[non-ceph]: Global Warming Thread

Oh for frack's sake.

Inuit Fear Granting Threatened Status to Polar Bears.

The Inuit fear that if Washington does declare the bear a threatened species, it will deter U.S. hunters, who spend millions of dollars a year for the right to shoot the animals in the Canadian Arctic.

Environmentalists say global warming is shrinking the sea ice that polar bears use as a platform to hunt seals. The fate of the bears has received widespread media coverage.

Mary Simon, president of the Inuit Tapiriit of Canada group, said green organizations were using polar bears as an excuse to attack the administration of U.S. President George Bush over its position on climate change.

"As Inuit we fundamentally disagree with such tactics ... the polar bear is a very important subsistence, economic, cultural, conservation, management, and rights concern for Inuit in Canada," she said in a statement. (Reuters)
Look, if certain indigenous peoples want to kill a very large mammal now and again to maintain their traditions, and the population of said animal is stable and sustainable, fine. If certain indigenous peoples want to sell hunting rights to American trophy hunters, and the target animal's population numbers are stable and sustainable, well, what can I say, some wealthy American guys really need to have that all-important polar bear rug, preferably in front of a roaring fireplace, with Miss November lying on top of it. If the money actually goes to the Nunavut community, and the Inuit can shake the queasy feeling that they're pimping their heritage, fine. Selling out a species that's in deep trouble when climate change is already having an adverse effect on the local human population (coastal erosion, water rising, etc.) is either remarkably stupid or remarkably cynical. Possibly both.

As for the Nunavut Inuit's need to occasionally hunt and kill a very large animal, their claim that hunting Bowhead Whales is a proud tradition vital to maintaining the tribe's culture seems less defensible when you consider that they've largely forgotten how to do it.

Nunavut Whale-Hunters: Yep, We Suck

Wildlife officials want Nunavut communities to carefully plan their next bowhead whale hunt, wherever it may be.

That's why the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board has authorized just a single kill over the next two years.

"What we were hoping is that if the planning doesn't occur this year, at least they'll have another year to plan for the '98 season," NWMB Chairman Ben Kovic said this week.

Participants in last year's hunt in Repulse Bay, the first since 1979, ran into a lot of problems before they were able to land their whale.

At one point the whale sank after having been shot hundreds of times, but later resurfaced after its body gassed up.

Some Inuit said they were embarrassed by the botched hunt. (DWANE WILKIN, Nunatsiaq News, March 14, 1997)
The logical next step will be to sell whale-hunting licenses to Americans. I'm sure there's someone with a Barrett .50 caliber rifle itching to put some baleen above the fireplace.

Clem
 
Hey, nothing better than a big piece of whale blubber between your cheek and gum.
and, it doesn't cause cancer!
 
Clem;108210 said:
Oh for frack's sake.

Inuit Fear Granting Threatened Status to Polar Bears.


Look, if certain indigenous peoples want to kill a very large mammal now and again to maintain their traditions, and the population of said animal is stable and sustainable, fine. If certain indigenous peoples want to sell hunting rights to American trophy hunters, and the target animal's population numbers are stable and sustainable, well, what can I say, some wealthy American guys really need to have that all-important polar bear rug, preferably in front of a roaring fireplace, with Miss November lying on top of it. If the money actually goes to the Nunavut community, and the Inuit can shake the queasy feeling that they're pimping their heritage, fine. Selling out a species that's in deep trouble when climate change is already having an adverse effect on the local human population (coastal erosion, water rising, etc.) is either remarkably stupid or remarkably cynical. Possibly both.

As for the Nunavut Inuit's need to occasionally hunt and kill a very large animal, their claim that hunting Bowhead Whales is a proud tradition vital to maintaining the tribe's culture seems less defensible when you consider that they've largely forgotten how to do it.

Nunavut Whale-Hunters: Yep, We Suck


The logical next step will be to sell whale-hunting licenses to Americans. I'm sure there's someone with a Barrett .50 caliber rifle itching to put some baleen above the fireplace.

Clem

This is a lot like a video I watched a few days ago, it was filmed in 1996 so I don't know how relevant it is to the current situations, it was Kingdom of The Seahorse. A large part of it was about an island in the Phillipines where seahorses are a very important export because of the Asian market. It is tradition for them to collect large amounts of them, but the numbers were dwindling. A marine biologist went there and had trouble getting the villagers to see her point at first (white devil wanting to steal their gold! :roflmao:), but they eventually started a breeding program and an anti-poaching program. They still harvest a certain number, but the pregnant males are always taken to a contained breeding net so that they can release their babies when the time comes instead of sending the pregnant male to become "Medicine" (pssshhh) in a chinese store. And the program has grown and they were trying to spread it to other islands in the area, as well as starting a kind of scholarship program for one of the villages kids each year.

