Bear down! – Send an ambulance and a lawyer!
The big green machine has finally successfully lobbied enough FUD to get the thriving polar bear listed as a threatened species. Never mind the fact that the arctic sea ice has melted before in the last 100 years. See the news release from the Department of the Interior here:
http://www.doi.gov/issues/polar_bears.html
Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne announced on May 14, 2008 that he is accepting the recommendation of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dale Hall to list the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The listing is based on the best available science, which shows that loss of sea ice threatens and will likely continue to threaten polar bear habitat.
So what happens if sea ice grows? Let’s see how well that “best available science” holds up. According to the full DOI press release, computer model scenarios figured heavily into the decision.
Now come the lawsuits for everything under the sun that may potentially affect sea ice and those poor bears. Yep, fire up that big lawsuit engine, let’s get ready to ruuummmmble!
(h/t MattN)
Update: The Sierra Club is not happy about this, because the “decision is riddled with loopholes, caveats, and backhanded language that could actually undermine protections for the polar bear and other species”. You just can’t please some people.
Update 2: If you really want to see green stupidity in action, try the Polar Bear Brainwashing Parking game:
http://www.gamesfree.ca/other_games/810/Polar_Bear_Parking.html
Play the game and watch the “education” at the end. Note to intellectually challenged game designers: Penguins don’t inhabit the arctic.
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The Polar Bear ruling was one of the topics on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show tonight. He talks often about enviromental law. Says he’s practiced ESA law for 20 years. (Environmental Site Assessment?)
Anyway, tonight he suggested that industry ought to immediately begin challenging this with absurd suits…like shutting down interstate highway construction by connecting it to CO2 emissions. A caller suggested that Chinese imports could be challenged because of the CO2 China puts in the air.
No nibbling at the edges of this thing. Just dive right into it with the most wild absurd lawsuits that can be dreamed up. Not as an effort to shut down the country. Instead, to shoot down the law.
An example of Hugh’s recent blogging regarding the Polar Bear…
http://hughhewitt.townhall.com/blog/g/74b80ca5-1032-475d-80bc-609df7bc7162
Well if it takes a dammed polar bear to move us away from our dependency on carbon based fuel sources than so be it!
Wether its global warming or staying competitive in a global economy carbon based fuels have got to be replaced with something better!
GISS April temps are available.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:2007.0/to:2008.33/plot/gistemp/from:2007.0/offset:-0.238/to:2008.33/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2007.0/offset:-.146/to:2008.33/plot/uah/from:2007.0/to:2008.33
A quote from D. Keith Mano’s prescient 1973 novel, The Bridge:
“Whereas it has been ascertained irrefutably by the Council’s Emergency Committee on Respiration that the process of breathing has and will continue to destroy and maim innumerable forms of microscopic biological life, we of the Council, convened in full, have decided that man in good conscience can no longer permit this wanton destruction of our fellow creatures, whose right to exist is fully as great as ours. It is therefore decreed that men, in spontaneous free will and contrition, voluntarily accede to the termination of their species. . . It is hoped bretheren, that you will donate your physical bodies to the earth in such a manner that the heinous crimes of murder and pollution committed by our race throughout history may in some small way find redress.”
Fiction… set in 2035… the eco-fascists run the world…
Well, I managed to knock over 4 penguans in one go (on the game), and after many tries, got the parking right.
That game is some very bad science propiganda.
I thought the U.S. was a “secular” state which separated religion from Politics?
“I’m a moderate liberal, but I would like everyone to think about this: What has Bush done to mitigate soot? Answer: More than Clinton ever did.”
First thanks for your brilliant post on the soot issue. Environmentalist rule #1: Hype trumps truth; politics trumps practicality. you cant hype something that’s the fault of China, god forbid we ask them to stop polluting instead of tightening the screws ever harder on ourselves.
The entire Democrat party is today in the hands of Bush-hating extremists now.
The idea that they would give Bush credit for even breathing is unthinkable.
I am sure they will find a way to hate even this sop of a decision as “not enough”
or other nonsense, even though it was what they asked for.
Whenever I begin to think the world has not gone totally insane, Anthony provides absolute proof that I am wrong.
Of the lawyers, by the lawyers, for the lawyers.
How much CO2 do people exhale? Maybe we should ban breathing. At least for those folks who believe CO2 is the cause of all our problems.
Hat tip to another blogger for pointing this out:
http://www.polarbearsinternational.org/beartracker/
“Follow the movements of satellite-collared polar bears on the Beaufort Sea.”
Uh…are they still alive? Because it would appear most of them are floating face-down in the water…
….except for that one down in Phoenix. Maybe he got the memo on the PDO cooling phase and decided to migrate south for the next few decades.
