By Bill Steigerwald
“Junior gets brainwashed”
Of all the animals the Inuit traditionally hunted, Nanuk, the polar bear, was the most prized. Native hunters considered Nanuk to be wise, powerful, and “almost a man.” Some called the bear “the great lonely roamer.” Many tribes told legends of strange polar-bear men that lived in igloos. These bears walked upright, just like men, and were able to talk. Natives believed they shed their skins in the privacy of their homes.
– Polar Bears International
TASIILAQ, EAST GREENLAND
“Guess what I learned today?” Junior asked as he came running in from school.
“I can’t imagine,” Grandpa mumbled.
“Shush, Dad,” said Mother. “What did you learn, Junior?”
“I learned all about ‘global melting,’ ” Junior began breathlessly. “The whole world is getting hotter because humans drive too many cars. The sea ice is going to go away forever and — ”
“Whoa!” interrupted Grandpa. “Who taught you that stuff? Rosie O’Donnell?”
“No,” said Junior. “Principal Hansen. She came to homeroom today. Her big computer says Earth is getting hotter and hotter and Greenland is melting really, really fast. All the ice will be gone when I get as old as you.”
“That’s preposterous,” Grandpa said.
“Principal Hansen said the oceans will get taller and taller,” Junior said with a worried look on his face. “Principal Hansen said polar bears and lots of other animals will get ‘stinkt if humans keep burning stuff like coal. It’s really scary, Grandpa.”
“Principal Hansen’s even crazier than Al Gore,” Grandpa said to Mother so Junior couldn’t hear. “Didn’t I tell you that boy should have been home-schooled?”
Later that same night, after midnight, Grandpa was at his desk sending his usual round of disparaging e-mails to the politicians in Washington when Junior’s cry pierced the stillness.
“Grandpa!” Junior wailed. “Help me. I’m burning!”
Grandpa and Mother raced to Junior’s bedside. Junior was crying in his sleep. “Help me, Grandpa,” he pleaded mournfully. “I’m too young to melt.”
“Junior, wake up,” Grandpa said, shaking him. “You’re dreaming.”
Junior’s eyes popped open. “Grandpa! Mother! The ice was all gone! We were stuck on a tiny iceberg. The ocean was boiling!”
“It was just a silly nightmare, Junior,” soothed Mother. “The ice isn’t melting. See?” she said, patting the rock-hard wall of their cave.
Grandpa was fuming. He gritted his big teeth and looked Junior straight in his teary eyes.
“Boy,” he said firmly, “I’m going to tell you something I want you to remember for the rest of your life. We are polar bears. We are the largest land carnivores on Earth. We are the species ursus maritimus – ‘bears of the sea.’ We can swim 200 miles. We can walk 100 miles a day.
“We learned how to live on this frozen wasteland at the top of the world thousands of years before humans discovered fire. There are 25,000 of us alive today – twice as many as 50 years ago. We are not going to become extinct – no matter what Principal Hansen and her computers say. Now go to sleep – and no more silly nightmares.”
“That was no nightmare,” Grandpa whispered angrily to Mother. “That boy’s being brainwashed by a bunch of kooks.”
“That’s all the schools teach,” said Mother. “It’s like a new religion. Every cub I know thinks the ice will be gone before they grow up. All the mothers are complaining.”
Grandpa was fuming. “Polar bears having nightmares,” he snarled. “That’s pathetic. It’s time somebody stood up to lunatics like Hansen and their doomsday stories.”
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Oh, on a side note. I have a 6 year old daughter and I pity the poor first fool that tries to indoctrinate her at school !!!
Robuk (03:28:46) :
(NO jones was aware that the only data set that mattered to the IPCC was his and if that were to be proven fraudulent his carreer would be finished, its nothing to do with confidentiality agreements)
Jones’ career isn’t really finished, it has just reached its tipping point.
Ferdinand Engelbeen (05:47:14) :
her colleagues traced a polar bear, swimming 300 miles (500 km) from the sea ice to the mainland… Not a big problem for it.
Do you really believe this?
swimming at 6km/hour [4mph] (Not a bad speed for a fur ball) this will take the bear 300/3.73 hours = 80 hours = 3.4 days continuous swimming at max speed (can bears sleep whilst swimming?)
If it managed this distance it has to have used most of its energy reserves and be near starvation. A swim of desperation not migration
Bear with reading the whole thing. Its worth it.
Not cute.
