November 17, 2012
In spite of all the headlines about the dearth of Arctic ice it seems that polar bears are not too worried. They are heading out onto the rapidly growing ice in a “mass exodus” to hunt for their seals about a week ahead of schedule.
Polar Bear Science reports that:
It appears from the ice maps that most of the polar bears throughout the world that have chosen to remain on land during the late summer and fall (about July/August through October/November) can now return to the ice. …
… polar bear watchers in and around Churchill Manitoba (in Western Hudson Bay) are reporting an exodus of polar bears to the sea ice that is rapidly forming offshore. While it appears from the ice map …. that only a narrow strip of sea ice has formed close to shore, this is apparently quite enough for the bears to move off the land and out to sea. Once on the ice, polar bears will start hunting for seals.
The same phenomenon is likely true all over the Arctic – ice forming near shore may not be showing up on the satellite images (e.g. western Russia, Svalbard) but it will be enough to get polar bears off land and back out to sea where they can hunt. ….
…. Kelsey says that the “bay froze about a week earlier than last year” [earlier is good] and reports that polar bears are eagerly moving offshore onto the newly-formed ice. Sounds like the folks there to promote “Polar Bear Week” won’t find many bears to point cameras at.
Polar Bear Alley also reports:
This whole season has been about a week ahead of last year so it is not a real surprise that the bay froze about a week earlier than last year. Yesterday, we watched the mass exodus of polar bears out onto the sea ice. Most of the day consisted of yellow bear butts wobbling and weaving out towards the floe edge.
Over the past week, there have been daily highs around minus 10-15C and some fairly consistent north winds. This combination is all we need for the ice to freeze along Cape Churchill. From wind and greasy waves last Thursday to a thin band of ice along the shore by Saturday, you could see the end was near.
Most years though a late season south wind ‘saves’ bear season but this wind arrived about a day or two late this year, the ice is now locked in from what I can see. By Monday, ice floes clung to the shore and the smaller bays near Churchill were almost locked in. A north wind that night and the next day then sealed the deal.
Yesterday, there was a constant stream of polar bears crossing Cape Merry, the point between town and the Churchill River. Polar Bear Alert officers hazed some of them to speed their departure but really, once the ice is here, there is not much incentive to stay around. By 3pm, you could see twelve bears out on the ice between Eskimo Point to the west and Miss Piggy beach. ……
Tags: Arctic, Churchill Manitoba, Hudson Bay, Polar bear, Polar ice packs, Sea ice
Posted in Alarmism, Arctic, Wildlife | Comments Off on Polar bears heading out onto rapidly forming Arctic sea ice
November 17, 2012
Hot on the heels of the report that the IPCC has not been invited to the COP18 meeting in Doha later this month comes this report that the US is trying to funnel large parts of what is to be discussed at Doha into other forums and effectively bypass and undermine the UNFCCC
Could it be the US and China and India and other non-European countries who are disillusioned with the IPCC, are responsible for the snub?
EurAktiv reports:
The US is considering a funnel of substantive elements of the Doha Climate Summit away from the UN framework and into the Major Economies Forum (MEF), a platform of the world’s largest CO2 emitters, EurActiv has learned.
Since 1992, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has provided an umbrella for talks to curb global greenhouse gas emissions, and on 26 November, will host the COP18 Climate Summit in Qatar.
But it has been confirmed to EurActiv that Washington is increasingly looking to shift policy action to the MEF whose members account for some 85% of global emissions, and which the US views as a more comfortable venue for agreeing climate goals.
If the idea gains traction, it could demote the UNFCCC to a forum for discussing the monitoring, reporting and verification of emissions reductions projects, sources say. …
…… The MEF is a successor to the Major Economies Meetings set up by President Bush, and criticised by several governments for undermining the UN process.
Its participants include: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the European Union, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Tags: climate change, COP18, MEF, UNFCCC, United States
Posted in Alarmism, Climate, Politics, UN, US | 1 Comment »
November 17, 2012
UPDATE: This email from IPCC at Revkin’s site seems to confirm that they are not officially invited but will be present anyway (at whose cost?) to provide a “background briefing for media”! Just in case the media cannot get their stories right “when they come to write about AR5“!!
Pachauri and the IPCC have apparently not been invited to the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP18/CMP8) which is to be held in Doha from November 26th to December 7th. Pachauri has been talking to the press in Doha and seems very aggrieved. His press interview seems like he is almost begging for an invitation. He’s already in Doha so maybe he could just gatecrash the event!!
