A couple of months ago the journal Polar Biology published a paper about a polar bear's having chased a reindeer into the sea, caught it, drowned it, dragged the carcass back to land, and feasted on it. "Yes, they can: polar bears Ursus maritimus successfully hunt Svalbard reindeer Rangifer tarandus platyrhynchus" didn't make a lot of noise at first and probably didn't deserve to.But count on popular media to spin and hype what's actually mundane if it can be tied, even speculatively, to … [Read more...]
Healthy Polar Bears and Thriving Tigers: The Common Climate Tale
Last year, the world applauded Greta Thunberg’s emotional “How Dare You!” speech at the UN summit in New York. The teenager famously said, “Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction.” The mainstream media’s narrative is similar. Ecosystems are dying. Animals are going extinct. Our evil desire to consume fossil fuels is to blame! What do you think? Are species going extinct because of manmade global warming? Christians, who honor God as Creator, should … [Read more...]
Eco-anxiety: A dangerous and unscientific doomsday construct
“Eco-anxiety” is now a popular term. It is being increasingly used in the media to describe an anxiety condition resulting from the fears about the coming environmental destruction.Climate Xchange for example, defines Eco-anxiety as a “feeling of stress, grief, helplessness, and fear of uncertainty associated with the grim outlook for our climatic and ecological systems if business continues as usual.” The American Psychological Association defines Eco-anxiety as “a chronic fear of … [Read more...]
Beyond the Blinders: Economic Progress in the Age of Radical Environmentalism
The dominant global narrative is that the world is overpopulated and we are exhausting natural resources.With the ongoing hysteria surrounding climate change, some even go so far as to suggest that human population growth is the cancer of the earth.But what if I told you that these fears are baseless? That innovation and invention are making resources less scarce over time, even as population and resource consumption rise? That our ability to adapt improves as the world changes?Here are … [Read more...]
The Myth That the Polar Bear Population Is Declining
Many of us watched the viral video in horror. A starving polar bear scavenging for food on barren land, his ribs visible beneath a jaundiced white coat.“This is what climate change looks like,” said National Geographic.The magazine explained that because of melting sea ice, precipitated by climate change, more of these mammals are starving. They pointed to a new study in Science suggesting that polar bears require much greater caloric intake in their diet than previously believed.The video, shot … [Read more...]
Baby, Is It Really Cold Outside? Christmas and Climate Change
“Baby, It’s Cold Outside” is an Academy Award-winning popular song by Frank Loesser and is regarded as a Christmas song because of its winter theme. It became popular in the 1940s. Recently it made news for wrong reasons. Some radio stations banned the holiday standard owing to pressure from feminists and the #MeToo movement, while others continued to play it. But I am more interested in the “cold winter” aspect that the song portrays. Is Christmas cold any longer? Did climate change make … [Read more...]
The Astonishing Failures of Al Gore’s Arctic Prophecies
In his 2007 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Al Gore claimed that there is “a 75 percent chance the entire polar ice cap will melt in summer within the next five to seven years.” Well, eleven years have gone by, and Arctic ice is doing fine. Why do politicians like Gore make blatantly false claims? The Arctic ice sheet has been the heart of climate-change debate. So much so, both climate-change alarmists and climate-change skeptics have often erred by relying exclusively on the … [Read more...]
How Are Polar Bear Extinction Fears Like Global Warming Fears?
By now the message is old hat to everybody, but in case you've forgotten, here's how Greenpeace puts it: "polar bears could completely disappear from the Arctic in the next 100 years if we don’t take action soon." Ah, right. Except that it's dead wrong. The chief reason? Just as is the case with fears of dangerous manmade global warming, those making the claim depend entirely on computer models, models that are at best not verified and at worst falsified by empirical observation—the "key to … [Read more...]
Yes, Virginia, the polar bears are alive and well. Just ask the Inuit.
by William D. Balgord The following report should serve as the coup de gras for demolishing the lame arguments behind the EPA endangerment finding. That watershed policy action relied on a false assumption that the polar bear is, or soon would be, threatened with extinction as a result of rapid climate change (viz., thinning ice in its Arctic habitat) in turn being forced by man-made greenhouse gases. According to a growing list of recent studies and contrary to popular opinion, the polar … [Read more...]
New video debunks polar bear extinction scare
Polar bear expert Susan Crockford explodes the myth that global warming threatens polar bears in a new video from the Global Warming Policy Foundation. The numbers tell the story: global polar bear population has risen to over 30,000 despite decline in summer Arctic sea ice extent. … [Read more...]