It was a bit outdated, already. But it really opened my eyes as to how bad the seahorse export problem is. The amount of seahorses killed for the "medicinal" trade alone was insane. Apparently the Asian market gets them by the ton almost daily.
 
Ok, I havent kept up with this thread much (started before I joined, long posts, etc... not able to sit still long enough to read it all :bonk:), and only now just skimmed it, so i dont really know where you are in the conversation right now, but personaly, I dont much believe in "global warming", I believe in climate change. What I mean is, we havent gathered enough data from the earth to make these observations that we are the only reason tempuratures are rising. If you have heard of the 17 year cicada (every 17 years an insect called cicada comes out in a HUGE MASS, and the noise is almost unbearable) well, it kind of goes in waves, how do we know this isn't what happens with the earth tempurature-we dont, we dont have enough data, this whole ice in the artic telling tempuratures from the past works I guess, but it only goes back what 20-30 million years...the earth has been around for BILLIONES of years, how do we know the earths tempurature doesnt fluctuate every 17 billion years. Or look at it this way, in the midst of all this debate about the pollution destroying the ozone layer, a ozone hole above the antartic thats been there for longer than weve had oil or gas is now, at the peak of pollution starting to close (now you dont hear about that do you...see bellow). We can prove the earth is round, clouds are made of water vapor, we revolve around the sun, not the other way around, soil is brown, leaves are green (not really, but for this purpose :wink:), etc. but we cant prove global warming. pollititions (yup... All Gore) are blowing it up to get noticed, NASA actually has tonnes of research papers/studies conducted that say global warming isn't what its made to be, but the handfull that point to global warming as the problem of everything are the only ones you see or hear about. NASA does this to earn funding from the government which they wouldnt get otherwise...sad really.

Im not saying there's no pollution or that we dont need to lead more environmentally friendly life styles, but this whole global warming thing is no where near as bad as it's made to be. I have actually heard people...people in high places too, saying something like the movie Day After Tommorow is possible... NO WHERE NEAR

Not that this really matters, but my dad is a weatherman and a colonel in the air force, so i guess Im kind of influenced by him... actually, it probably does matter, because what I hear from him is the story as it is, not blown up by some crazy, power hungry polition (yes...Al Gore again...)

look at this video, it pretty much sums it up.

http://www.youtube.com/swf/l.swf?vi...efault.jpg&t=OEgsToPDskIQ8IFCIfQ4VJBYoFgnv6Yjhttp://www.youtube.com/swf/l.swf?vi...efault.jpg&t=OEgsToPDskIQ8IFCIfQ4VJBYoFgnv6Yj
 
At the risk of being harsh, that video is a propaganda piece. Admittedly, so is "An Inconvenient Truth." From my limited understanding of climate science, although Al Gore takes some liberties (e.g. the complaint that CO2 is invisible so showing smokestacks venting smoke or steam is technically incorrect) his presentation meshes fairly well with what a large number of climate scientists believe. But really, the main point is that this should not be a popularity contest: public policy on issues like this should be decided by a combination of scientific consensus and risk analysis. There is certainly some uncertainly in exactly what is going on in the field, and some people make some interesting arguments about how to interpret and predict based on the measurements (Freeman Dyson, for example.) However, the uncertainty doesn't necessarily imply that the best course of action is to assume "until I see proof beyond all doubt, we should stay the course." There is relatively undisputed evidence that since the industrial revolution, human activity has had an impact on the atmosphere. Since we have never seen the effect of human activity on the earth like this before, we are in unexplored territory. As it happens, human beings are very happy in the global environment that's existed for the past few million years; there have been plenty of times in the history of the earth where human life wouldn't be possible at all because of the atmospheric makeup.

Just to dissect an element of the video that I think I can safely call out, though: the fact that water vapor is a more important greenhouse gas in the instantaneous effect has almost nothing to do with the argument made. The amount of water vapor in the atmosphere fluctuates on a fundamentally different timescale than CO2, since water tends to do things like fall out of the sky as snow or rain, and be renewed by evaporation. CO2, on the other hand, has a relatively slow half-life. Also, the water vapor cycle has been more-or-less in balance since the last ice age, but a small amount (e.g. 5-10%) change in the greenhouse gas levels from CO2 or water vapor could change that balance, since if the CO2 was enough to raise the ambient temperature, it's possible that this would cause more evaporation, leading to higher water vapor levels in the atmosphere, leading to more greenhouse effect from that, in a snowball effect (also, more dissolved CO2 could be released from the ocean into the atmosphere, and the albedo of the earth could be reduced by melting snow revealing darker material under it.) The video's "alternative explanation" of the greenhouse effect is an even more gross oversimplification than Al Gore's, since it shows 100% of incoming sunlight reflecting, rather than some being absorbed by the ground and oceans, which is misleading.