It could just be a secretarial oversight or it could be an intentional snub by the UN for a discredited organisation or it could be the UN expressing its displeasure for the manner in which the IPCC preens itself and usurps the UN’s own perceived role. Or it could be that some of the key countries attending plan to question or reject the IPCC’s findings and just don’t want them around.
My guess is that some way will be found for Pachauri to save some face.
The Gulf Times (Bonnie James) reports:
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will not be attending the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP18/CMP8) in Doha, chairman Dr Rajendra K Pachauri has said.
“For the first time in the 18 years of COP, the IPCC will not be attending, because we have not been invited,” he told Gulf Times in Doha. ……
……. Dr Pachauri first hinted about his ‘anticipated absence’ at COP18, while speaking at the opening session of the International Conference on Food Security in Dry Lands (FSDL) on Wednesday at Qatar University.
Later, he told Gulf Times he did not know why the IPCC has not been invited to COP18, something that has happened never before.
“I don’t know what it is. The executive secretary of the climate change secretariat has to decide. I have attended every COP and the chairman of the IPCC addresses the COP in the opening session,” he explained.
Tags: climate change, COP18, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, Rajendra K. Pachauri, United Nations
Posted in Alarmism, Climate, UN | 2 Comments »
November 17, 2012
Thessaloniki
If anything proves that he Greek crisis is essentially due to past profligacy it is the current improvement in the status of the finances of the city of Thessaloniki. And I have no doubt that it it was the entry into the European Union and the mirage which the EU creates of getting something for nothing which lay behind much of the public employees “jobs for life” attitude and the spendthrift behaviour that any self-respecting household would have eschewed. But of course the Greek crisis has been caused by just a small minority of Greeks. I suppose the analogy would be of a household where the husband was spending the family jewels on drink and a good time while his wife and family made do with whatever that was left. But what Thessaloniki is apparently showing is how to get out of the pit. And if Greece could have devalued their drachma and did not have the high value of the Euro as a millstone around their necks, the return of tourists and an escape from the depths would probably be faster.
Reuters reports:
With his craggy face, diamond earring and tattooed wrist, Thessaloniki mayor Yannis Boutaris looks an unlikely candidate to turn around the finances of Greece’s second biggest city.
But the 70-year old, who stands apart from the political mainstream, is pulling off reforms that have so far evaded the national government in a three-year-old debt crisis that has sucked in some 150 billion euros of international aid.
In contrast to the rest of Greece, this sea-front city of one million is shrinking debt, cutting business taxes to help firms and paying city employees and contractors on time.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: European Union, Greece, Greek Crisis, Thessaloniki, Yannis Boutaris
Posted in Behaviour, Corruption, European Union, Greece, Politics | Comments Off on Thessaloniki: One Greek city running a budget surplus and showing how it can be done
November 16, 2012
It is thought that wooden spears could have come into use as early as 5 million years ago since chimpanzees and orangutans have been observed using wooden spears and because the human – chimpanzee split is dated to around 8 million years ago. Stone tipped spears however were thought to have come into use only around 300,000 years ago during the time of the Neanderthals. But a new paper in Science finds archaeological evidence from South Africa that stone spear tips were being used around 500,000 years ago.
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Tags: hafted spears, Homo heidelbergensis, Neanderthal, origin of spears, South Africa, spears, Stone Age, stone-tipped spears
Posted in Archeology, Evolution | 1 Comment »
November 15, 2012
Woolly mammoths seem to loom out of a stone age pre-history and it is sometimes difficult to realise that they only went finally extinct some 10,000 years ago. But this particular skeleton comes from the time when Neanderthals were a common sight.
Mammuthus primigenius: Wikipedia
A nearly complete mammoth skeleton has just been uncovered at Changis-sur-Marne in the Seine-et-Marne department. This type of discovery, in its original context, is exceptional in France since only three specimens have been found in 150 years: the first such discovery, known as “the mammoth of Choulans”, was discovered in Sainte-Foy-lès-Lyon in 1859.
This mammoth is probably a Mammuthus primigenius, a woolly mammoth with long tusks that were used to expose edible vegetation under the snow. These animals could reach 2.8 to 3.4 metres high at their withers and were covered with fur and a thick layer of fat. The mammoth of Changis-sur-Marne existed between 200,000 and 50,000 years ago, at the same time as Neanderthals. Mammoths were well adapted to cold climates and thus disappeared from western Europe 10,000 years ago when the climate became warmer. The most recent specimen died off the coast of the Bering Strait, 3700 years ago. ….
