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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."

8 of 292 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Nothing new here ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Fascinating website. Lots and lots ... and lots of articles bashing global warming. Googling them turns up lots of SEO, pointed almost entirely to anti-climate change sites using site to support their claims.

    Truly fascinating.

    I also like how Dr Crockford's writing contains such brilliant scientific conclusions as this one:

    "I suggest this is what really happened: the polar bear biologists working in Svalbard earlier this year knew this bear was going to die back in April when they captured him – they simply waited, with a photographer on hand, until he died. It was an orchestrated photo-op."

    Also amazing how her extensive papers are based entire on field work. Oh wait, I mean, according to her site she DOESN'T do field work. She's purely academic.

    "I am a different kind of polar bear expert than those that study bears in the field but having a different background means I know things they do not and this makes my contribution valuable and valid."

    She's the one shining light in entire scientific community standing up against the thousands of scientists spreading polar bear misiniformation.

    I'm glad to see ultra conservative Heartland Institute paying for her diligent, important, unbiased work.

    http://www.desmogblog.com/heartland-payments-university-victoria-professor-susan-crockford-probed

    Huzzah! Good for her!

    We're all in good hands. Everything is OK.

    Sleep, young man, sleep....

  2. Re:Nothing new here ... by itzly · · Score: 5, Informative

    there doesn't seem to be a correlation between the recent years in which mortality events occurred (2009, 2011, and 2014) and the years in which lower ice levels were recorded (2007 and 2012)

    Arctic ice has quite a bit of local variability from year to year, so you probably don't want to average ice area in the entire Arctic, but only look at the habitat area of the walrus.

  3. Re:The problem with double standards. by Required+Snark · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Stop lying, I'm sick of it. Just admit what you are actually doing for a change.

    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?
  4. Re:The problem with double standards. by Strangely+Familiar · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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  5. Re:2013 Antarctic sea ice hit 35-year record high by Namarrgon · · Score: 5, Informative

    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"?
  6. Re:The problem with double standards. by dave420 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  7. Re:The problem with double standards. by dave420 · · Score: 5, Informative

    The same Susan Crockford who gets paid by the Heartland institute every month, and who is:

    a sessional adjunct professor in Archaeozoology in the Pacific Rim with research focuses on the domestication and breed development, evolutionary theory and the evolution and history of the domestic dog.

    Her opinion on climate science simply does not matter.

  8. Re: The problem with double standards. by JWW · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!