Video Shows Starving Polar Bear on Iceless Land
news.nationalgeographic.com
news.nationalgeographic.com
So while this video might evoke a strong emotional response, it is just an anecdote and not actually evidence one way or the other for human-caused climate change.
Of course, human-caused climate change is obviously real, but it's not OK to use bad arguments even if your conclusion is correct.
EDIT: To clarify further, I am not disputing that polar bears are not being harmed by climate change, or even that the particular bear in the video is not starving because of climate change. I am merely pointing out that one could produce a video of a starving polar bear both in our world and in the world where climate change is not happening, because wild animals starve all the time.
Good thing most people already know we don't live in the world where climate change is not happening, so this doesn't need to act as proof of it happening, but rather as an individual example of what is happening all over.
Nonetheless it is not evidence for climate change, and moreover it is not even necessarily an example of the effects of climate change - even we 100% fix climate change, there will still be plenty of starving wild animals available for sad videos.
The actual way to ensure there are no starving wild animals is to exterminate them in the wild. But that's probably not a good idea.
> By telling the story of one polar bear, Nicklen hopes to convey a larger message about how a warming climate has deadly consequences.
That's a troubling turn of phrase.
Most people don't understand science at the same level as many of the participants in HN. They are not bad people, and they are not necessarily ignorant people. But they don't base their decision-making process on scientific principles. Someone needs to reach out to these people and help them understand the world we live in.
Ten minutes on Fox News and similar sites should convince anyone that Climate Change deniers understand how to influence people and do all they can to advocate for those who profit from policies that harm our world. We have to use the available tools to counter their arguments.
If they don’t understand it is their loss. You can bet against them in the capitalist system. Sell them houses near coastlines. If they’re truly ignorant and you are in fact backed by science and facts, then you can profit off of them.
But if you can justify doing this for people you consider not worthy of the facts because they probably can’t understand it, then you can justify it with anyone.
This is the same rationale for why the FBI or law enforcement want more power. People don’t understand that thy are the GOOD guys and they won’t abuse their power.
If the good guys—the people backed by science in this case—lose their accountability to actual science by being good at propoganda and manipulation, why even bother with science? They’ll become bad guys soon enough when they finally realize the facts never mattered.
When propoganda is spewed from both sides the only way to tell is to have facts based on reality that people can independently verify. That’s the whole point of backed by science. If you deny people the option to independently verify then you deny them the ability to find out who’s right and who’s wrong. At that point are you any different from the bad guys?
This muddies the water and gives me great doubt to the veracity of the overall claim. If man-caused global warming were happening, the data would show it. Why fake the data?
Perhaps because data proving anthropomorphic climate change does not exist and it must be manufactured? But it has become a near religious issue and dissent is not tolerated. Daring to ask for proof is a thoughtcrime.
They corrected a known design flaw in the temperature recorder. This isn't freaking tweaking, it's properly accounting for external variables. The fact that you bring this up shows once again that depth of knowledge and experience in one field does not automatically translate to another field. I'm going to break it down in a way I'm pretty sure you'll understand. Back when the browser wars were going on web pages would have to "tweak" their code so that a page would display properly. Just because someone had to write a bit of code because because of a flaw in the browser didn't mean that the data from the website was a lie.
The thing with the seal level rise? Is this that old Morner chestnut that's been thoroughly debunked numerous times and has been around since the early aughts? The guy was found himself to be falsifying data but every few years someone trots this out as new and it's just not. I mean it's a pretty straightforward well known phenomenon that adding more water to a body of water will make it rise and since we are losing land ice we're adding more water to the ocean. You can easily replicate this by putting an ice cube in a glass of water.
There's mountains of proof of human caused global warming and really it's basic science, but none of that matters because if you choose not to believe the proof there is nothing anyone can say to you to make you believe otherwise. No one can make you stop believing hucksters and conspiracy theorists. You can dissent all you want, but it doesn't make you right.
"The whistle was blown by two Australian scientists Dr. Albert Parker and Dr. Clifford Ollier in a paper for Earth Systems and Environment."
It's another example in a long line of data "adjustments" that turn science on its head, showing the opposite of what is actually observed. I call it fakery. You have other words. We disagree.
As I said, it muddies the waters. There may be real evidence, but this fraud doesn't help the cause.
[1] https://quantpalaeo.wordpress.com/2016/03/20/albert-parker-h...
[0]: http://ww2.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/bird-and-wildlife-...
The only question is would we be ready when things start rolling faster than we could control?
You could generalise that to:-
Most rich countries acknowledge <foo is a problem> and try to come up with solutions. The big outlier is the US.
Where <foo> is healthcare, corporate governance, lobbying, women's rights, racism, income equality, prison incarceration rates, police brutality.
Growing up in the UK in the 80's I was fascinated by America and planned on one day visiting if not living there.
Now? If I leave the UK (and I probably will) it'll likely be Germany or Holland, they aren't perfect (what is?) but they look a lot better than the US/UK these days.
I'm pretty tired of it to be honest, I don't recognise this country any more.
Might as well trade in four-leaf clovers. They're solar generated, renewable, organic, gluten free, etc. etc. etc. And just as worthless. Let me take that back. At least clovers can be plowed back into the soil and used to improve the earth.
What the world needs is to wake up from this nonsense and get back to actually making tangible products and quit obsessing on ways to sell mindshare of fellow citizens as if it is a commodity.
It's rough.
Between it's inability to work as a payment method at scale (transactions per minute), exchanges running off with client bitcoins, exchanges getting broken into constantly and the shady way it's handled when that happens and on and on.
I'm not saying the idea is fundamentally useless (clearly) but the implementation is terrible.
I might be wrong and in 20 years I'll be getting paid in BTC but I'd bet that isn't the case.
A single Bitcoin transaction currently use as much engery as energy spent in a single home for days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
There are multiple reports now out detailing and comparing energy use of traditional transactional fiat money vs. the new schemes
They provided their evidence as to why it's not a jump to link it to global warming -- where is your evidence that it is, in fact, a jump?
I'm certainly not denying climate change is wiping out polar bears, just that this shows good evidence of that.
The article states bears starve through summer until sea ice forms on which they catch seals .. but the image is from Summer, when the sea ice presumably is yet to form. I guess it could be cumulative from the previous Summer being too warm; again it's not good, clear evidence as it's presented.
Could someone answer where the seals go? I'd have expected if they weren't resting/mating on sea-ice that they'd rest on land and actually be easier to catch? Do they instead stay at sea?
Which is not to doubt global warming and it's effect on polar bear populations. Just that this particular bear is not really evidence.
It is very easy to draw a line from warming to lack of sea ice in a place where our living record shows there should be ample amounts to polar bears in Baffin starving. This is not a jump.