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environmentalists Archive

Monday

7

April 2008

0

COMMENTS

Polar Bear Politics

Written by , Posted in Energy and the Environment

There is a fuss over the refusal of the administration to bow to their political games and place polar bears on the endangered species list, despite observed growth in some polar bear populations.

The call by special interests to place the polar bear on the endangered species list is not based on any evidence of declining polar bear populations. It is based on projections of future polar bear populations. That would be fine, if those projections were made through a rigorous scientific process. Sadly, they are based on sloppy methodologies and spurious assumptions:

Calls to list polar bears as a threatened species under the U.S. Endangered Species Act are based on forecasts of substantial long-term declines in their population. Nine government reports were prepared to support the listing decision. We assessed these reports in light of evidence-based (scientific) forecasting principles. None referred to works on scientific forecasting methodology. Of the nine, Amstrup, Marcot and Douglas (2007) and Hunter et al. (2007) were the most relevant to the listing decision. Their forecasts were products of complex sets of assumptions. The first in both cases was the erroneous assumption that General Circulation Models provide valid forecasts of summer sea ice in the regions inhabited by polar bears. We nevertheless audited their conditional forecasts of what would happen to the polar bear population assuming, as the authors did, that the extent of summer sea ice would decrease substantially over the coming decades. We found that Amstrup et al. properly applied only 15% of relevant forecasting principles and Hunter et al. only 10%. We believe that their forecasts are unscientific and should therefore be of no consequence to decision makers. We recommend that all relevant principles be properly applied when important public policy decisions depend on accurate forecasts.

The report goes on to list the numerous scientific principles these reports violated. Contrary to the claims of the global warming fanatics, this process is not being driven by science. The call to put polar bears on the endangered species list is nothing more than an attempt to validate belief in global warming. Since they can’t prove the phenomenon is real to the extreme degrees that they claim, they just react to it as if it is real and then use their own reactions as proof of its existence. “Of course there’s global warming,” they’ll say in the near future, “its effects have put polar bears on the endangered species list!” Enough is enough of the polar bear politics.

Tuesday

8

May 2007

0

COMMENTS

Children: Destroyers Of The Environment

Written by , Posted in Energy and the Environment, The Nanny State & A Regulated Society

Having too many children is an “eco-crime”

HAVING large families should be frowned upon as an environmental misdemeanour in the same way as frequent long-haul flights, driving a 4×4 car and failing to reuse plastic bags, according to a report to be published tomorrow by a green think tank.

The paper by the Optimum Population Trust (OPT) will say that if couples had two children instead of three they could cut their family?s carbon dioxide output by the equivalent of 620 return flights a year between London and New York.

John Guillebaud, co-chairman of OPT and emeritus professor of family planning at University College London, said: “The effect on the planet of having one child less is an order of magnitude greater than all these other things we might do, such as switching off lights. An extra child is the equivalent of a lot of flights across the planet.”

“The greatest thing anyone in Britain could do to help the future of the planet would be to have one less child.”

Mark Steyn reminds us that Britain is already one of several European nations ready to jump head first over the infertility cliff.

In those terms, surely the greatest thing everyone in Britain could do to help the future of the planet would be to reduce his carbon footprint to zero by killing himself. The United Kingdom’s present fertility rate is not three children or even two but 1.6 or 1.7, and the British will be extinct long before the polar bear. And when the self-loathing westerners are gone how many Yemeni imams will want to man the late shift at the local Greenpeace office?

This is a common flaw in eco-leftist arguments. When they deny the United States the ability to drill for oil it doesn’t change demand. The oil no longer being drilled in the US, in other words, must come from somewhere else. And no one else in the world will be as considerate to the environment in drilling as we are, so they actually making things worse. Likewise, by encouraging western civilization to breed itself into extinction, they are simply creating a world dominated by some other ideology, and I can pretty much guarantee that other doesn’t give a damn about carbon footprints.

tip: Michelle Malkin

Friday

3

November 2006

0

COMMENTS

Government Proposes Massive Land Grab

Written by , Posted in Energy and the Environment

Mountain States Legal Foundation explains how environmentalist groups are teaming up with Federal Courts to force the government to confiscate private property for the purpose of protecting an animal they admit doesn’t even inhabit the area:

Days ago, in a proposal unnoticed by the media, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) announced the largest land grab since President Clinton designated massive national monuments across the West. When Clinton decreed 1.9 million acres of federal land in Utah as the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument to kill a vast underground coal mine that would have employed 1,000 locals in the most economically depressed region of southern Utah, generated $20 million in annual revenue, and produced environmentally compliant coal for generating electricity, there were protests across the West. When the Bush Administration published its plans, there was barely a ripple of protest.

. . .Formally entitled ?Revised Designation of Critical Habitat for the Contiguous United States Distinct Population Segment of the Canada Lynx? and published in the Federal Register on November 9, 2005, the plan results from a March 2000 ruling by a federal district court in the District of Columbia. There, after ten years of litigation, a host of environmental groups succeeded in efforts to require the FWS to use the Endangered Species Act (ESA) to protect the Canada lynx (Lynx canadensis) in the contiguous United States.

That was only the beginning. After the FWS placed the lynx on the ESA list in July 2003, Defenders of Wildlife urged the federal court to order the FWS to designate critical habitat in the lower 48, notwithstanding that the lynx?s natural habit is in Canada?hence its name. . .

Under the plan, 8.4 million acres of private land would be included, at a cost, over twenty years, of $889 million. Although the plan includes Washington, Idaho, Montana, Minnesota, and Maine, its greatest impact is on the latter three with one million acres affected in both northwestern Montana and northeastern Minnesota and six million included in northern Maine. Thousands of landowners will find their ability to use their private property greatly constrained, if litigious environmental groups have anything to say about it, and they will. Worst of all, the FWS admits that, because the historic range of lynx only marginally includes the lower 48, the designation of critical habitat will achieve little, if anything.