In case you haven't researched it,  the polar bear reference Gore made in An Inconvenient Truth: 
'For the first time every a significant number of polar bears are drowning"  turned out to be another Gore exaggeration.  If you'd like a reference, post a request.  Only four dead polar bears were sited in that study, hardly significant.  In fact, the polar bear population has doubled over the last few decades because they like most warm blooded mammals reproduce at higher rates in warmer environments.  Please read the following and at the very least watch the presentation by following the link below:

I had the good fortune to attend a Christopher Monckton presentation Tuesday night.  It is easy to see why Al Gore is afraid of him.  He  (Monckton) is a very honest man on a genuine mission to spread the truth.

He didn't even tell people that he has a DVD for sale on the Science and Public Policy website.  He has no connections to big oil or coal.  He is  obviously isn't doing this for the money.  Lord knows that can't be said of Gore who stands to make a billion if cap and trade legislation goes through in the U.S. Monckton said during the presentation that Gore told the committee last Friday that if Monckton showed up, he wouldn't.  Gore has been running from Monckton for years.  As I said, it's with good reason. 

Monckton would tear Gore apart in a one on one debate.  Anyone who doubts Monckton's abilities should view Apocalypse? No! which is a tape of a presentation he made at Cambridge. 

His presentation Tuesday is still available for free online:

http://yct.tamu.edu/

You can also view Monckton's review of the 35 errors in Gore's Sci-Fi Comedy Horror Flick:

An Inconvenient Truth on my website:

http://www.hootervillegazette.com/AlGoreTheater.html

Lord Monckton's Written works are available by following this link:

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton/

I'll close with this.  I admire your willingness to get involved with this or any issue that is aimed at bettering the planet.  I wish you had all been around to stop environmental efforts to ban DDT.  40,000,000 lives would have been saved if you had.

Dash RIPROCK III

Mr. "Riprock the Third's" misunderstandings of the status of polar bear populations are common ones.  I'll address them in a post to the blog.

Hooray for the revoking of Section 7! Now let's do the same for the 4(d) rule.

And I'm looking forward to your post on common misconceptions, like the comment above yours, Emily.

@Dash RIPROCK III:

Polar bear drownings are significant in that they did not take place before the sea ice began to thin, shrink, and recede due to global warming. It's important to look at the information on polar bear drownings in that way, and in the broader context of other significant impacts to polar bears because of the loss of their sea ice habitat.

I'll address the facts of polar bear drownings first, and then move on to create the broader context.

The first and only documented mass polar bear drowning event was recorded in 2004, when researchers with the U.S. Minerals Management Service discovered the carcasses of four bears that had drowned in the Beaufort Sea during a period of high winds and rough seas between September 10 and 13, 2004. Because the scientists were able to observe only a relatively small area during their aerial surveys, they estimated that up to 27 bears may have died during this time. The researchers warned that polar bear drownings may be a more serious threat to polar bear populations overall than previously understood and may increase as global warming continues to melt the sea ice.

On August 16th, 2008, surveys documented nine polar bears swimming in open water off the northwestern coast of Alaska in the Chukchi Sea, in an area recently opened for offshore oil exploration. One bear was more than 50 miles from land. Surveys in the same area were not possible the following day, due to high seas. A shorter survey in adjacent areas on August 18th documented one swimming bear. While polar bears are excellent swimmers, they are at increased risk of drowning in stormy conditions when swimming in open water far from the land or ice.

Now, on to your other statement about polar bear populations increasing:

Polar bear populations did increase for a few decades, but that increase was due to a ban on sport hunting implemented in the 1970s. Today, polar bears are in trouble. Global warming and the loss of sea ice is now affecting polar bears in significant ways and some populations are already in decline (specifically, the Hudson Bay, Southern Beaufort Sea and Chukchi Sea populations). In addition to increased drownings and population declines, scientists are reporting bears losing weight, spending more time on land fasting as they wait for sea ice to form, and, for the first time ever, polar bears have been cannibalizing eachother due to food-related stress. 

The US Geological Survey predicts that by 2050, 2/3 of the world's polar bears will disappear, including all of the polar bears in the United States/Alaska. This prediction is based on conservative climate models and could well be optimistic.

Against the backdrop of all of the current science, your statement that polar bear populations have increased is outdated, out of context, and misleading.

The bottom line is that polar bears depend on the sea ice for every aspect of their life cycle: from breeding and raising their young to travel and hunting for their primary prey species, seals. They cannot live without the sea ice. Given the projections for sea ice loss and an ice-free Arctic in summer as early as 2010, the plight of polar bears is indeed grim if global warming continues unchecked.

Well, Mike's stolen most of my thunder on polar bears!  But I'll do something up for the blog as well, in the future, since the science around this is really interesting, and ongoing.