Actually, if you are going to appropriate indigenous culture, you should do so in the language spoken – which in this case is Inuktitut. Otherwise, in Greenland, most Inuit also speak Danish. English is increasingly spoken by the younger generation, but not by those over 50. And if people call a government official outside of Nuuk – they call Copenhagen – not Washington – since Greenland, Kalaallit Nunaat, is a autonomous region of Denmark.
Rather than putting words into the mouths of indigenous peoples – a rather impolitic thing to do – why not have someone who is Inuit do the speaking? For example, Kuupik Kleist, the Greenlandic Prime Minister, who is leader of the Inuit Ataqatigiit Party which won the 2009 elections.
“For Greenland climate change also offer new opportunities in terms of tapping the natural wealth of our country. Less ice means easier access to the sustainable harvesting of oil, gas and minerals. The ice-melt will also provide huge hydro-power resources, giving us a unique opportunity to establish energy-intensive industries based on clean, renewable energy. All of which will be vital in securing our economic self-sufficiency.”
“Climate change is a very real threat for traditional hunting – especially of marine mammals that are so important for our food security and nutritional well-being. Hunters, on both the East coast and in the North, report of unsafe sea ice and changes in animal populations, making it ever more difficult to hunt. But climate change also presents new exciting prospects. Agriculture in South Greenland is one such example. Warmer and longer summers enable farmers to cultivate more land, harvest better yields and introduce new types of crop.”
http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:lLPxnhGIayUJ:uk.nanoq.gl/Emner/News/News_from_Government/2009/12/speech_by_kuupik.aspx+%22kuupik+kleist%22%22global+warming%22&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a
So Greenland’s elected leader sees both opportunities and hardships due to global warming – a considerably more nuanced position. And one that does not appropriate traditional culture for political ends.
I have a little nightmare of my own. Several months ago I was in the Home Depot and a father and daughter were buying light bulbs. The little girl, maybe 8 or 9, turned to the dad and said buy these (pointing to CF bulbs) it will save the trees. The dad replied ‘I don’t like those.’ The girls nagged some more. When I had heard all I could stand I butted in. I turned to the young girl and said, ‘those bulbs have poison in them. Heavy metal, Mercury.’ The girls looked at me as if I had crushed her dreams. I didn’t stop. I then picked up a package and flipped it over, ‘See look at this big warning label, Contains Mercury. If this gets in your brain it doesn’t come out. It stays in your fatty tissue forever. It will eat at your brain like a virus. If this gets in the water, everyone gets it.’ The girl stood there dumb founded. I popped her bubble. The dad is grinning from ear to ear. He leaned over to me and whispered ‘Thanks.’ I then said all you have to have is the truth and the truth is more important than someone’s silly notion of global warming.
Thumbnail (20:49:09), here is a clearer graph from the same IMAGES folder as your second link.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.anom.jpg
Go to http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/ to see many more images they have available.
John M Reynolds
“Mike (07:27:21) :
[…] The little girl, maybe 8 or 9, turned to the dad and said buy these (pointing to CF bulbs) it will save the trees. […]”
You could just as well have said “It doesn’t cause enough CO2 emissions. The trees would become very hungry.”. (Which is way oversimplified. But trees do eat that.)
John Egan (06:50:45) :
Do you also think Polar Bears really talk?
I remember an ABC radio news report from a Greenpeace trip to the Arctic where they were ~ “surpised to find so much open water.” They also claimed a Polar Bear passed by right next to them as they camped on ice “as though to say, ‘thank you’.”
Anyone believing this kind of claim’s interpretation needs to get serious, at least for once in their life. They might even find that they prefer it.
And this little story is better than AGW hype? You may have trumped the “hide the decline” trick. For shame.
Climate change activists don’t like Polar Bears!
Hope you enjoy this:
tfp formerly bill (06:38:44) :
That polar bears could swim long distances, was known already, and as the message after mine told, they can do 75-100 km a day. Nowadays several of them are tagged (a quite dangerous task, where polar bears are shot asleep, but may be faster awake than expected).
