Wolverines will now be considered as a threatened species because of climate change.
Climate change threatens wolverines; protections proposed - latimes.com
Climate change threatens wolverines; protections proposed - latimes.com
Wolverines vs. Climate change
- Thread starter DavidBrown
- Start date
Lots of Americans think Global Warming is something the government made up to worry us into throwing away our money to help save an area that doesn't need saving while the money goes into the government's pocket.
By the way, if we find out that a species is being harmed by Global Warming should we not write about it?
~Thylo
nanoboy
Well-Known Member
Lots of Americans think Global Warming is something the government made up to worry us into throwing away our money to help save an area that doesn't need saving while the money goes into the government's pocket.
By the way, if we find out that a species is being harmed by Global Warming should we not write about it?
~Thylo
You should most absolutely write about it! It would have been great if you guys started writing about it about 10 years ago though.
Any article or policy that cites climate change being detrimental to an endangered animal rings a bit hollow if hunting of said animal is still allowed ("Listing would likely outlaw wolverine trapping in Montana, where it is legal").
My wife wanted to donate $500 to WWF to buy a tracking collar for a polar bear when we had some good news in our lives a few years ago. But I didn't see the value in doing that if the poster bear of climate change was still being hunted 'legally' in Canada to the tune of 300+ per year. As one hunting tour operator so eloquently put it: ""If a male runs into a female with cubs, it attacks the cubs. Hunting males actually helps the young population survive," Lupien tells the Daily Mail. "The animal rights guys know this but they don’t want to admit it. And if you believe the ice caps are melting as some claim, these bears are going to die anyway, so you may as well hunt them.""
nanoboy
Well-Known Member
I sometimes feel that that is the argument in other developed countries (like Australia), but not in America where many politicians and citizens still need convincing.
It's important not to paint with too broad of a brush here in the U.S. Lots of serious people have been talking and thinking about global warming for the last 30 years. Al Gore wrote a well known book about it 20+ years ago. Several states are proceeding with action plans, including my home California where a cap and trade system has just happened.
The energy companies (coal, oil) and electrical utilities and their hand puppets in Congress and elsewhere like Senator James Inhofe and Dick Cheney have kicked back hard with disinformation campaigns and lies. I think that this is starting to change on a wide scale finally, especially after events like superstorm Sandy taking out large swathes of New York and New Jersey. Obama talking about climate change in his inaugural address is a pretty big deal as it means that he is now committed to doing something substantial about it.
nanoboy
Well-Known Member
All fair points. I read a great analogy from an MIT think-thank the other day. They used the flowing pipe and bathtub analogy: the bathtub is overflowing already, and all we are doing is turning the tap off a bit but it will still continue to overflow. Indeed, you referenced Obama's speech and superstorm Sandy - there have been inauguration speeches and megastorms before, yet your two references are quite recent. Too little too late.
The climate change sceptics and 'big oil' (did I ever mention here that I worked for BP on an offshore oil rig for half a year?) have much louder voices than people like Al Gore. My brush is getting progressively narrower for America, but it's still orders of magnitude wider than the brushes used to paint other first world countries that have been doing their part for years. I'll be convinced that you guys are on board when Fox News starts pushing for climate change action.
I couldn't be bothered by America's gun laws or internal politics, but when a country has the third largest population and one of the highest rates of energy consumption per capita and is one of the biggest emitters of 'carbon', then it becomes the world's problem. And this is why the rest of the world gets angry with climate change deniers in America. With BRIC nations not giving climate change precedent over growth, I suspect that America's climate change response will be muted and will occur at a glacial pace (pardon the pun).
We will never get world governments to agree and small countries like Australia will achieve nothing except penalizing ourselves by bringing in the carbon tax. I think we need to learn to adapt to climate changes instead of trying to change it. The worlds climate has changed from cold to hot and back again constantly and will continue to do so weather or not people have altered the rate of change, and we just need to learn to live with it.
