How to save the polar bears

Here is a radical plan to save the planet, or to be more accurate, just the Arctic. In a paper published in Earth’s Future, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, researchers from Arizona State University propose building 10-100 million floating wind-powered pumps designed to spray water over sea ice during the winter. The lower number represents a “scaled-down” version that would cover 10% of the Arctic at a low-low cost of $500bn. It is calculated that it would add one extra metre of ice every winter. You can find the whole paper here, but I warn you, like all academic papers, it is long, tedious, and full of big words and complex mathematical formula; in other words, its extremely boring.

I’ll give the scientists an “A” for thinking outside the box but at the same time I’m puzzled why climate experts on the Arctic are based at the University of Arizona. At least they admit “There are questions about the feasibility… The engineering challenges of translating even such a common technology to the harsh environment of the Arctic are daunting” before going on to discuss a litany of reasons why this idea may not work. Then they get to the crux of the paper, “Questions about the feasibility of the device and its local effects are probably best solved by building a prototype and experimenting with it in the field.” Translated from academic-speak, this means give me grant money to go try out my bat-shit crazy theory in the Arctic as it will get me away from the Arizona desert for a while and give me a reason to justify my existence and salary for the next decade.

http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/save-the-arctic-with-5-trillion-of-floating-wind-powered-ice-machines-researchers-recommend

Rebuilding the Arctic ice caps seems to me to be doomed from the start because if the cause is worsening global warming, won’t all that new ice just melt as well? This is almost akin to the idiot who leaves the refrigerator door open during a heat wave to cool off his house. You know, first law of thermodynamics and all; energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred. The only way to save the Arctic ice caps is to eliminate global warming and the greenhouse gases that are causing it. No I don’t mean cutting carbon emissions, there’s no way I’m giving up my home heating, V8 sports car and my jet setting ways. I mean stopping the sun’s harmful rays from reaching the earth in the first place by shielding the planet from all that cosmic radiation and other bad stuff the sun keeps bombarding us with.

I mean really, the sun is the most environmentally unfriendly thing around being a gigantic ball of nuclear gas and all. Eventually, that bugger is going to kill us all with some giant solar flare or sun spots or some other weird sun thing. Let’s face it, mother Sol is nothing more than a big bully, a giant burning ball of gas that mocks its tiny rocky satellites with the constant threat of burning them to a cinder with the eruption of a coronal mass ejection (doesn’t that sound phallic and misogynistic?)

Yes, the science of climate change is incontrovertible… and yet the scientists themselves don’t seem to have a clue what is going on. Even the actual “rocket scientists” at NASA, who seem to spend more time writing climate reports these days than actually exploring space like they are supposed to be doing, seem to be unable to accurately predict what’s going on with our sun. They use 100 years or less of not-so-great data to predict a “cycle” for a sun that has been around for billions of years and then are surprised when things don’t work out like they thought it would.

And then these other scientists comes out to tell us that there is going to be a mini-ice age by 2030 due to diminishing solar activity. Oh crap, what should we do? Maybe we should burn more fossil fuels and emit more greenhouse gasses to ameliorate this global cooling.

The minute someone quotes that 97% of scientists agree about man-made climate change, you can pretty much ignore that person as a liberal demagogue uninterested in facts unless they support their predetermined point of view. You can check it out yourself if you want to bother with the truth. The 97% number is a fiction, a number made up by the Obama White House selectively and incorrectly quoting studies that themselves are suspect in their conclusions. Put it this way, have you known 97% of people to agree on anything let alone something as controversial as climate change? You can say that the vast majority of people believe in making abortion legal if you extend that definition to those who think it should only be allowed in the first trimester and only in the cases of rape and incest. That is a far cry from saying they support abortion on demand and that its 100% the woman’s choice but you can distort the statistics by lumping them into the category that supports abortion (with an asterix). Similarly, you can say that 97% of scientists agree that there may be climate change and it may be related to man-made activity. Even I would fall into that category because it doesn’t address many issues including the severity of the climate change, in what time frame will it happen and if man-made emissions are the largest or even primary cause of the climate change or just a contributing factor.

