, if they are to be gone by 2050, there will have to be some decline in the world polar bear population by 2025 (when I'll be a crabbed 72 and the technological details of our daily lives will be unimaginably different). If the white bear population is steady or growing by that time, the science prognostications will be shown to be bunk, and not just about the bears, but about all of it. In short, being a scientist will be shown not to give precognition to fallable humans and history will not be kind to these scientists, whose opinions apparently are for sale.
Patience anti-warmies.
Ann Coulter complimented the Warmies on picking a method to hamstring current capitalist commerce which would not be revealed as complete hokum for a hundred years. I join her in the compliment, but I'm a very patient man.
Here is a detail to seize on and watch--the popular predator Polar Bear (the largest land carnivore extant). The report says: By 2050, polar bears will mostly be found in zoos, their habitats gone.
OK, warmies, you're on. I think there are about 30,000 polar bears outside zoos, up from just 5,000 in 1955. But let's use the conservative figures from the IUCN, which says there are about 22,000. 43 years to lose 22,000 bears, that's roughly 500 a year. (We're allowing yearly hunting of 700 a year by non-native hunters and an unknown number by the Inuit et al., but let's just ingnore those figures). I'm not saying that there will be a straight line loss, surely it will accelerate as the sea ice melts (even though sea ice forms and then melts now, through the seasons). But surely, if they are to be gone by 2050, there will have to be some decline in the world polar bear population by 2025 (when I'll be a crabbed 72 and the technological details of our daily lives will be unimaginably different). If the white bear population is steady or growing by that time, the science prognostications will be shown to be bunk, and not just about the bears, but about all of it. In short, being a scientist will be shown not to give precognition to fallable humans and history will not be kind to these scientists, whose opinions apparently are for sale.
Patience anti-warmies.
# posted by Roger Fraley @ 9:18 AM 
