Bi-Polar Bears Life Depends On YOUR Vote!!!

Bush dithers, Arctic withers


European scientists leaked to the New York Times excerpts of a major new report about the impacts of global warming on the Arctic. Among its conclusions: The retreat of the Arctic ice sheet could be devastating to polar bears, ice-dwelling seals and the native people who eat them. The report was due to be published on Nov. 9, but apparently the scientists felt that voters should know about it before Nov. 2.

The study finds that "while some historical changes in climate have resulted from natural causes and variations, the strength of the trends and the patterns of change that have emerged in recent decades indicate that human influences, resulting primarily from increased emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, have now become the dominant factor," according to Andrew C. Revkin's Page A-1 story in Saturday's New York Times.

The conclusions of the four-year study -- commissioned by eight nations with Arctic territory, and based on research by almost 300 scientists -- are yet another rebuke of the Bush administration's do-nothing policy on global warming. By embracing fringe science, Bush has maintained that the verdict is still out on whether human activities are a major factor in the world's heating up.

The European scientists, offering their own October surprise, apparently concluded that the polar bear couldn't take four more years.

http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/archive.html?blog=/politics/war_room/2004/10/30/polar_bear/index.html



Please do your part!!!

How are humans animals? Last time I checked I crapped in the toilet and slept in a bed. My dog doesn't do any of these things. My dog doesn't drive and neither does a deer in the woods. Can your pet read a book or type on the computer? I don't know of any animals that have the abilities that we humans have.

You can think of your self as an animal if you want but I consider myself a human.

... Since CO2 gas absorbs and emits infra-red at wavelengths of 12 microns and above, this means it exerts its greatest leverage when the surface or atmospheric temperature is very cold, such as exists at the polar regions. This is why all the models predict the greatest warming at the poles. A further reason for this polar warming bias in the models is that a small CO2 warming is predicted to increase relative humidity in the colder, dry air. It is less able to so in the more water-saturated atmosphere of the tropics.

Herein lies the most significant Achilles heel of the greenhouse scenario. Since the models predict such large warming at the poles, we need only examine the station records from those very regions to assess just how powerful (or weak) the CO2 greenhouse really is. Fortunately, we need not be overwhelmed by thousands of stations (good and bad) as exist in populated regions. Nor do we need employ esoteric statistical processes. Stations in polar regions are fewer in number and generally are better maintained. Generally they are scientifically supervised and free of urbanization effects. There are no cities or car parks in our planet's polar regions.

In the case of the Antarctic, the majority of stations show no warming, not even at the U.S. Amundsen-Scott Base at the South Pole, nor at the Russian Vostok Base high on the Antarctic ice plateau (which holds the all-time record for the coldest temperature ever recorded on the earth's surface: 1983's -89.2°C). Some stations even report a cooling trend. This is significant because if CO2 cannot exert leverage in these, the coldest, driest, places on the planet, it is unlikely it can have any significant effect elsewhere. These station records are included in the Appendix to this report.

The only part of the Antarctic that has warmed in recent decades is the 2% of the Antarctic land mass represented by the Antarctic Peninsula. This is the only part of that landmass to lie partly outside the Antarctic Circle. It is thus exposed to the temperate effects of the Southern Ocean. The remaining 98% of the continent has not been warming in spite of temperatures being cold enough to allow CO2 to exert a strong warming influence .

Faced with this lack of polar atmospheric warming, some scientists speculate that the reason may lay with the energy of latent heat transfer. Whenever ice melts, a large amount of energy is used up to facilitate the melting process, leaving the temperature temporarily static at the freezing/melting point of water, i.e. 0°C (or -2°C in the case of sea water). Might this latent heat transfer be a genuine reason for lack of polar warming? Or is it merely a thin pretext to explain it away?

We need look no further than our stations for the answer. The latent heat argument might hold up in areas where the ice exposed to the atmosphere was already melting, such as at the sea-ice fringes where the pack ice meets open water. However, station records show this not to be the case. There is a lack of warming not only at the sea-ice fringes, but also well inland in Siberia (e.g.. Olenek, Dzardzan, Reboly, Turuhansk) and inland in Antarctica (South Pole and Vostok), well away from any possible latent heat transfer effects. Such effects cannot occur at sub-zero temperatures. Even the coastal stations in Antarctica such as Mawson Base show no warming, even though it is closer to the sea-ice fringe.

As for those stations in the Arctic that are ice-free (such as those along the coast of northern Norway), here again the latent heat argument does not apply because the open sea is already free to warm up without the delaying effects of latent heat extraction from ice melt, there being no ice to melt. Here we find the same lack of warming at stations like Vardo on the Arctic coast of Norway, and at Akureyri on the north coast of Iceland ...