Thursday, July 09, 2009

Among the reasons the globular warmering weenies should not be trusted

is their insistence that 'The Science Is Settled', which they try to prove by keeping scientists who disagree from speaking.
Dr Mitchell Taylor has been researching the status and management of polar bears in Canada and around the Arctic Circle for 30 years, as both an academic and a government employee. More than once since 2006 he has made headlines by insisting that polar bear numbers, far from decreasing, are much higher than they were 30 years ago. Of the 19 different bear populations, almost all are increasing or at optimum levels, only two have for local reasons modestly declined.

Dr Taylor agrees that the Arctic has been warming over the last 30 years. But he ascribes this not to rising levels of CO2 – as is dictated by the computer models of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and believed by his PBSG colleagues – but to currents bringing warm water into the Arctic from the Pacific and the effect of winds blowing in from the Bering Sea.
...
Dr Taylor had obtained funding to attend this week's meeting of the PBSG, but this was voted down by its members because of his views on global warming. The chairman, Dr Andy Derocher, a former university pupil of Dr Taylor's, frankly explained in an email (which I was not sent by Dr Taylor) that his rejection had nothing to do with his undoubted expertise on polar bears: "it was the position you've taken on global warming that brought opposition".

Dr Taylor was told that his views running "counter to human-induced climate change are extremely unhelpful". His signing of the Manhattan Declaration – a statement by 500 scientists that the causes of climate change are not CO2 but natural, such as changes in the radiation of the sun and ocean currents – was "inconsistent with the position taken by the PBSG"
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This is what 'science by concensus' gets you: "You may be an expert, but you don't agree with what we want to push so we'll shut you up if we can."
So, as the great Copenhagen bandwagon rolls on, stand by this week for reports along the lines of "scientists say polar bears are threatened with extinction by vanishing Arctic ice". But also check out Anthony Watt's Watts Up With That website for the latest news of what is actually happening in the Arctic. The average temperature at midsummer is still below zero, the latest date that this has happened in 50 years of record-keeping. After last year's recovery from its September 2007 low, this year's ice melt is likely to be substantially less than for some time. The bears are doing fine.


Thanks to Sondra for the info

1 comment:

Marja said...

I have studied geology. When the talk about global warming started, my first reaction was pretty much 'so?', the lessons about Holocene Climatic Optimum being still fresh in my mind. So if it used to be a lot warmer in the Arctic, why should we start panicking from the news that it seems to be getting warmer there again? Of course the global warming alarmists have sort of explained that part away (back then the warming was local, now it's global), but there is still the fact that the climate has never been frozen on one setting, it keeps changing, with or without human help. So wouldn't it be smarter to start figuring out what to do when it changes, rather than try to keep it the way it has recently been, since sooner or later it will change anyway?