Practical Solutions! The key to sustainability, grip to tightly and lose everything you hold. Prosperity - Education - Awareness - Conservation.
nanoboy
Well-Known Member
I actually agree with you to an extent: the bathtub is already overflowing. I believe that some calculations state that if we turned off the tap today and stopped all forms of carbon emissions (say we all died or were abducted by aliens), the planet will continue to heat up for another few decades.
I am a follower of a scientist/economist called Bjorn Lomborg who preaches exactly what you stated: climate change is here, so let's learn to adapt. Yes, we should try to limit emissions and pollution, but what can we do right now to make life more comfortable? The urban heat effect (where cities are a few degrees hotter than surrounding countryside) could be limited if roads and the tops of buildings weren't black, so why not use light coloured material (or paint them) instead? Why not have more gardens on rooftops? Why not stop hunting polar bears to give an already imperiled species the best chance of surviving? Why not try to engineer around the problems rather than spend vast sums of money on approaches that will have very little effect on climate change?
I just googled him to find a link for you guys, and I found this recent article from the Wall Street Journal that's worth a read: Bjorn Lomborg: Climate-Change Misdirection - WSJ.com
Here are a few excerpts:
"Had New York and New Jersey focused resources on building sea walls and adding storm doors to the subway system and making simple fixes like porous pavements, Hurricane Sandy would have caused much less damage"
"In the long run, the world needs to cut carbon dioxide because it causes global warming. But if the main effort to cut emissions is through subsidies for chic renewables like wind and solar power, virtually no good will be achieved—at very high cost. The cost of climate policies just for the European Union—intended to reduce emissions by 2020 to 20% below 1990 levels—are estimated at about $250 billion annually. And the benefits, when estimated using a standard climate model, will reduce temperature only by an immeasurable one-tenth of a degree Fahrenheit by the end of the century."
"Instead of pouring money into subsidies and direct production support of existing, inefficient green energy, President Obama should focus on dramatically ramping up investments into the research and development of green energy. Put another way, it is the difference between supporting an inexpensive researcher who will discover more efficient, future solar panels—and supporting a Solyndra at great expense to produce lots of inefficient, present-technology solar panels."
So, pulling it back to the wolverines, instead of lamenting that they are doomed because of climate change, proactive action should be taken. So, why not stop hunting them in the lower 48 states? Why not ensure that there is a healthy breeding population in zoos? Why not release wolverines in suitable habitat and higher altitude?
The whole notion that wolverines are endangered only refers to bellow Canada. It is the same with wolves, they are as a species no where near endangered.
Climate change and the dramatic problems of warming seem to be the only thing people are interested in. When I last did a university course, one of my subjects was on the sustainability of agriculture. I have forgotten what it was called, but I did it in 94 in Minnesota when on an agricultural exchange program. One thing I remember clearly was the effects of warming compared to the effects of cooling. Warming actually increases the are of earth where food can be produced while cooling would reduce the area and yields over a much larger area. That course has probably effected my thinking on this issue as there is always the threat of going back into an ice age which is well overdue on earth. Possibly the only reason we have not gone into an ice age is the effect of mans clearing and carbon emissions.
nanoboy
Well-Known Member
Well, again I agree with you to an extent, but not to the extent that we saved the earth from an ice age.
Bjorn Lomborg also did some financial analysis on how much we gained economically (re: agriculture) from warmer years. Whilst I believe the figures, I don't think it is justification to let the planet get warmer, if only for the selfish reason that we have been getting some pretty hot days here in Victoria and I find it to be quite uncomfortable.
Not so much increases as shifts the area suitable for agriculture, with more southerly areas becoming unsuitable due to drought/more pests etc. (as has happened in much of the U.S. and eastern Europe this year). There is also the phenomenon called Hadley cell expansion, resulting in an increase of deserts.
The problem is, there is not much fertile topsoil up north, places like northern Ontario, Norway or Finland are largely rock and lakes, with a very thin layer of soil.
(To say nothing of the fact that some of the most productive and/or heavily populated places on Earth are at very low altitudes and at risk of flooding or at least saltwater seepage due to sea level change - places like Bangkok, Saigon, Mekong and the Red River deltas, Bangladesh, Rangoon, parts of Java and Southern China, The Netherlands, Florida etc...).