But there are more stories like the one I told. Here one of a bear swimming from Greenland to Iceland (some 200 miles/320 km shortest distance) or even from the more distant polar ice:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2028001/posts
I suppose that the 500 km one is an exception, as most polar bears don’t wait that long to swim back to the mainland when the ice is melting, but some stay on the ice all summer, going northwards together with the receding ice and the fish/seals which follow the ice edge. And I am sure that this will cost them a lot of their fat reserves, which are hardly compensated with berries on the mainland, or by sleeping to reduce energy use…
It seems that the main problem for polar bears for the moment is that there are too many for the number of seals available, and that the shorter hunt season is a problem too. But they survived the previous interglaciation with average North Slope temperatures of 5 C higher than today and no sea ice in summer at all…
Mike (07:27:21) :
I’m afraid you lied to the child, especially if you live in the coal powered USA
Your standard filament bulb causes the release of 5.8mg of mecury into the environment
a CFL releases 1 to 5mg Hg and causes to be released 1.2mg Hg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mercury_emissions_by_light_source_EPA_2008.svg
And then Grandpa bear at Little bear.
I can’t find any “Endangered Species” list that includes polar bears. We do know that as the earth’s temperature has risen, polar bear population has increased. So the evidence suggests that if something is ailing the polar bears, global warming is the cure.
In San Francisco Bay Area, the ‘Air Management Quality Board’ made Christmas Day
a ‘Spare The Air Day’ although there was plenty of blue sky. They just did not want
families to have word burning fireplace fires. There was very little haze but the KCBS
news station was happy to tout this outrage.
I’ve decided to call this new ideology ‘Ecoism.’ Rather than dredge up some old ‘ism’
from the dustbin of history and have people become outraged.
The perpetrators and cult believers can be called ‘ecotists.’
I wish some group could file a lawsuit to have the air quality board produce the reasoning and math behind this nonsense.
Happy New Year!
tfp formerly bill (11:57:57) :
Can you give me another reference please? Wikipedia has become somewhat discredited of late, especially in matters relating to the climate.
tfp formerly bill (11:57:57) :
Mike (07:27:21) :
I’m afraid you lied to the child, especially if you live in the coal powered USA
Your standard filament bulb causes the release of 5.8mg of mecury into the environment
a CFL releases 1 to 5mg Hg and causes to be released 1.2mg Hg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mercury_emissions_by_light_source_EPA_2008
Anytime you want the pure, unembellished facts, just go Wikipedia, especially if the topic is something controversial like global warming. NPOV rules at Wiki!
/sarc off
Even if the children are being brainwashed about AGW (and I don’t know either way on that), children have a way of growing up. And finding their own truth. Testing authority – or rejecting it.
Enough of them will soon find that they have been lied to, much as my generation was lied to by our US government in the 1960’s. The results then were (almost) revolutionary. It should be fun to watch what the current group of teens and 20-somethings do as they find they’ve been lied to. They have the internet with which to communicate. All we had was tv, our songs, and “happenings.”
Below are some questions that teens and 20-somethings should be asked to get them thinking:
— When CO2 was much higher in the past compared to today, why did ice ages occur? Why didn’t the earth have hotter summers and melting polar ice caps with much higher CO2?
— What caused the ice ages to end, was it CO2?
— How did the recently-discovered ancient hunter get beneath a glacier in the Alps, especially since he was mortally wounded with an arrow? Did he dig a hole through the glacier to die under there?
— Since any gas (like CO2) absorbs radiation energy (like heat from the earth) such that each doubling of the gas absorbs less and less than the previous amount, why should anyone be concerned about an increase from 380 ppm to 760 ppm (a doubling)?
— The Roman warm period, and the Medieval warm period were both much warmer than today, so how did Polar bears survive those warm periods? PETA and WWF were not around back then.
— Why is the sea level decreasing off the coast of California?
— Why are sunspots so very critical to earth’s average climate? Why were there so few sunspots during both the recent cold events (Maunder and Dalton)? Why were there so many sunspots during the 1980’s and 1990’s?
— Why do climate scientists (Mann, Hansen, and others) hide their data for years, and never reveal their calculation methods? What are they hiding?
— Why is the Main Stream Media so silent on Chiefio’s blog results, the March of the Thermometers? see http://chiefio.wordpress.com
— Why do thousands of scientists say (signed their names) that man-made global warming is junk science?
— Why do process control engineers know that increasing CO2 above 350 ppm cannot possibly have any role in changing earth’s climate?
— If the science is settled, why are governments funding additional research in the billions of dollars per year?
— And this one just to get them thinking about the entire Environmental Doom: if the oceans are so fragile and vulnerable to oil spills, how did the oceans manage after all the millions of barrels of oil were spilled in World War II attacks on oil tankers? Hundreds of tankers were sunk, and many hundreds more of other oil-fueled ships went to the bottom, leaking oil from their fuel tanks.