Certainly, it's a fair argument that we don't fully understand all of the things going on. However, from a "what's a good idea" standpoint, the atmosphere and albedo and vegetation biomass and outgassing of sequestered carbon from fossil fuels as CO2 are causing many of the driving forces to diverge further and further from the way things have been for the entire time that the planet has been well-suited to human life. Since we don't have complete information, it seems to me that the wisest course of action is to avoid straying into unknown territory that has an unknown risk of changing the biosphere in substantial ways, since, really, we're pretty much in the best possible place for our comfort and survival where we are, so any change that happens is likely to be bad news for the human race, and probably most mammals. The silver lining is that cephalopods have proven that they can survive through far more drastic changes in atmospheric oxygen and CO2 levels (and asteroid/comet strikes, and volcanic activity) so perhaps if we screw things up badly enough we'll open up an opportunity for the cephalopods archaeologists of the future to be amused at our peculiar primate technologies and curious artworks. Still, I'd sort of like to err on the side of caution for the immediate future.

As an unrelated criticism, I've never heard of "the heartland institute" as a scientific center, and about half of the talking heads in that seem to have dubious credentials. There's one MIT guy, what, two profs from Alabama and Ottawa, one National Weather Service guy, and a few of people with credentials that sound like "professional expert from the made-up-institute of we-know-how-to-sound-smart." I know a fair number of geologists, atmospheric chemists, environmental engineers, planetary scientists, astronomers, NASA scientists, marine scientists, and so forth, and I don't know any who express the sort of view expressed in the "heartland" video, and quite a few who think that Al Gore's version is oversimplified but gets the big picture close to rights. An exception to this is Freeman Dyson (who I have met briefly, but I doubt he'd remember me) who is somewhat skeptical, but more that people are too negative about things we might be able to do to avert disaster than that we should avoid doing anything. You might argue that I know a bunch of hippie-dippy ivory tower liberal intellectuals, but they're also some of the best and brightest of American science, and the qualified scientists appear to be about 90-99% in agreement with the Al Gore version than the "heartland institute" version.

A few interesting links:

Heartland Institute - SourceWatch
BBC NEWS | Special Reports | 629 | 629 | Climate scepticism: The top 10
http://gristmill.grist.org/skeptics
Edge: HERETICAL THOUGHTS ABOUT SCIENCE AND SOCIETY By Freeman Dyson

(I also recommend Peter Ward's book Out of Thin Air which is only indirectly about the dynamics of atmospheric composition, but which I found very intriguing in its description of the historical dance between oxygen and CO2 levels, temperature, and life on earth.)

and I want to single out this one particularly:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686

because Science is the premiere journal published in the United States ( Nature is published in the UK, and is of similar stature) for representation of the academic consensus of professional scientists on any topic related to scientific inquiry. They don't tend to shy away from legitimate scientific controversy, and they put a great deal of effort into avoiding dishonesty, misrepresentation, and inaccuracy. In studying almost 1000 papers on this topic published in the forums in which real professional scientists stake their reputations and report their lives' work, there were no publications whatsoever that argued against the scientific consensus as defined in that article.

I don't exactly mean this to be an attack: I'm glad that you're thinking for yourself, and I encourage you to learn as much as you can and decide for yourself. I find both the "heartland" video and "An Inconvenient Truth" to be oversimplified, misleading, alarmist, unscientific, and silly, and I think it's pathetic that we're making public policy decisions on the shallow propaganda version of this. And, I know how you feel, since my dad has been involved in the defense industry, and often gets frustrated when reality in that area is misrepresented by snooty academics. I trust and respect my dad, and enjoy having intelligent discussions on what he believes and why, and get irritated when I run into people who make simple-minded arguments that I believe are justified more by knee-jerk political views than objective reality, so emotionally I can very much relate to where you're coming from...

I don't expect you or anyone to automatically agree with what I say, so I hope that this is taken as an attempt to help you discover new information and consider why I might have the viewpoint that I have, and that perhaps I and others who share that have put some effort into having an informed opinion.

:yinyang::read::smile:
 
Come on. We all know global warming doesn't exist. Last week it was 112 here, and now it is snowing in Flagstaff.

Must be a fluke.
 

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