Btw. I don't trust Lomborg as far as I could throw him. If you want info on the issue, Skeptical Science, Climate Progress, DeSmogBlog, Rabett run, RealClimate, Tamino, Chris Mooney...are much better choices.
Last edited:
Yup, turns out even in this latest WSJ op-ed, Lomborg was being dishonest again. No surprises there.
http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Blog-Lomborg_Final.pdf
I could go on, but there is no need; this is hardly the first time he's done that, and it's been well documented elsewhere.
Ironically, during the past several decades, climate action has been pretty much along the lines of what he suggests: do nothing. Now the bathtub is indeed overflowing (and we have seen nothing yet). Unsurprisingly too, like with most things left festering, delayed action becomes more expensive and less likely to work. Yet the difference between action and inaction can still mean the difference between hitting the wall with 20 and 60 mph.
http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Blog-Lomborg_Final.pdf
I could go on, but there is no need; this is hardly the first time he's done that, and it's been well documented elsewhere.
Ironically, during the past several decades, climate action has been pretty much along the lines of what he suggests: do nothing. Now the bathtub is indeed overflowing (and we have seen nothing yet). Unsurprisingly too, like with most things left festering, delayed action becomes more expensive and less likely to work. Yet the difference between action and inaction can still mean the difference between hitting the wall with 20 and 60 mph.
The biggest problem with addressing climate change is many who choose to do so actually do come from the Socialist or Leftist thinking. While at the same time the biggest American climate change spokesperson Al Gore is a hypocrite. America will always be concerned with the concept of not accepting an aristocracy and the idea of paying for polluting to us ultimately is seen as that. That Al can keep his gas sucking jet and its ok but the little people need to have higher pump prices "for the planet.
Not to mention American's don't like taxes of any kind.
Not to mention American's don't like taxes of any kind.
True, and that's only further sign how the Right has gone self-destructively mad (at least in the States; in the rest of the world there is far less division along party lines as far as climate science is concerned). Now we could discuss how this happened, as conservation and preservation of the environment used to be the domain of the Republicans once, Theodore Roosevelt being but one example. In the mean time, the communists couldn't care less about environmental protection; their priority was industrialization (primarily with coal); the former USSR and today's China are hardly environmentally friendly.
We could also discuss why it happened, and how the Republican party has been hijacked by big oil lobbyist groups; we could discuss the organized astroturfing and other successful PR campaigns by the fossil fuel lobby, like this:
Secret funding helped build vast network of climate denial thinktanks | Environment | guardian.co.uk
We could also mention farmers in the American Midwest, who have lost their crop due to drought, yet don't care about climate change much as crop insurance is heavily Federally subsidized. Financed by, well, taxes.
But all of it is beyond the point. Climate change does not care for the Right or Left, it is a physical occurence that is happening whether one accepts it or not. It will hit left and right - as is just beginning to do now.
We could also discuss why it happened, and how the Republican party has been hijacked by big oil lobbyist groups; we could discuss the organized astroturfing and other successful PR campaigns by the fossil fuel lobby, like this:
Secret funding helped build vast network of climate denial thinktanks | Environment | guardian.co.uk
We could also mention farmers in the American Midwest, who have lost their crop due to drought, yet don't care about climate change much as crop insurance is heavily Federally subsidized. Financed by, well, taxes.
But all of it is beyond the point. Climate change does not care for the Right or Left, it is a physical occurence that is happening whether one accepts it or not. It will hit left and right - as is just beginning to do now.
nanoboy
Well-Known Member
I forgot about this thread. Oop!
Saola, that was good rebuttal of Lomborg's article. When I was in university, I had a book called "How to Lie With Statistics" (or something like that); it basically showed you how you could push any agenda you want with statistical data and still be factual. Lomborg has a habit of choosing the wrong statistics, but I still like the message that he is preaching: global warming is here, it's getting worse, let's use the money to adapt. It would be great if he partnered with experts in the respective fields (the way orthodox academics do it) to add more credibility to his stats.
