We know transparency’s gone out the window for many public officials, but still: Since early August, I’ve been checking daily for Problem Polar Bear Reports issued by the Churchill Polar Bear Alert Program managed by Manitoba Conservation. This morning (12 September), five reports were posted at once on the Town of Churchill website, dating back to first of the season for the week of August 5-11, see image below.
It’s apparent that the intent of these reports is in part public safety: to raise awareness of the potential threat of wandering polar bears around the town of Churchill because of the language that appears on virtually every report: “stay vigilant”, “be bear smart,” “be bear aware,” etc.
However, the X account for Town of Churchill seems to have been abandoned (last post 19 April 2024), which suggests the town is confident no residents or tourists would benefit from Alerts on X that polar bears are ashore:
The town’s Facebook account seems to be their only method of public communication yet even there, there have been no Polar Bear Alert reports posted this summer.
Oddly, even though it is now apparent from the just-released reports that one bear got so close to town that it had to captured and put in the ‘polar bear jail’ the week of 5-11 August — for the public’s safety — the only safety announcement the town issued that week was a ‘heat warning’ on 12 August:
I guess we are to assume that whoever is running this account – or the town council, or the mayor – believes that a day or two of hot weather (which Churchill gets regularly most years) is more dangerous to public safety than a massive predator wandering around town.
I can only conclude that keeping residents and tourists in the dark about potential threats from local polar bears is one way that Churchill is now adapting to climate change (from CBC News, 10 September 2024):
Bears Onshore and Effective Sea Ice Breakup dates
It is apparent from the wording of the Churchill reports that even by the last week of August this year, all bears were not yet off the ice, since they say only that “most bears” were on shore the week of 26 August to 1 September (see next section).
That suggests the last bears came ashore this year at least a week later than they did in 2020 (at 21 August), which at the time polar bear specialist Andrew Derocher presented as an anomaly (see tweet below). Compare to the situation last year here.
The last report I’ve seen from Derocher (via X) for 2024 on the status of his teams’ tagged females is that many of them (11/29 or 38%) were still on the ice as of 8 August (posted 11 Aug):
Derocher referring to this an “amazing” year that’s “similar” to the 1980s probably doesn’t tell the half of it, since he hasn’t posted any maps since then (as of noon, 12 September).
This effectively keeps secret the date when the last of these females bears actually came ashore, which is in any case a biased microcosm of the entire subpopulation. In other words, we can expect that if 40% of tagged female were still on bits of remnant ice at 8 August, there will have been many more bears, especially males, out there as well – which of course he never mentions.
He also never mentions that satellites under-report the amount of ice at this time of year by as much as 20% because of the effects of melt-water sitting on ice, but we’ve come to expect that.
Oddly, a recent study tried to explain the importance to survival of the recent phenomenon (since about 2015 or so) of bears staying out on melting bits of remnant ice rather than heading immediately to shore when the ice coverage over Western Hudson Bay drops below 50%. They suggested this behaviour was largely confined to male bears because they had to make up for feeding missed during the breeding season (McGeachy et al. 2024).
Females, alternatively, appear to respond to break-up in WH by coming onshore approximately 3 weeks after the mean ice concentration in WH reached 50%, … However, suitable habitat was still present elsewhere in the Bay and appeared to be used by a portion of WH prime age males. [McGeachy et al. 2024: 494, where “prime age males” are aged 5-19 years.]
However, these authors never mention the data reported by Derocher every year showing fairly significant numbers of tagged females lingering on tiny chunks of ice well into August, even though Derocher is a co-author. Funny, that.
Problem Bear Reports 2024, Weeks 1-5
Week 1, 5-11 August
Week 2, 12-18 August
Week 3, 19-25 August
Week 4, 26 August-September 1
Week 5, 2-8 September
References
McGeachy, D., Lunn, N.J., Richards, E.S. and Derocher, A.E. (2024). Sea ice influence on male polar bear survival in Hudson Bay. Arctic Science 10, 483-498. https://doi.org/10.1139/as-2023-004 Open access.
Finally, 15 years and a trillion dollars too late, George Monbiot says what skeptics have been saying all along. Nearly every single carbon reduction scheme is a useless make-work machination that creates the illusion that the government is doing something. He calls it “perceptionware”.
A new paper was released in Science pointing out that in the last 25 years, barely 4% of climate policies in 41 countries have made any real difference. And by “real difference” we mean reducing a useful fertilizer, so it’s a good thing that 96% of the ploys failed, but a tragedy that a thousand billion dollars was stolen from decent people.
In any case, finally Monbiot sees the tip of the iceberg of grift and graft, but doesn’t realize his own role in it, doesn’t realize the same failures of journalists like him also failed the science world where 96% of papers have achieved nothing they set out to do as well — like predicting the climate. Climate science has been spinning its wheels, creating perceptionware and failing to figure out the climate for fifty years, but George hasn’t noticed.
