Wednesday, May 17, 2006
"INTERESTING AND WEIRD"
Stupid whales are everywhere, and Canada’s harp seal population is booming:
"This is interesting and weird,” said John Hocevar, a marine biologist with Greenpeace. “There has definitely been a healthy rebound in their numbers."
Barbra Streisand—you’ll remember her from such seabeast-themed films as A Starfish is Born, Hello, Dolphin!, and Turtl—may have to quit singing her doomed fish anthem (“And the fishes are dying in the woooorld”). Polar bear numbers also seem to be holding up, according to H. Sterling Burnett:
According to the WWF there are some 22,000 polar bears in about 20 distinct populations worldwide. Only two bear populations—accounting for about 16.4 percent of the total—are decreasing, and they are in areas where air temperatures have actually fallen, such as the Baffin Bay region. By contrast, another two populations—about 13.6 percent of the total number—are growing and they live in areas were air temperatures have risen, near the Bering Strait and the Chukchi Sea.
As for the rest, 10 populations—comprising about 45.4 percent of the total—are stable, and the status of the remaining six is unknown. Conclusion: based on the available evidence there is little reason to believe the current warming trend will lead to extinction of polar bears.
That’ll be news to Tim Flannery, Andrew Bolt’s reliable mockery-content provider:
I have so often caught out Tim Flannery exaggerating the effects of global warming that I shouldn’t be surprised by anything he says.
But I still couldn’t believe that last month he trotted out the old “polar bears will become extinct” scare.
Plenty of room for polar bears in Flannery’s Buick-sized refrigerator.