Thanks for the recommendations of other authors. I am by no means a Bjorn-fanboy, and I am definitely open to reading other works in the field.
Saola, that was good rebuttal of Lomborg's article. When I was in university, I had a book called "How to Lie With Statistics" (or something like that); it basically showed you how you could push any agenda you want with statistical data and still be factual. Lomborg has a habit of choosing the wrong statistics, but I still like the message that he is preaching: global warming is here, it's getting worse, let's use the money to adapt. It would be great if he partnered with experts in the respective fields (the way orthodox academics do it) to add more credibility to his stats.
Thanks for the recommendations of other authors. I am by no means a Bjorn-fanboy, and I am definitely open to reading other works in the field.
My friend, no self-respecting climate scientist would want anything to do with him. And it's not just because he has zero qualifications in climate science, it's because they know him very well.
Entire books:
The Lomborg Deception - Friel, Howard; Lovejoy, Thomas E. - Yale University Press
and entire websites have been written about his errors:
Lomborg Errors
Sourcewatch has a good summary on him, too:
Bjorn Lomborg - SourceWatch
Not surprisingly, he's a recommended "expert" by the Heartland institute:
The Heartland Institute | DeSmogBlog
What he typically does:
Debunking Bj¸rn Lomborg -- Part II, Misrepresenting Sea Level Rise | ThinkProgress
Skepticism toward The Skeptical Environmentalist: Scientific American
Lomborg has a history of selectively using of facts and statistics to make points that are counterfactual. Remember his first book, the Skeptical Environmentalist? In an unprecedented move, the editors of Scientific American printed an editorial calling him on his sophistry. After three months of debates on the pages of Scientific American — in which Lomborg was given as much space to rebut as he wanted, his entire book lay in tatters, exposed as the intellectual junk it was.
They further described Lomborg's text as having "misrepresented the actual positions of environmentalists and scientists" with an analysis that was "marred by invalidating errors that include a narrow, biased reading of the literature, an inadequate understanding of the science, and quotations taken out of context."
John P. Holdren, one of the Scientific American authors noted: "It is instructive that [Lomborg] apparently did not feel he could manage an adequate response by himself (In this, at least, he was correct. But he could not manage it with help, either)."
And it's not just climate science; he's been known to promote entirely wrong conclusions in other areas he knows nothing about, such as
biodiversity and extinction:
Grist | Books | The Skeptical Environmentalist | 12 Dec 2001
Grist | Books | The Skeptical Environmentalist | 12 Dec 2001
deforestation:
Grist | Books | The Skeptical Environmentalist | 12 Dec 2001
public health:
Grist | Books | The Skeptical Environmentalist | 12 Dec 2001
and other issues:
Grist | Books | The Skeptical Environmentalist | 12 Dec 2001
The Union of Concerned Scientists also authored a highly critical analysis of Lomborg’s first book. They state:
The Skeptical Environmentalist | Union of Concerned Scientists
"Lomborg’s book is seriously flawed and fails to meet basic standards of credible scientific analysis. The authors note how Lomborg consistently misuses, misrepresents or misinterprets data to greatly underestimate rates of species extinction, ignore evidence that billions of people lack access to clean water and sanitation, and minimize the extent and impacts of global warming due to the burning of fossil fuels and other human-caused emissions of heat-trapping gases. Time and again, these experts find that Lomborg’s assertions and analyses are marred by flawed logic, inappropriate use of statistics and hidden value judgments. He uncritically and selectively cites literature—often not peer-reviewed— that supports his assertions, while ignoring or misinterpreting scientific evidence that does not."
But enough about him, his work belongs to the intellectual scrap-heap, and possibly deliberate deception. I hear what you're saying, and of course I agree - we will need adaptation (which will be costly, it's not just New York and London, soon it's Washington and Singapore, every low-lying river delta from Mississippi to the Nile, and all low-lying coastal infrastructure and real estate everywhere) - but without mitigation, it will not work for long. Additionally we have increasing drought and heat waves, floods, fires, ocean acidification etc. to contend with. And as far as geoengineering goes, we will probably need it too, but we don't even have the tools for it yet, let alone the knowledge what possible consequences might come out of it.
