Polar Bears Are a Pest – Time to End Their ‘Threatened’ Status

Earlier this week, as I’m sure you know, was International Polar Bear Day. Usually I celebrate by tossing a well-marinaded bear haunch onto the barbecue – note to novices: DO NOT eat the liver. It’s poisonous –  but I couldn’t this year because of pesky global cooling, so instead, I sat indoors by the fire and drank a toast to the world’s exploding polar bear population which has now reached record highs of 30,000.

30,000 polar bears is a lot. As someone else remarked (remind me where and I’ll link to it), when Al Gore was born the population was just 5,000. Even as recently as 2005 it was estimated at no more than 22,500.

When the population of something explodes six-fold in 70 years that’s a sign that it’s doing pretty well, right? In fact, frankly, at that point it ceases to be a species in any kind of danger and starts to look more like a pest.

So why do the greenies persist in treating it like it’s a rare and precious species on the verge of extinction due to man’s selfishness and greed (TM)?

This is the question asked and answered by the best short video you will ever see about the polar bear non-problem.

It has been made by Canadian polar bear expert Susan Crockford for the Global Warming Policy Foundation and it calls for the US Administration to reassess the polar bear’s (utterly bogus) classification as a “threatened” species.

As the film makes clear, the polar bear is not “threatened” and hasn’t been for many decades (not since hunting was mostly banned). When in May 2008 the US Fish and Wildlife Service listed it as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act this was a political gesture not a scientific one.

The flimsy justification for the polar bear’s “threatened” status was the dramatic decline in summer sea ice which – so the fashionable theory ran – would render polar bears unable to feed because whenever they pursued seals they’d collapse through the thin ice.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Icegate: Now NSIDC Caught Tampering with Climate Records

You’ve read about how NOAA overestimated US warming by 50 percent.

Now it’s NSIDC’s turn to be caught red-handed fiddling the data and cooking the books.

NSIDC – National Snow and Ice Data Center – is the US government agency which provides the official statistics on such matters as sea ice coverage in the Arctic.

Naturally its research is of paramount importance to the climate alarmists’ narrative that man-made global warming is causing the polar ice caps to melt. At least it was until those ice caps refused to play ball…

Where the alarmists have for years been doomily predicting ice free summers in the Arctic –  according to Al Gore in 2007, 2008 and 2009 it would be gone by 2013 – the truth is that multi-year ice has been staging a recovery since 2009.

age_coverage_time_series_83_15_w_labels2

So what do you do if reality doesn’t suit your narrative? Simple. If you’re NSIDC (and NASA and NOAA…) you just change reality.

NSIDC’s latest attempt to breathe new life into the corpse of the alarmist narrative comprised a press release a few weeks ago claiming that 5+ year old sea ice is at its smallest level on record. To prove it, they’ve produced a new chart that looks like this.

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But according to Steven Goddard of the Real Science website this claim needs to be taken with a huge pinch of salt.

Note how, to confuse matters, NSIDC have upended their chart so that 5+ year ice instead of being at the bottom is now at the top. Far worse, though, they’ve gone and deleted all the old style maps from their archive.

At least they thought they had.

Read the rest at Breitbart.