When President Trump yanked America out of the UN’s Paris Accord last Thursday, Climate Depot’s Marc Morano launched into full media overdrive. From major U.S. news outlets like Fox News, the Blaze and American Family Radio, to international broadcasts including Sky News, Al Jazeera, and ‘Good Morning Britain,’among others, Marc has been hitting the airwaves […]
“[Ann] Peddle of Bristol’s Hope was out for her morning walk when she came across the carcass of a polar bear that had washed ashore. The carcass had drifted between the rocks near the wharf in Bristol’s Hope, according to Peddle.
Peddle took some quick photos of the bear to post to social media before contacting the wildlife department at around 8:30 a.m.”
Ann Peddle took the photo below, which was printed with the above story:
See the map below for the location of Bristol’s Hope in NE Newfoundland, along the west shore of Conception Bay (see map at end of post for the names of the bays):
Was this a death by drowning or some other, more likely cause?
Bears die natural deaths all the time, as all wild animals do. For polar bears, the most common cause of death is starvation — either because they are young, inexperienced hunters or too old and weak to keep stronger bears from stealing their kills.
In addition, however, males sometimes die from wounds inflicted during fights over access to females during the mating season — or they die of starvation sooner or later because they are too injured to hunt or eat effectively (like the famous starving bear with the injured leg promoted by the photographer in 2015 to advance the ‘fight’ against global warming, which polar bear biologists renounced). Females can be injured trying to protect their cubs from attack by males, which might have the same ultimate result (death by starvation).
Less often, as far as we know, they could also die of accidental drowning while swimming long distances or by being crushed by compacting pack ice.
Since the mating period and intensive feeding season for polar bears have just ended, it is most likely that one of the two most common causes (starvation and/or injuries from fighting) is the cause of this bear’s death, although under the circumstances drowning is the option most people will think of first.
It is not possible to tell from the photos released of the dead bear whether there are injuries to its head from fighting (or from being shot, also a slim possibility). Nor can we tell its sex or age. But the bear does look lean for this time of year, which suggests it may not have been feeding adequately. There is also no way to know if this is a bear who had recently come ashore as many did earlier in the season and got caught without ice to walk out on, and therefore tried to find the pack by swimming.
More information may be forthcoming, or not, after conservation officers have had a closer look.
Here are the regional ice conditions on the day the bear washed ashore (5 June):
Detailed ice concentration map for 28 May (the week before) show two distinct patches of thick ice off Newfoundland (one socked in to White Bay and Notre Dame Bay and the other in Bonavista Bay), with a small tongue of ice extending east to Conception Bay where the polar bear was eventually found:
Two weeks ago (see map below for 20 May), the ice off Newfoundland had a tenuous connection across the region but that soon broke up into the two masses shown above: one rapidly disintegrating one in the east and another solid piece of thick first year ice (70-140 cm thick) in the west.
If a bear got caught in the eastern section of the ice, he would have had to swim west to remaining ice jammed against the Great Northern Peninsula but if he was on a piece of ice that broke free and drifted east, it would have taken him further away from the existing pack. However, it is possible he was already dead, drifting on a piece of melting ice.
If the bear was still alive and tried to swim west, he might have drowned in the attempt but we won’t know that for sure unless a necropsy is performed and the results announced. This does not always happen, unfortunately, so we may never know for sure.
Polar bears can of course get caught short by melting ice condition in late spring and early summer off Labrador and Newfoundland but it depends on when and where the bears are (either ashore or on the ice) and the sea ice conditions at the time.
This year, virtually all of the polar bear landings ashore were in March and April (one early May), at a time when there was lots of ice around. Which means the bears would not have to swim back to the Arctic, they could walk.
Not a problem for most bears, as they can walk thousands of kilometres. Most of the bears that visit Newfoundland and southern Labrador end up on the south coast of Baffin Island over the summer.
But if a bear comes ashore late in the season (April/May) when there is little ice around, or in a location where there is little local ice, it would have to swim to the nearest ice flow and then walk the rest of the way (or walk/swim).
This year ice conditions have been unusually heavy and even at this date in early June there is still ice all the way along the Labrador coast up to Baffin Island — a long walk to Baffin Island but probably not impossible for any bears that are still on the ice off NW Newfoundland or southern Labrador.
The recent marches for science were an amazing irony: People actually think that science is a matter of protesting in the streets. It was a demonstration all right, a full-throated display of postmodern contempt for reason, especially as embodied in the scientific method.
This virus has already taken over many universities, the most extreme of which is Evergreen State College in Eastern Washington. There black students decided there should be a No White day on campus to protest the history of blacks mistreatment. One professor refused and tried to hold his class, arguing that free speech was not a matter of race, creed, gender or anything else. A riot erupted against him and students attending, shutting down the class.
This post is to call attention to a war correspondent issuing a recent report on the state of this cultural conflict. Professor Jordan Peterson of the University of Toronto writes from the front lines where higher education institutions and students are in upheaval.