Entire books:
The Lomborg Deception - Friel, Howard; Lovejoy, Thomas E. - Yale University Press
and entire websites have been written about his errors:
Lomborg Errors
Sourcewatch has a good summary on him, too:
Bjorn Lomborg - SourceWatch
Not surprisingly, he's a recommended "expert" by the Heartland institute:
The Heartland Institute | DeSmogBlog
What he typically does:
Debunking Bj¸rn Lomborg -- Part II, Misrepresenting Sea Level Rise | ThinkProgress
Skepticism toward The Skeptical Environmentalist: Scientific American
Lomborg has a history of selectively using of facts and statistics to make points that are counterfactual. Remember his first book, the Skeptical Environmentalist? In an unprecedented move, the editors of Scientific American printed an editorial calling him on his sophistry. After three months of debates on the pages of Scientific American — in which Lomborg was given as much space to rebut as he wanted, his entire book lay in tatters, exposed as the intellectual junk it was.
They further described Lomborg's text as having "misrepresented the actual positions of environmentalists and scientists" with an analysis that was "marred by invalidating errors that include a narrow, biased reading of the literature, an inadequate understanding of the science, and quotations taken out of context."
John P. Holdren, one of the Scientific American authors noted: "It is instructive that [Lomborg] apparently did not feel he could manage an adequate response by himself (In this, at least, he was correct. But he could not manage it with help, either)."
And it's not just climate science; he's been known to promote entirely wrong conclusions in other areas he knows nothing about, such as
biodiversity and extinction:
Grist | Books | The Skeptical Environmentalist | 12 Dec 2001
Grist | Books | The Skeptical Environmentalist | 12 Dec 2001
deforestation:
Grist | Books | The Skeptical Environmentalist | 12 Dec 2001
public health:
Grist | Books | The Skeptical Environmentalist | 12 Dec 2001
and other issues:
Grist | Books | The Skeptical Environmentalist | 12 Dec 2001
The Union of Concerned Scientists also authored a highly critical analysis of Lomborg’s first book. They state:
The Skeptical Environmentalist | Union of Concerned Scientists
"Lomborg’s book is seriously flawed and fails to meet basic standards of credible scientific analysis. The authors note how Lomborg consistently misuses, misrepresents or misinterprets data to greatly underestimate rates of species extinction, ignore evidence that billions of people lack access to clean water and sanitation, and minimize the extent and impacts of global warming due to the burning of fossil fuels and other human-caused emissions of heat-trapping gases. Time and again, these experts find that Lomborg’s assertions and analyses are marred by flawed logic, inappropriate use of statistics and hidden value judgments. He uncritically and selectively cites literature—often not peer-reviewed— that supports his assertions, while ignoring or misinterpreting scientific evidence that does not."
But enough about him, his work belongs to the intellectual scrap-heap, and possibly deliberate deception. I hear what you're saying, and of course I agree - we will need adaptation (which will be costly, it's not just New York and London, soon it's Washington and Singapore, every low-lying river delta from Mississippi to the Nile, and all low-lying coastal infrastructure and real estate everywhere) - but without mitigation, it will not work for long. Additionally we have increasing drought and heat waves, floods, fires, ocean acidification etc. to contend with. And as far as geoengineering goes, we will probably need it too, but we don't even have the tools for it yet, let alone the knowledge what possible consequences might come out of it.
Last edited:
nanoboy
Well-Known Member
Dammit. I keep forgetting about this thread Saola. Your posts are very detailed and are good reads. Man, you really hate the guy. 
So, just to piss you off, I will try to find a photo I have somewhere of me and Bjorn when he came to Melbourne. I asked him what he thought about Michael Crichton referencing his book heavily in his novel 'State of Fear'. I don't think he was pleased that Crichton mentioned his work from his response.
So, just to piss you off, I will try to find a photo I have somewhere of me and Bjorn when he came to Melbourne.
I asked him what he thought about Michael Crichton referencing his book heavily in his novel 'State of Fear'. I don't think he was pleased that Crichton mentioned his work from his response.