Just for kicks, you can use their map to zoom in on the now-proven-fraudulent three-fingered “warming island” on Greenland. And to think just last year it was predestined to become “an international symbol of the effects of climate change” — until a map from 1957 showed it as an island as well.
Y’all ever see what happens when polar bears and penguins do get together in the wild?
http://www.sillybooks.net/books/kon_and_nok/kon_and_nok.html
A growth in population from 5000 to 23000 is consistent with models as it falls well within the error bars…
Are we witnessing a Romanesque breakdown of society with the ‘green-movement’ orchestrated through ‘so-called’ science?
Is ther “NO” sanity left on this Earth?
Even the Republican Presidential Candidate is buying the to Al Gore’s “Money Maker” B— S—.
JM
Lower than I expected.
http://www.junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/Warming_Look.html#GISTEMP
—————————-
Concerning the bears, it’s high time to pressure the candidates into telling us NOW what steps they intend to take to solve “this problem”. The Interior Dept has spoken, now ask McCain and Obama what actions they intend to implement. Nail them down now so that the American people know what to expect.
SURFACE TEMPERATURES: 2007 vs 2008
Compare May 12 2008 Ocean temps
http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/EPS/SST/climo&hot.html
to May 13 2007 ocean temps:
http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/EPS/SST/data/anomnight.5.13.2007.gif
The Indian, Pacific were much warmer 1 year ago, and the western Atlantic shows a definite cooling trend.
Recall the GISS temp anomalies
March 2008 = +0.60.
March 2007 = +0.60.
Yet compare March 16, 2007 NOAA NESDIS colour map: http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/EPS/SST/data/anomnight.3.16.2007.gif
To March 17, 2008 NOAA NESDIS colour map:
http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/EPS/SST/data/anomnight.3.17.2008.gif
Eyeballing the two, you’d have to say the 2008 map is noticeably cooler than the 2007 map.
Yet, how did Hansen come up with identical temp anomalies?
Granted I’m comparing only SSTs for one day in the middle of the month.
I here that Roy Innis and the Congress on Racial Equality is threatening to sue the DOI for doing this. Well, that’s what I heard from Pual Driessen.
Retired Engineer,
An average human inhales ” air” and exhales up to 900 grams of CO2 per day. With 6.6.billion humans on the planet. This means at least 6 billion Kg a day.
Then you have the animals exhaling CO2 + the Methane producing type.
The maths tell quite a story.
How many chickens does it take to feed the U.S. population in one year? – 10 billion? How many chickens and pigs does it take to feed the 1.4 billion Chinese population per year. The figures are astronomical. How much CO2 do all these animals produce?
$6 a gallon? You’ve seen nothing yet, here in Britain we’ve go £5 a gallon, about $10!
[…] has actually increased from about 5,000 to 12,000 in the 1960s (depending on who you believe), some people suggest that the Department of Interior’s decision is […]
Replacing a cheap fuel with an expensive fuel is the way to save the economy?
Right.
Next you will be telling us that the way to save a drowning man will be to through him an anchor.
If the polar bears are threatened by thinning sea ice it is not due to human caused global warming because there hasn’t been any global warming for at least the last 6 years.
Something else is causing the ice to melt other than CO2 emissions, because CO2 emissions have been increasing these 6 years that the globe has been cooling.
It is not the polar bears that are on thin ice it is those who state that we are warming when we are cooling, and call an increase in polar bear population since the last time we experienced global cooling a decrease worthy of endangered species status.
When you work in the arctic, the only thing that you need to know about polar bears is that you need to be protected from them, and you always want to have a local who is a good shot with you for protection.
I think this could also cut the other way. If in say 5-10 years the Arctic shows no decrease in sea ice then I am sure many companies can show real damage because of this ruling. The climate model is in play as being incorrect and the modelers themselves can be sued.
Well if it takes a dammed polar bear to move us away from our dependency on carbon based fuel sources than so be it!
Wether its global warming or staying competitive in a global economy carbon based fuels have got to be replaced with something better!
Typical AGW religionist. Use lies, pseudoscience, pass stupid laws, whatever, just so long as you promote your AGW propaganda. With the pogies, the ends always justify the means.
“Roger Carr (22:34:54) :
Y’all ever see what happens when polar bears and penguins do get together in the wild?”
I was just wondering that myself. Given the decline in NH ice and the increase in SH ice, it seems obvious to me that the Feds should move a genetically representative group of polar bears to Antarctica. Surely the endangered status trumps the UN’s limits on environmental impact in Antarctica.
How many penguins could a PB eat in a day? Sorry – I can’t figure out how to make it sound as cute as the woodchuck tongue-twister.