Australia’s peak body of earth scientists has declared itself unable to publish a position statement on climate change due to the deep divisions within its membership on the issue. After more than five years of debate and two false starts, Geological Society of Australia president Laurie Hutton said a statement on climate change was too difficult to achieve. Mr Hutton said the issue “had the potential to be too divisive and would not serve the best interests of the society as a whole.” It undermines the often cited stance that there is near unanimity among climate scientists on the issue. --Graham Lloyd,
The Australian, 4 June 2014
The Center for Biological Diversity has failed in its bid to use the North American Free Trade Agreement to pressure Canada to list polar bears as a species ‘threatened’ with extinction. Since the argument that polar bears may be threatened with extinction sometime in the future is based not on their current status but on perceived future threats that may occur if future predictions of global warming also occur, I see this as good news indeed. --Susan Crockford,
Polar Bear Science, 7 June 2014
This may come as a shocker to some, but scientists are not always right — especially when under intense public pressure for answers. Researchers with the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG) recently admitted to experienced zoologist and polar bear specialist Susan Crockford that the estimate given for the total number of polar bars in the Arctic was “simply a qualified guess given to satisfy public demand.” “So, the global estimates were… ‘simply a qualified guess given to satisfy public demand’ and according to this statement, were never meant to be considered scientific estimates, despite what they were called, the scientific group that issued them, and how they were used,” Crockford said. --Michael Bastasch,
The Daily Caller, 30 May 2014
The Global Warming Policy Foundation is pleased to announce that Professor Christopher Essex has joined the GWPF’s Academic Advisory Council. Christopher Essex is Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Applied Mathematics at The University of Western Ontario. He co-discovered the entropy production paradox, computed the first accurate entropy production rate for the Earth, the first accurate temperature for laser radiation, and pioneered the concept of computational over-stabilization, which has implications for climate models. --
The Global Warming Policy Foundation, 9 June 2014
Dame Julia Slingo [the Met Office’s chief scientist] has, like so many of her colleagues, been turning her mind to climate change communication, and reckons that talking about the science in dull technical reports may not be the way forward. Getting the message of impending disaster out requires a dose of funky, a dash of sexy, and a whole lot of poetry. I can see it now - Andrew Motion doing atmospheric circulation, JK Rowling doing the temperature trends, and of course flood warnings from Peter Gabriel. --Andrew Montford,
Bishop Hill, 9 June 2014