Monbiot hasn’t even taken the obvious leap: Where were the Greens, the people who supposedly were the smart ones who cared the most? Most of these carbon reduction failures were obvious to anyone who owned a calculator. Could it be George, that the Greens were the dumb ones wrapped up in their own perceptionware game, pretending to care about CO2 to impress their friends at dinner parties but not actually giving a damn? Or worse, could it be that some Greens were bought off by industries and foreign countries that profit from the carbon grift?
Who stood up for the poor, the workers, and the taxpayers who were being shafted — only the skeptics.
“Grand schemes, many backed by governments, masquerade as positive action on the environment. They should be disowned”
Let’s talk about perceptionware. Perceptionware is technology whose main purpose is to create an impression of action…
Monbiot zeroes in on the endless fantasia that is the quest for airline biofuel:
…perhaps the clearest example of perceptionware is the repeated unveiling, across the past 25 years, of mumbo-jumbo jets. Throughout this period, fossil fuel and airline companies have announced prototype green aircraft or prototype green fuels, none of which has made any significant dent in emissions or, in most cases, materialised at all. Their sole effect so far has been to help companies avoid legislative action.
Now he worries the poor are starving as we burn their food, and chop down forests so we can fly to Bali:
But never mind, this perceptionware is now Labour policy too. Failure is baked in. Even with restrictions on which feedstocks can be used, any significant deployment of biofuels for aviation will increase total demand, which means either that agricultural crops are removed from human consumption, raising the price of food and therefore increasing global hunger, or that wild ecosystems are destroyed to make way for agricultural expansion.
George still doesn’t realize the root of the problem is Big Government itself. In the crazy biofuel market, it was the government that “picked the winner” and decided we should burn food to save the world, not the free market. Who could have guessed that high energy plant matter would also be the same stuff people wanted to eat?
As for using waste, this promise is repeatedly rolled out to justify disastrous policies. Biodiesel would be made from used cooking oil, but as soon as production increased, new palm oil was used instead. Biomass burners would mop up forestry waste, but soon started taking whole trees and, in some cases, entire forests. Biogas would be made from sewage and food waste, but operators quickly discovered they could produce more with dedicated crops like maize and potatoes. Why? Because waste is generally low in energy, variable and expensive to handle. Already, there’s intense competition for the small portion of waste that might be commercially useful, as companies chase carbon payments: so much so that fresh palm oil has been sold as waste oil, as this attracts a higher premium.
The government funded monopoly in science created a fake crisis that parasites could feed off, and he is surprised that parasites turned up to dinner.
Where were all our expert climate scientists, George, while 25 years of money and time was wasted? Did they or did they not want to save the world, or were they too stupid, or too scared to say the obvious?
Germany attempted to defend its disastrous energy policies in a fact-check-style response to former President Donald Trump who held up Berlin as a warning to the American public in Tuesday’s debate with Vice President Kamala Harris.
Mr Trump urged U.S. voters to reject the green agenda favoured by the Democrats and Harris, noting that even Germany has had to walk back its Energiewende transition as evidence of the foolhardy nature of the green agenda.
“You believe in things that the American people don’t believe in,” Trump said towards Harris. “You believe in things like, we’re not gonna frack. We’re not gonna take fossil fuel,” referencing her long-standing opposition to fracking, a position she has attempted to flip-flop on.
“Germany tried that and within one year, they were back to building normal energy plants,” Trump continued. “We’re not ready for it.”
It’s difficult to know where to begin. The German political class is delusional if they truly believe their green energy achievements are an aspirational success.
As Volkswagen weighs its first closure of a German auto plant, workers aren’t the only ones worried
BY DAVID MCHUGHUpdated 5:24 PM AEST, September 8, 2024Share
FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) — Volkswagen is considering closing some factories in its home country for the first time in the German automaker’s 87-year history, saying it otherwise won’t meet the cost-cutting goals it needs to remain competitive.
…
Higher costs outweighed a modest 1.6% increase in sales, which reached 158.8 billion euros but were held down by sluggish demand. Blume called it “a solid performance” in a “demanding environment.” Volkswagen’s luxury brands, which include Porsche, Audi and Lamborghini, are selling better than VW models.
I suspect Germany is still feeling the pain of President Trump humiliating their green political class back in 2018, by correctly predicting that German reliance on Russian gas and failure to develop domestic fossil fuel resources would undermine their energy security.
The German political class laughed at Trump back then. The climate obsessed German bureaucrats with ring fenced government provided incomes are still trying to laugh. But no German who has to make a living in the real economy is laughing.
If Germany continues with the green madness, the entire nation is on a one way trip to Venezuelan levels of national destitution, or worse – except for the privileged bureaucrats and politicians of course.
Some Germans are trying to fight back. Parties like AFD did very well in recent elections, though likely this was more to do with AFD’s immigration policies than their climate policies. But AFD also emphatically rejects climate action, which appears to make AFD Germany’s best hope for righting Germany’s energy policy train wreck.
As for the dog eating comment, Trump as far as I know never accused Germans of eating their dogs.