Here is the quote from Polar Bears International that is used as the epigraph of this fable:
This was obviously used as a mere “peg,” segue, or jumping-off point to get readers to suspend disbelief in the concept of talking polar bears, not as an appropriation of indigenous culture. The fable could do fine without such a link to the native legend. It’s peripheral. But John Egan takes it as though it were central and takes offense:
Huh? Polar bears speak a human language? Why would they? In most (all?) native legends I’ve heard of, animals have their own language.
Huh? Polar bears are an indigenous people?
Robuk (03:28:46) :
The article states that CRU/Hadley claim” “Much data remains under lock and key. It is tied up in confidentiality agreements with the governments that provided it. ”
Does anyone know exactly which governments’ data is “tied up in confidentiality agreements” ??
My earlier comment notwithstanding (you know – ‘fatuous’), I need to balance it by saying how much I appreciate this site, Anthony. I have been a long-time reader, almost daily. It is a haven of honesty and common sense in what feels to me like a world gone mad. I think the reason for my earlier comment was that this little series seems so out of place, and counterproductive. I cringe when I imagine critics quoting or linking to it as exemplary of this site. As a fully-fledged member of the choir, I don’t need convincing, and I can’t at all imagine someone who is not skeptical being swayed to another viewpoint by it.
DirkH (09:24:17) :
You could just as well have said “It doesn’t cause enough CO2 emissions. The trees would become very hungry.”. (Which is way oversimplified. But trees do eat that.)
It is not oversimplified at all. CO2 is plants’ (apart from a few carnivorous ones) only source of carbon which is used to make carbohydrates and then proteins. That is ‘food’. No other source at all. Water and a few trace compounds are needed, and sunlight to do the conversion, but CO2 is the only ‘food’ they eat.
Since all animals eat plants or other animals that have eaten plants, CO2 is the source of all food. That’s the Carbon Cycle, without which all life as we know it dies, and CO2 is central to it. Bring it on, I say…..
Bart Nielsen (14:50:21) :
tfp formerly bill (11:57:57) :
Mike (07:27:21) :
I’m afraid you lied to the child, especially if you live in the coal powered USA
Your standard filament bulb causes the release of 5.8mg of mecury into the environment
a CFL releases 1 to 5mg Hg and causes to be released 1.2mg Hg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mercury_emissions_by_light_source_EPA_2008
Anytime you want the pure, unembellished facts, just go Wikipedia, especially if the topic is something controversial like global warming. NPOV rules at Wiki!
/sarc off
Lets drop the sarcasm, interact like adults for once, and do a little research before [snip]
If you powered a standard incandescent light bulb with electricity produced by a coal-based power plant for 5 years, the power plant would release 10 mg of mercury into the environment. Now, power a CFL for 5 years, and because of its far lower energy consumption the power plant would only be releasing 2.4 mg of Mercury into the environment. Add that to the 4 mg of mercury that is found within the CFL, and you still get only 6.4 mg of Mercury, significantly less that the 10mg released by the operation of the incandescent bulb. Also, if you recycle your CFL properly (currently only required for large industrial operations, but available in several progressive areas, including, for example, Seattle) that 4 mg of Mercury is recovered, leaving only the 2.4 mg of emissions from the powerplant.
Obviously, these numbers are different if you live in an area that doesn’t use coal power. At this time 44.2% of all electricity in the U.S. is generated by coal plants, comparable with the UK.
So, Mercury is bad. But 2.4 mg is less than 1% that in a mercury thermometer, and less than .1% that in a thermostat. 10 mg is obviously a lot more. But, all of this hinges on whether your electricitiy is coming from coal. If it is, you’re better off with a CFL if cost of your electricity and minimizing mercury in the environment are your concerns. If your local electrcitiy come from a different source, educate yourself. Maybe you’re better off with the incandescent!
But for goodness sake, don’t go traumatizing some poor little child if you don’t know what you’re talking about.
EPA fact sheet on Mercury in lightbulbs: http://www.gelighting.com/na/home_lighting/ask_us/downloads/MercuryInCFLs.pdf
Facts about coal use in the UK: http://www.eia.doe.gov/cabs/United_Kingdom/Electricity.html
Facts about coal use in the US: http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/epm_sum.html