Our Climate Who Art in Heaven

Just some collected items from deniers and the truth from NPR. Wasn't there some comment by Obama about following science?

Art in heaven?

Note from WWF, see below:

...Moreover, when the WWF report is compared with the Arctic air temperature trend studies discussed earlier, there is a strong positive (instead of negative) correlation between air temperature and polar bear populations. Polar bear populations are declining in regions (like Baffin Bay) that have experienced a decrease in air temperature, while areas where polar bear populations are increasing (near the Bering Strait and the Chukchi Sea) are associated with increasing air temperatures. Thus it is difficult to argue that rising air temperatures will necessarily and directly lead to a decrease in polar bear populations...

Suppressing the inconvenient facts about climate change

June 29, 2009
Article from: The Australian

Declan McCullagh of CBS reveals that the US environmental agency quashed an inconveniently sceptical report

THE Environmental Protection Agency may have suppressed an internal report that was sceptical of claims about global warming. Less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA centre director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty "decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data".

The EPA official, Al McGartland, said in an e-mail message to a staff researcher on March 17: "The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward ... and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision." The email correspondence raises questions about political interference in what was supposed to be a independent review process inside a federal agency.

Alan Carlin, the primary author of the 98-page EPA report, told CBSNews.com in a telephone interview on Friday that his boss, McGartland, was being pressured himself. "It was his view that he either lost his job or he got me working on something else," Carlin said. "That was obviously coming from higher levels." After reviewing the scientific literature that the EPA is relying on, Carlin said, he concluded that it was at least three years out of date and did not reflect the latest research. "Global temperatures are roughly where they were in the mid-20th century. They're not going up, and if anything they're going down."

Christopher Booker in Britain's The Sunday Telegraph on how to deal with an inconvenient expert:

TOP of the agenda at a meeting of the Polar Bear Specialist Group will be the need to produce a suitably scary report on how polar bears are being threatened with extinction by man-made global warming. But one of the world's leading experts on polar bears has been told to stay away from this week's meeting. Mitchell Taylor has been researching polar bears in Canada and around the Arctic Circle for 30 years, as an academic and a government employee.

The (PBSG) chairman, Andy Derocher explained in an email that (Mitchell's) rejection had nothing to do with his expertise on polar bears: "It was the position you've taken on global warming that brought opposition." 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".

Polar bear expert barred by global warmists
Christopher Booker
Published: 5:20PM BST 27 Jun 2009

...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 [As I mentioned a year ago was the determination of the Canadian office in charge of cold. See below.]

-------

Not in the story:

...study commissioned by Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans examined the relationship between air temperature and sea ice and concluded, "the possible impact of global warming appears to play a minor role in changes to Arctic sea ice." Rather, the Canadian study found that changing wind patterns are the primary cause of changing sea ice distributions. Moreover, while sea ice has decreased in the Arctic, it has remained relatively constant (or even increased slightly) in the Antarctic since 1978.

-------

He has also observed, however, how the melting of Arctic ice, supposedly threatening the survival of the bears, has rocketed to the top of the warmists' agenda as their most iconic single cause. The famous photograph of two bears standing forlornly on a melting iceberg was produced thousands of times by Al Gore, the WWF and others as an emblem of how the bears faced extinction – until last year the photographer, Amanda Byrd, revealed that the bears, just off the Alaska coast, were in no danger. Her picture had nothing to do with global warming and was only taken because the wind-sculpted ice they were standing on made such a striking image.

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"....

Polar bear appearances grow on oil fields
Alex DeMarban

June 24, 2009 at 12:04PM AKST

Polar bear encounters on the North Slope oil fields have risen to record levels the last two years, a sign that increasing numbers of the white giants may be prowling on land because the sea ice they prefer is shrinking, scientists said.

Oil field sightings along the southern Beaufort Sea coast jumped to 321 in 2007 and 313 in 2008, said Craig Perham, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist in Anchorage.

That’s more than double the 15-year average of 138.
It’s also a sharp rise from 232, the previous high in 2005.

Oil companies are legally required to report a polar bear encounter to Fish and Wildlife that involves any change in the animal’s behavior, even if the bear simply lifts its head to sniff the air, Perham said....

NO NO. Listen to NPR. A Zoo curator has the inside poop, so to speak

Environment
Polar Bear Population Struggles as Sea Ice Melts
Elizabeth Shogren, NPR

Henry Kacprzyk, a curator at the Pittsburgh Zoo, says the zoo tries to educate visitors about the risks facing polar bears in the wild.

In January 2007, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed listing polar bears as an endangered species. The agency is expected to announce a final decision within the next several weeks.

Here's a summary of what recent research says about how polar bears are faring:

* Two-thirds of the world's current polar bear population could be lost by the middle of the century because of shrinking sea ice, according to a 2007 U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) study.
* In 2004, an aerial survey of the northern Alaskan coast documented dead bears floating in the sea. Scientists surmised that the bears drowned because the shrinking sea ice means they have to swim longer distances to shore or between ice slabs. No bear drownings were seen in any other aerial surveys conducted between 1987 and 2003, according to a U.S. Minerals Management Service report.
* The survival rate for cubs that live in the southern Beaufort Sea region in northern Alaska dropped significantly in recent years, according to a 2006 U.S. Geological Survey study.
* Pregnant polar bears in northern Alaska have become much less likely to den on the sea ice. The proportion of dens on sea ice was 62 percent from 1985 to 1994, but dropped to 37 percent in 1998 to 2004. The reason: melting sea ice, according to a 2007 USGS report.
* In the most southerly populations, polar bears already appear to be in trouble. In Canada's West Hudson Bay, the population declined 22 percent between 1987 and 2004, according to a 2007 USGS report.

Then Again, from the World Wildlife Fund report, via NCPA:

...Interestingly, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), an international organization that has worked for 50 years to protect endangered species, has also written on the threats posed to polar bears from global warming. However, their own research seems to undermine their fears. According to the WWF, about 20 distinct polar bear populations exist, accounting for approximately 22,000 polar bears worldwide. As the figure shows, population patterns do not show a temperature-linked decline:

• Only two of the distinct population groups, accounting for about 16.4 percent of the total population, are decreasing.
• Ten populations, approximately 45.4 percent of the total number, are stable.
• Another two populations - about 13.6 percent of the total number of polar bears - are increasing.

The status of the remaining six populations (whether they are stable, increasing or decreasing in size) is unknown.

Moreover, when the WWF report is compared with the Arctic air temperature trend studies discussed earlier, there is a strong positive (instead of negative) correlation between air temperature and polar bear populations. Polar bear populations are declining in regions (like Baffin Bay) that have experienced a decrease in air temperature, while areas where polar bear populations are increasing (near the Bering Strait and the Chukchi Sea) are associated with increasing air temperatures. Thus it is difficult to argue that rising air temperatures will necessarily and directly lead to a decrease in polar bear populations.

I also reported on this. The WWF, of course, contradicts its official fund-raising position.

So, all you have to do is have one source for you position, like the UN or US Geographical folks, and that is the answer and everyone else needs to be shut up.