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Tags: Changis-sur-Marne, Mammuthus primigenius, Neanderthal, Paris, Woolly mammoth
Posted in Archeology, France, Wildlife | Comments Off on Near complete woolly mammoth skeleton found near Paris
November 15, 2012
Political behaviour is always worth observing and fascinating though the line between high-farce and tragedy is quite thin.
The Sweden Democrats is one of the recent wave of far-right, anti-immigration, vaguely neo-nazi, political parties that have been been voted into parliaments around Europe over the last 15 years or so. (One of the characteristics of European politics has been the over-representation of marginal and extreme groups but in general – I think – countries just get the representation they deserve).
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Tags: Erik Almqvist, Jimmie Åkesson, Kent Ekeroth, Parliament of Sweden, Sweden, Sweden Democrat, William Petzell
Posted in Behaviour, Politics, Sweden | Comments Off on Sweden Democrats bring Swedish Parliament into disrepute
November 14, 2012
The reserves are massive but not yet technologically exploitable. I have little doubt that human ingenuity will prevail and before too long. It is just a matter of time and engineering before this oil starts flowing.
Malthusians must be gnashing their teeth as “Peak Oil” is pushed back – again – by a few hundred years!!
ABC News:
Drillers in Utah and Colorado are poking into a massive shale deposit trying to find a way to unlock oil reserves that are so vast they would swamp OPEC.
A recent report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office estimated that if half of the oil bound up in the rock of the Green River Formation could be recovered it would be “equal to the entire world’s proven oil reserves.”
Both the GAO and private industry estimate the amount of oil recoverable to be 3 trillion barrels.
“In the past 100 years — in all of human history — we have consumed 1 trillion barrels of oil. There are several times that much here,” said Roger Day, vice president for operations for American Shale Oil (AMSO).
The Green River drilling is beginning as shale mining is booming in the U.S. and a report by the International Energy Agency predicts that the U.S. will become the world’s largest oil producer by 2020. That flood of oil can have major implications for the U.S. economy as well as the country’s foreign policy which has been based on a growing scarcity of oil. …..
The cost of extracting the Green River oil at the moment would be higher than what it could be sold for. And there are significant environmental obstacles. ….. Nevertheless, the federal government has authorized six experimental drilling leases on federal land in an effort to find a way to tap into the riches of the Green River Formation. …….
Getting oil from Green River shale is a different proposition than getting gas and oil from other sites by using the controversial method of “fracking,” fracturing the underground rock with pressurized, chemical-infused water.
The hydrocarbons in Green River shale are more intimately bound up with the rock, so that fracking cannot release them. The shale has to be heated to 5,000 degrees Farenheit before it will give up its oil. ….
Tags: Green River Formation, Oil reserves, OPEC, Peak oil, shale oil, United States
Posted in Alarmism, Energy, Engineering, Oil, Technology, US | 2 Comments »
November 14, 2012
Carbon dioxide keeps going up while global temperatures decrease.
It’s certainly not rocket science that’s needed.
But unfortunately “climate science” has deteriorated to be nothing much more than “voodoo” science.
Tags: AGW, carbon dioxide, climate change, climate science as voodoo science, CO2, global warming
Posted in Alarmism, Climate | 1 Comment »
November 14, 2012
What are the genetic characteristics that are effectively being “selected for” today?
Evolutionary selection is a result not a cause. It is a result describing the genetic change of a population not of an individual. But all genetic change in a population comes about only through the procreation of new generations of individuals.
Evolution then is the result of the survival, success and reproduction of organisms within an environment which is changing. By environment I mean all surrounding factors whether geologic or climatic or of competition within the species or with other species. In a population of organisms the relative success of and subsequent reproduction of those better suited to the environment begets a gradual change in the characteristics of the surviving organisms. It is because of the environmental changes in the first place that there is a subsequent change in the characteristics of the organism best suited to that environment. It is this gradual change of the surviving characteristics that we call evolution and we say that the resultant, surviving characteristics have been “selected for”. If the environment did not change and if an organism was suited to its environment, the genetic make-up of the organisation would always tend back to its stable equilibrium position. Any mutational changes would provide no benefit and would just die away. Without environmental change there would be no evolution to report. Over long stretches of time and many thousands of generations, these gradual changes of environment have been sufficient to have created all the species of living things that have ever existed and to have eliminated all the non-viable species that have gone extinct.
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Tags: Artificial selection, Evolution, genetics, Mutation, Natural selection
Posted in Behaviour, Evolution, Medicine | Comments Off on What is evolutionary selection now selecting for?
