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35,000 Walrus Come Ashore In Alaska
the eric conspiracy writes "Lack of sea ice in the Arctic has forced record numbers of walrus to come ashore in Alaska. The walrus, looking for a place to rest have come ashore in Point Lay Alaska. The walrus normally rest on floating ice. "We are witnessing a slow-motion catastrophe in the Arctic," Lou Leonard, vice president for climate change at the World Wildlife Fund, said in a statement that was reported by CNN. "As this ice dwindles, the Arctic will experience some of the most dramatic changes our generation has ever witnessed. This loss will impact the annual migration of wildlife through the region, threaten the long-term health of walrus and polar bear populations, and change the lives of those who rely on the Arctic ecosystem for their way of life."
This is definitely the disasterous dastardly doings of the Eggman!
Mass haulouts of Pacific walrus and stampede deaths are not new, not due to low ice cover
http://polarbearscience.com/20...
Large haulouts of walruses -- such as the one making news at Point Lay, Alaska on the Chukchi Sea (and which happened before back in 2009) -- are not a new phenomenon for this region over the last 45 years and thus cannot be due to low sea ice levels. Nor are deaths by stampede within these herds (composed primarily of females and their young) unusual, as a brief search of the literature reveals.
Includes references, links and copies of contemporary reports.
You, and all the other "skeptics", are pretending to be engaged in a rational approach.That's not credible.
There will never be enough evidence to convince you. It's obvious from your past behavior. Every time a new piece of real world evidence shows up you have the same knee jerk reaction: ti's not enough, there's some other reason, it happened before, what about (irrelevant information here), etc.
So there is an extraordinarily large walrus event: it doesn't count. There are new high temperature records being set every year: the numbers are skewed. Vermont maple farmers are loosing their livelihood because the winters are not cold or long enough: it's just a long term cycle. Dozens (or even hundreds) of species in North America and Europe are moving their range further north every year: a common pattern isn't happening, each case is unique and unrelated.
Stop wearing the fig-leaf of "rational skeptic". You have made up your mind. No additional information will sway you. Short of a "personal extinction event", you are not going to change you position or your behavior.
Why is Snark Required?
They noted less sea ice, they noted the walruses, they noted AGW, and just linked A to B to C without bothering to any science in between. That is my problem.
It's probably completely bogus. The sea ice isn't far from normal for this time of year, and higher than in other recent years. It's higher than in 2005, not quite as high as 2006.
Let's not forget that parts of the Pacific coast were a little warmer than normal, too. But that doesn't imply "warming", because the majority of the U.S. was way colder than normal.
So we have: sea ice that might be just a little lower than normal in certain parts of Alaska, but pretty normal overall.
Couldn't agree more. The parent poster (Karmashock) stated, " They noted less sea ice, they noted the walruses, they noted AGW, and just linked A to B to C without bothering to any science in between. That is my problem." So, Karmashock would have liked a scientific study showing how AGW led to the Walrus landing. So, when an abberation occurs, it can't be accepted as related to anything else, unless there is some "science in between". Really, it is too late for that. The abberation has already occured. Do we *now* start a study on the frequency of Walrus landings? Where is the baseline behaviour? How long should the study last? 10 years? Sure, let's study the Walruses for ten years. Maybe we can get a science award for our troubles. It reminds me of a situation in Africa, where a local doctor was fighting Ebola with some success with an AIDS drug. The doctor reasoned that Ebola and AIDS had some similar charactaristics, and that there were known antiviral drugs to treat AIDS. He tried one drug, and it didn't seem to work. He tried a second, and the mortality of his 15-20 patients dropped to 13%. A reporter interviewing him asked if he thought he should wait for some clinical studies before using the antiviral. He scoffed, and said that he was trying to save as many lives as he could. There was not time for clinical studies. When you have a disease with a 70% mortality rate, and it is infectious, you are talking about a serious threat. You need to use your brain, and take some educated guesses. AGW is a serious threat, and we don't have a set of planets on which to do double-blind experiments to satisfy Karmashock's thirst for science. We need to use our brains, and take some educated guesses. If we wait around for all the studies to come in, the situation, be it ebola or AGW, may be out of control.
Join the IParty!
Usual selective reporting from the Daily Mail - claiming a 29% rebound from an all-time record low is somehow "proof" that global warming is overblown. The link is a year old too - this year is actually the sixth lowest in the satellite record.
Worth looking at an actual trend, rather than Daily Mail headlines.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
The U.S. and Russia, with the support of groups such as Humane Society International, the Natural Resources Defence Council and the International Fund for Animal Welfare, had argued that allowing Canada to continue trading in the bears was contributing to more hunting at a time when their sea ice habitat is shrinking because of climate change. The Russians added that the Canadian trade makes it easier for poachers in Russia by allowing them to disguise their kills as legal bears from Canada.
But Canada — along with Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund, influential scientific bodies and other NGOs — said the Canadian hunt is sustainable and that the real threat to the bears is from climate change, not trade.
Although the world sided with Canada this time, Derocher notes support is slipping.
From http://www.macleans.ca/news/inuit-scientists-say-defeat-on-polar-bear-trade-ban-not-final/
Global Warming isn't a rational/scientific debate. If it was, the idea wouldn't have taken off as a result of Al Gore's film. That's not science, it's a popularity contest.