First of all, please let me say that this site is full of nice people.  You'd be surprised at the ad hominem attacks one finds on other sites.  BTW, I will spend tomorrow as I spent last Saturday, half a day planting trees as part of our county beautification program.  Just because one is skeptical of AGW doesn't mean that one can't be at least a little green.

Emily, Please "do something up" for the blog.  I will add this site to my list of favorites and keep checking back from time to time. I'd like to see what you have to add to Mike's comments.

Mike all you've said is of Course predicated on the fact that you believe CO2 emissions are leading to truly significant anthropogenic global warming.  Otherwise, cutting CO2 emissions is not going to do any good.  I'm truly trying to
balance my reading on this, but so far in my opinion the skeptics are making a better argument.  We can get into this at another time.  For now, the polar bears.

Mike, no matter how you slice it, Gore was exaggerating when he said a significant number of polar bears are drowning when he was in fact quoting a study with four dead polar bears drowning under unusually high storm conditions.  He did not mean it's never happened before so now it's significant.

It may or may not surprise you that Gore has openly admitted he thinks exaggeration is acceptable.  Ponder the following quote if you will:

"In the United States of America, unfortunately we still live in a bubble of unreality. And the Category 5 denial is an enormous obstacle to any discussion of solutions. Nobody is interested in solutions if they don’t think there’s a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous (global warming) is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis." — Al Gore

Perhaps he could have put it more succinctly, "Unless We Announce Disaster, No One Will Listen" — Sir John Houghton, first chairman of IPCC.

I can't say I've ever been in debate where the other side admits upfront they're going to be over-representing the facts.  That's why I believe he  tried to imply that there were in fact more than four polar bears that had died.

I immediately red flagged your comment that polar bear drownings did not take place before the sea ice began to thin...due to global warming.  I must first ask you where you got the idea that the sea ice has never thinned, shrank or receded before?  For the record, are you suggesting that in the history of this planet or for that matter recent history (say the last 110 years) it has never happened before?  That the only time it has ever happened is now because of global warming?  If so, that's quite a re-write of climatological history you've just completed.  I'll wait for your answer before I waste a lot of time correcting this.  It's possible I've misunderstood you.  If you do agree that this has happened before, you might also agree that it happened well before man was putting out enough CO2 to be the cause.  I might also ask how man and the polar bears survived it before?

As for the polar bear study Gore cited, some estimates go actually go as high as  40 possible deaths, but again these are just estimates.  What we know for certain is that four polar bears died.  That is what was observed and that's what we have to go with for now.


The following is a quote from Lord Monckton's review of Al Gore's film:

The amount of sea ice in the Beautfort Sea  has grown over the last 30 years, not been reduced.  A report for the World Wide Fund for Nature shows that polar bears, which are warm-blooded, have grown in numbers where temperature has increased and become fewer where temperature has fallen.  Polar bears evolved from brown bears 200,000 years ago, and survived  the last interglacial period, when global temperature was 5 degrees Celsius warmer than the present and there was probably no Arctic ice-cap at all.  The real threat to polar bears (as you've already mentioned Mike)  is not global warming, but hunting.  In 1940 there just 5,000 polar bears worldwide.  Now that hunting is controlled there are 25,000.  2007 was indeed the lowest year ever for sea ice measured via satellite, but the satellite records only back 27 years.  The North-West passage, a good  proxy for Arctic sea-ice extent, was open to shipping in 1945.  Amundsen passed through in a sailing vessel in 1903.

As for the Geological Survey prediction based on climate models, I would argue that these model are "garbage in garbage out."  Didn't AGW supporters learn a very embarrassing lesson when M&M of Canada ripped apart Mann's Hockey stick graph.  If I'm not mistaken Mann had rigged the model to spit out a hockey stick no matter what.  Even random statistical noise plugged into this whopper generator spit out a hockey stick looking graph.  I'm sorry Mike, but AGW supporters aren't going to be able to wish away the Medieval Warm period or the Little Ice age.  They are in fact a matter of recorded human history.
See the works of Brian Fagan for several rather enjoyable reads on the subject.

According to Canadian arctic biologist Mitch Taylor, in the warmer southern areas of their range in Canada, bear populations are exploding with some of the biggest  clubs born on record.

Chris Horner may have gotten it right when he said the biggest threat to polar bears may in fact be computer models.

Mike, Emily, Bethany, and Samantha, please at least click on the links I provided above.  It might well give us topics for future discussion.

Mike, I hope at some point you'll  share a link to your Sci-Fi works.  I need to read something more than books and papers on AGW.  - Dash

Has this paper been published in a peer-reviewed journal?  I'd be curious to read the responses to it.  The axe the authors grind with "Environmental Organizations" is extremely unusual in published scholarly research; it doesn't reflect well on their credibility or objectivity.