Jordan Peterson: Why You Have To Fight Postmodernism
explains why young people need to organize and rise up against nihilistic postmodernism. The full transcript is worth reading, and a video presentation is also available. Some excerpts below present some of his key points.
JORDAN PETERSON: I want to recommend a book first to everyone here: It is called Explaining Postmodernism by Stephen Hicks. You need to understand postmodernism, because that’s what you’re up against. You’re up against it far more than you know or think, and it’s a much more well-developed and pervasive, pernicious, nihilistic, intellectually attractive doctrine than has yet come to public realization. It absolutely dominates the humanities and increasingly the social sciences in the universities.
It’s not like any given person is absolutely possessed by the spirit of postmodernism, because often they’re not educated enough to know all the details about what it is that has them in their grip, but if you get 20 of them together and they’re all 5% influenced by the postmodernist ethos, you basically have the spirit of the mob. It’s a mouthpiece for that particular philosophical doctrine.
See the postmodernists completely reject the structure of Western civilization. And I mean completely, so I can give you an example, in one term — Jacques Derrida. He is head trickster for the postmodernist movement, and he regarded Western culture — let’s call it the patriarchy — as phallogocentric. Phallo comes from phallus, and so that’s the insistence that what you see in Western culture is the consequence of the male-dominated oppressive self-serving society.
So the first thing that you might want to know about Postmodernism is that it doesn’t have a shred of gratitude — and there’s something pathologically wrong with a person that doesn’t have any gratitude, especially when they live in what so far is the best of all possible worlds. So if you’re not grateful, you’re driven by resentment, and resentment is the worst emotion that you can possibly experience, apart from arrogance. Arrogance, resentment, and deceit. There is an evil triad for you.
So you have to educate yourself about postmodernism.
So here’s what the postmodernists believe: They don’t believe in the individual. That’s the logos. Remember, Western culture is Phallogocentric. Logo is logos. That’s partly the Christian word, but is also partly the root word of logic.
They believe that logic is part of the process by which the patriarchal institutions of the West continue to dominate and to justify their dominance. They don’t believe in dialogue. The root word of dialogue is logos — again, they don’t believe that people of good will can come to consensus through the exchange of ideas. They believe that that notion is part of the philosophical substructure and practices of the dominant culture.
So the reason they don’t let people who they don’t agree with speak on campus, is because they don’t agree with letting people speak.
You see it’s not part of the ethos.
They believe that since you don’t have an individual identity, your fundamental identity is group fostered, and that means that you’re basically an exemplar of your race.
And so the postmodernist Marxists just basically pulled a sleight-of-hand, and said, ‘Okay if it’s not the poor against the rich than it’s the oppressed against the oppressor.’ We’ll just re-divide the sub-populations in ways that make our bloodied philosophy continue in its movement forward, and that’s where we are now.
So for the postmodernists, the world is a Hobbesian battleground of identity groups. They do not communicate with one another, because they can’t. All there is, is a struggle for power, and if you’re in the predator group, which means you’re an oppressor, than you better look out, because you’re not exactly welcome. Not exactly welcome, and neither are your ideas. So that’s what you’re up against.
You young people out there who are university students, you need to take over the student unions, you need to take them back, because they are absolute snake pits, and have been since the 1990s.
Our society needs to figure out how to stop shunting public tax money to radical left-wing activists. If we were doing that for the radical right-wing activists, there would be an absolute storm, but it’s happened incrementally since the 1960s and needs to stop.
So that’s what conservatives and also liberals –true liberals in the English sense– are up against me. What’s happened also as a consequence of this postmodern neo-Marxist intellectual invasion, is the center keeps moving way to the right now, so if you’re a classical liberal, you’ve become a conservative.
Conclusion
And then finally with regards to talking to young people. You finally have something to sell to them. It is not easy to sell conservatism to young people, because they want to change things. That’s not what conservatives want to do, they want to maintain things. Well now you got something to sell — you can sell them freedom of speech, and you can tell sell them responsibility.
The left is selling them rights, you can sell them responsibility.
I can tell you, because I received many letters of this sort … young people are absolutely starving for someone to provide them with a sense of responsibility, and say look here, here’s something worth living for.
We’ve got this beacon of freedom and wealth in the West, which works, although it doesn’t work perfectly. And one of one of the responsibilities of young people is to find out what’s at the core of that, the great core of that. The paramount importance of the individual, and the divinity of speech. That’s something to sell, its what our whole culture is predicated on.
Footnote:
Tom Wolfe first opened my eyes to this assault on reason. I posted on his essay along with the obvious connection to climate change/global warming. See Warmists and Rococo Marxists
Scientists claim that Arctic sea ice is experiencing a record decline. As Arctic Sea Ice Shows Record Decline, Scientists Prepare to Go Blind Data from NSIDC shows that the Arctic is actually experiencing a record low decline in sea ice, since the peak on March 3. masie_4km_allyears_extent_sqkm.csv They also show that Arctic sea ice extent […]