I'm not debating whether the science is there or not. I'm simply pointing out that the idea of Global Warming didn't take off because of the science. And Karmashock is right in saying that when in doubt (there is contradicting evidence for or against some event being caused by Global Warming) the Global Warming crowd goes nuts when people dare to question it. You need to be able to admit that not everything is caused by Global Warming.
Science is not well served by shouting down people who disagree with you. It's served by providing evidence to back up your claims and explaining why your opponent's claims are factually incorrect. Labeling people skeptics without actually proving them wrong is counterproductive.
Zoologist Dr. Susan Crockford weighs in: Mass haulouts of Pacific walrus and stampede deaths are not new, not due to low ice cover - 'The attempts by WWF and others to link this event to global warming is self-serving nonsense that has nothing to do with science...this is blatant nonsense and those who support or encourage this interpretation are misinforming the public.'
Population sizes may fluctuate for a number of reasons that have little to do with the low ice levels: note these very recent incidents of large walrus herds and associated mortality events (2009, 2011 and 2014) have not coincided with the lowest levels of summer sea ice in the area, which occurred in 2007 and 2012.
Just tell her to wear a seal costume to be more easily recognized so that nobody shoots her by mistake.
Ezekiel 23:20
You are absolutely right - it's not a scientific debate. The science is settled. We're beyond that now. The debate amongst climatologists is for accuracy, not whether AGW exists or not. We're many decades past that point. The fact that there is such an overwhelming body of evidence showing AGW exists, and yet organisations and governments deny it exists shows that there are people willing to ignore science for other reasons. As long as that happens, science can't be used to convince them otherwise, as they have already deemed it ignorable if it proves antagonistic to their desired position.
So yes, science is not well served by shouting down, but it's even less well-served by people simply ignoring it because it's telling them things they don't want to hear. Once that starts to happen, what should people do? Accept the purposeful ignoring of science as a valid position, and applause people for ignoring evidence?
The sceptics have been proven wrong time and time again - they trot out the same weak arguments which have already been debunked, and get all indignant when that's pointed out. They pretend to play the "science game" - by using the correct language and going through the motions - but they don't listen to the answers when science provides them. They're the Glenn Becks of this discussion - they're asking questions but not bothering to hear, or even interested in, the answers, and definitely not bothering to change their position when it is demonstrated to be fundamentally at odds with every shred of evidence gathered.
Of course not everything is caused by global warming, but conversely when the science shows that something is definitely affected by it, we can't point at alarmist media and claim that reflects the quality or content of the science. That is incredibly disingenuous.
The same Susan Crockford who gets paid by the Heartland institute every month, and who is:
Her opinion on climate science simply does not matter.
Are you fucking kidding me?!?! The fucking story is about the behavior of walruses!!! The Zoooligist is the science expert you are looking for to put context to this story, not the climatologist!!!
Shit with these kind of stories, even the experts aren't allowed to be experts!
The attempts by WWF and others to link this event to global warming is self-serving nonsense
"this event" is the walrus beaching, which she had darn well better know about. If the WWF said your computer started overheating due to global warming, would you take their word for it because they know climate science better, or would you check your system fans and blow dust off your heat sinks, knowing what the real cause likely is since it happens regularly, albeit rarely?
Nothing new does not mean not related.
Car crashes occured before drunk driving became an epidemic, yet that doesnt mean that the increase in car crashes was not affected by the increase in drunk driving.
Walrus are dependent on the ice.
When there's not enough ice, they beach.
Walrus landings have been increasing as ice decreases.
The ice is decreasing because of globl warning.
Keep trying chump.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Early arctic explorers reported walrus and seal colonies that stretched miles. Like the buffalo they where industrially hunted in the 19th and early 20th century. The Walrus population has rebounded since their low in the 1950s. Walrus colonies only form on islands, not ice. Now pray tell, how does ice cover in the arctic come into play? (That is a real question, after researching the subject, I can not find any clue how ice cover affects walrus populations.)
Then you didnt look very hard considering many of them live on floating ice in the ocean, far from land, where there are no islands. That's why they are dependent on the ice to rest, because they cannot swim constantly like other members of the seal family. When the ice disappears, their possible range shrinks as they are forced to come ashore to rest. Living on the ice is one of their evolutionary advantages, keeping them safe from predators, close to their food supply, and increasing the posible territory they can inhabit.
"The limited diving abilities of walruses brings them to depend on shallow waters (and the nearby ice floes) for reaching their food supply."
"The walrus relies on this ice while giving birth and aggregating in the reproductive period."
"Thinner pack ice over the Bering Sea has reduced the amount of resting habitat near optimal feeding grounds. This more widely separates lactating females from their calves, increasing nutritional stress for the young and lower reproductive rates."
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
So we have: sea ice that might be just a little lower than normal in certain parts of Alaska, but pretty normal overall.
I suppose that depends on your definition of normal, for example it's about 2 million square kilometers below the average for 1980-2010, which hardly seems to qualify as normal. I can a reason see why you would choose an average of the lowest years on record for comparison, but it's not a very flattering reason.
Fanatically anti-fanatical