You seriously didn’t think I meant making a giant umbrella to cover the planet did you? That’s as stupid as suggesting we build 100 million ten tonne wind-powered floating water pumps in the Arctic. While it would probably keep all those poor peasant labourers employed in Asia for the next decade to make an umbrella that size, that’s probably not a very feasible idea. I mean, even if we could make it, how the heck are we going to get that big-ass umbrella into space and into a geosynchronous orbit with the Earth? What I meant was give me a Gajillion dollars of taxpayers money to do research into a “high-tech” space defense “Star Wars” style force field to shield out the suns harmful rays. It could be turned off too if we needed more solar energy so if the ice-age guys are right, we can just shut it off for a few decades. I have no idea how this would work or the technology behind it because it doesn’t exist or is even close to existing outside the realm of science fiction. But I have a cool photo of how it may look like if it was possible, that I conveniently stole off the internet, so how about it? Just give me a few billion dollars and I’ll fix everything because “questions about the feasibility of the device and its local effects are probably best solved by building a prototype and experimenting with it in the field”.

All this talk about man-made climate change ignores that fact that Earth’s climate has been changing constantly and substantially ever since the planet was formed. One doesn’t have to go back millions of years to the dinosaurs and mass extinctions to see huge changes in the planet’s climate. Take the last ice age where the Laurentide Ice Sheet covered most of Canada and the northern United States for 75,000 years between 95,000BC to 20,000BC and then rapidly began to contract without the aid of man and his evil fossil fuel burning ways. This also conveniently gave me an excuse to learn how to create an animated GIF file from video and imbed it into a webpage. Pretty cool huh? If this is the result of climate change and global warming, then on behalf Canada, I would like to vote in favour because its cold enough up here without a glacier 3km thick covering the land.

I took a trip up the Columbia icefields a few years ago, and visited the Athabasca glacier, one of the few remaining glaciers from the last ice age. They have nice little commemorative plaques telling you where the glacier was (it is still receding) on certain years. In 1844, you can see that the glacier covered the parking lot where the tourist center is now located. By 1908, the glacier had retreated to the highway that runs through the park today. In both photos, you can see the glacier in the background.

My older brother, living proof that intelligence is not completely hereditary, decided to give me a sermon about global warming and how man was causing the glacier to recede when we drove through Edmonton on the way home. This freaking glacier has been receding for the past 20,000 years and he wants to tell me the cause is because we’ve been driving SUV’s for the past century? And my walking on the glacier and drinking 20,000 year old glacier run off water while throwing snowballs at my kids has also contributed to the erosion as well. Most likely, I’ll have ingested some alien virus that was frozen in the glacier 20,000 years ago from a crashed UFO and it is causing me to mutate into some alien-human hybrid that is going to destroy humanity… I think I’ll start with those arrogant jerks at Greenpeace first…

UPDATE 1 (24 February 2018): Here’s a great news piece about Polar Bears. Polar bear battle in Toronto! It’s good science vs. climate do-gooders. It’s funny how environmentalists love to talk about how science is incontrovertible when even the scientists are tired of being abused by them and have issued a very clear statement that there is nothing incontrovertible about it. Plus when the science goes against them, they then engage in ad hominem arguments by calling any scientist who questions their religious eco-disaster orthodoxy as being heretics… I mean sellouts to corporate interests. Here’s the gist of it:

Coming next Tuesday to Toronto’s swanky Yorkville district, it’s the 2018 Polar Bear Showdown, an international display of conflicting views on the state of polar-bear science. Are the great, charismatic creatures, all white, cuddly-looking and dangerous, caught in the death grip of climate change?

At one corner in Yorkville, in the ballroom of the upmarket Four Seasons Hotel, Polar Bears International (PBI) will stage a grand, $15,000-a-table gala to raise funds to protect the allegedly threatened Arctic species from the ravages of our addiction to fossil fuels. Sponsored by a klatch of corporate goody-two-shoes — a couple of Canadian banks, a major accounting outfit, The Globe and Mail — and filled with razzle-dazzle entertainment and good food, the purpose of the event is to mark International Polar Bear Day and draw attention to PBI’s science-based effort to sound a global polar-bear alarm.

At another corner, exactly one block away, in the Founders’ Room at the down-market Toronto Reference Library, the Global Warming Policy Foundation of London, England will launch a new report on the state of polar bears by Susan Crockford, adjunct professor at the University of Victoria. There will be no entertainment, and no food, but the science will be far superior… “Polar bear experts who falsely predicted that roughly 17,300 polar bears would be dead by now (given sea ice conditions since 2007) have realized their failure has not only kicked their own credibility to the curb, it has taken with it the reputations of their climate change colleagues.”

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