Fears that two-thirds of the world’s polar bears will die off in the next 50 years are overblown, says Mitchell Taylor, the Government of Nunavut’s director of wildlife research.

“I think it’s naïve and presumptuous,” Taylor said of the report, released by U.S. Geological Survey on Friday, which warns that many of the world’s polar bears will die as sea ice vanishes due to a warming climate.

“As the sea ice goes, so go the polar bears,” said Steve Amstrup, who led the study.

But Taylor says that’s not the case. He points to Davis Strait, one of the southern-most roaming grounds of polar bears. According to the USGS, Davis Strait ought to be among the first places where polar bears will starve due to shrinking seasonal sea ice, which scientists say will deprive the bears of a vital platform to hunt seals.

Yet “Davis Strait is...

Als ergänzende Lektüre zum Artikel Tobias Kaufmanns sei dieser hier empfohlen:
“Osirak II?
[...] More questions will no doubt be raised about the operational details of the raid (some sources claim there were actually two raids, one of them diversionary), as well as fresh theories about what the Israelis were after and whether they got it. The only people that can provide real answers are in Jerusalem and Damascus, and for the most part they are preserving an abnormal silence. In the Middle East, that only happens when the interests of prudence and the demands of shame happen to coincide. Could we have just lived through a partial reprise of the 1981 Israeli attack on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor? On current evidence, it is the least unlikely possibility.” Ich wette eine Kiste Golanwein, dass es vor dem 4.11.2008 im Iran knallt....

One of the cardinal creeds of the world’s climate alarmists is that there will be more severe flooding in a CO2-enriched warmer world; and one of their cardinal claims is that 20th-century warming has been unprecedented over the past two millennia ... and maybe a whole lot longer (Hansen et al., 2006). Hence, the world should have experienced some truly phenomenal flooding over the past century or so, and especially over the last few decades. But has it?

What was done
In a study that sheds some light on this question as it pertains to southwest Germany, Burger et al. review what is known about flooding in this region over the past three centuries, which takes us back into the Little Ice Age, when according to climate-alarmist “wisdom” flooding should have been much less significant than it has been recently.

What was learned
The six...

It’s official – buying carbon credits to offset CO2 emissions is like doing penance for sins, according to a high-level Vatican official. An article in The New York Times today, “Vatican Penance: Forgive Us Our Carbon Output,” focused on the Vatican’s plans to become the world’s first carbon-neutral state – by planting trees along the Tisza River in Hungary. The article notes:

“After the Vatican agreement was announced, Msgr. Melchor Sánchez de Toca Alameda, an official at the Council for Culture at the Vatican, told the Catholic News Service that buying credits was like doing penance. “One can emit less CO2 by not using heating and not driving a car, or one can do penance by intervening to offset emissions, in this case by planting trees,” he said.

Perhaps the Roman Catholic Church is trying to best its upstart...

Das Schweigen ist laut. Noch immer hat sich Israels Regierung nicht zu dem Vorwurf geäußert, die Luftwaffe hätte Anfang September Ziele in Syrien angegriffen. Premier Ehud Olmert wird nur mit dem allgemeinen Satz zitiert, man könne nicht immer alle Karten offenlegen. Damaskus klagt zwar lautstark, Militärflugzeuge hätten syrischen Luftraum verletzt. Aber dazu, was diese dort gemacht haben, äußert sich das Regime widersprüchlich. Berichte in israelischen Medien, die in sicherheitsrelevanten Fällen einer Militärzensur unterliegen, sind vage. Vage, aber vielsagend.

Die israelische Zeitung “Haaretz” zitiert einen “früheren israelischen Offiziellen”, dieser “habe gehört”, dass die Luftwaffe eine Einrichtung attackiert habe, die möglicherweise nicht konventionelle Waffen herstellen könnte. Die Londoner “Sunday Times” ist...

Auf Hans Rosling wurde hier bereits verwiesen. Bei den Freunden der offenen Gesellschaft fand ich dieses schöne 5-Minuten-Video. Viel Spaß!

Die 8. UN-Konferenz zur Bekämpfung der bedrohlichen Ausbreitung der Wüsten in aller Welt ist gescheitert. 

Die Delegationen aus 191 Ländern verabschiedeten am Wochenende in Madrid zwar einen Aktionsplan für die kommenden zehn Jahre. Auf die notwendige Finanzierung konnten sie sich jedoch nicht einigen, obwohl es nach Presseberichten vom Sonntag um eine geringe Anhebung des vergleichsweise bescheidenen Budgets von 17 Millionen Euro ging. Dieses sollte um fünf Prozent erhöht werden.

Umweltschützer warfen den Industrieländern «Untätigkeit» und «Gleichgültigkeit» vor. Die Wüstenbildung bedrohe die Existenz von rund zwei Milliarden Menschen, einem Drittel der Weltbevölkerung.
http://www.co2-handel.de/article184_6756.html

Großartiges Interview mit dem iranischen Präsidenten, über den schon Dieter Bohlen das Nötige gesagt hat: “Das Problem ist: mach einem Bekloppten klar, dass er ein Bekloppter ist!”  http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/politics/international_politics/full+transcript+ahmadinejad+interview/797347