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Melting Arctic Ice Has Consequences
OriginalArlen writes to tell us about some compelling global warming coverage in the Washington Post. First there is an article about a study indicating that melting Arctic ice is threatening polar bears with extinction. The article quotes an environmentalist: "This study is the smoking gun. Skeptics, polluting industries and President Bush can't run away from this one." And the polar melting is opening new shipping lanes. The second article details a trip late in October through the Northwest Passage by a Canadian icebreaker. Never before in history could this trip have been accomplished so late in the year; ice would have choked off the passage. Estimates of when the passage might be navigable by commercial shipping range from 2020 to the end of the century. The indigeneous people are not looking forward to this development.
He has invested millions into alternative and green energy on several different initiatives plus reauthorized initiatives started under previous administrations.
And he has spent (not invested) tens or hundreds of billions on a wasteful and stupid war, rather than investing (not spending) those same tens or hundreds of billions in serious alternative energy research, including advanced nukes, actually clean (i.e. fully sequestered) coal, algal biodeisel, solar, wind, tide, etc.
The difference in spending on war vs investment in America's energy future is so many orders of magnitude that pointing out the millions he has invested in alternative energy is like a doctor pointing out that he has cured a cancer patient's hangnail.
Admittedly, on the flip side, "global warming is going to kill the cute cuddly polar bears" is about the least honest, to say nothing of least relevant, argument one can make in this arena. Polar bears have been around for 250,000 years or more. 250,000 years is the oldest current age estimate of the species, and there are excellent statistical arguments to suggest that our first-pass age estimates are always gross under-estimates, as evidenced by the routine discovery of fossil forms that double the earliest age estimate for a species.
So it is certain that polar bears have experienced far greater climate fluxuaions in the past, not least of which would be the past ice age, in which there was no open water in the Arctic. But polar bears are absolutely dependent on open water for their current way of life, which involves hunting seals. Yet somehow polar bears survived and adapted, including adaptation to the catastrophic changes of the Young Dryas, which were far more violent that anything projected by current climate models for the foreseeable future.
So I say, let the polar bears take care of themselves. I'm not worried about the polar bears. I'm worried about modern industrial civilization, which is a hell of lot more sensitive to changes in global climate than any biological system on Earth.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.