An
outrageous remark from a
discredited, copy-cat blogger? Or perhaps an accurate summary of the Current Occupant's ambivalent, compromised
attitude towards the adverse impact of climate change caused by fossil fuel burning. Presented for your consideration are two cases of elucidation:
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| PBS: the latest climate-denial victim |
Case One: A bureaucrat in the Rocky Mountain Region of the US Fish & Wildlife denies climate change is reducing snowfall in the critical denning areas of the wolverine in a seventeen page memo directing field scientists to reverse their conclusions on loss of habitat. Scientists have been urging the FWS to list American wolverines as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. The federal bureaucracy left over from the Charlatan's reign in power has denied the wolverine protection twice and Rocky Mountain Regional Director Noreen Walsh is maintaining that policy line in her latest directive to field biologists. Walsh writes that although there is significant evidence climate change is impacting snowfalls and their persistence in the wolverine's range--avoiding the mistake of denying the undeniable--she concludes,
"there is enough uncertainty about specific variations...to [not] draw definitive conclusions" and calls the scientists' conclusion about reduction of wolverine habitat because of climate change "speculation". A huge amount of ideologically driven mental energy is needed to twist reality beyond recognition, but Walsh manages it. Another example further along in her memo-writing
tour de force occurs when she again accepts reality by writing, "Therefore [there are projected loss] of areas with snow cover persisting until May 15th of 31% and 63%...", but then rejects the logical inference of habitat loss by blithely stating, "its not clear to me this actually represents an equivalent loss of habitat". Her memo exhibits a type of conditioned response that prohibits any recognition of climate change as constraining economic exploitation of Nature.
The most credible scientific data coming from satellite telemetry shows an absolute wolverine dependence on deep snow for denning purposes. Persistent spring snow, defined as lasting until May 15th, is as as close as humans can get to a scientifically valid indicator for critical wolverine habitat of any available. The largest density of wolverines below the Canadian border is in Glacier National Park, Montana. Its well studied glaciers are retreating so fast that
researchers predict with confidence they will be gone by 2020. The glaciers are melting because snowfall is decreasing and temperatures are rising. There is no speculation about those facts. Walsh relies on comments from the wolf-killing fortress of wildlife haters, the Idaho Department of Fish and Game--emphasis on "Game" as in killing wildlife for fun and profit--to justify her directive to reverse course on listing the wolverine. She concludes, but of course only after "reviewing available information", that she is "unable to make a reliable prediction about how climate change will impact wolverine habitat into the foreseeable future." Seventeen pages of rhetorical nitpicking and logical legerdemain is spewed forth to support her
arrogant bottom line: "I cannot support the recommendation that we list the wolverine as threatened." She seems to take pleasure in pointing out her anti-conservation
diktat is supported by two other directors in Region Eight and One as well as state wildlife incumbents. The more they deny, the more destruction of the natural world, and Noreen Walsh will use her keyboard to kill again.
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| AP: the losers, an Atlantic right whale & calf |
Case Two: Unable to say no to oil companies that provide his free lunch the Current Occupant has approved the use of whale killing sonic surveys for the Atlantic Ocean. Oil exploration has been kept off the Atlantic shelf for the most part due to concerns for protection of the coastline that is home to millions. That will change as exploration begins in earnest for new fossil fuel deposits to exploit. Hydrosonic blasts that travel hundreds of miles underwater are the geophysicist's tool of choice to find oil, but the problem is they kill marine mammals. The sonic cannons used to create seismic surveys will damage and perhaps even kill many turtles, whales, seals and dolphins that live in the coastal waters of the eastern US. Oil companies want the data to prepare for the lease sales of 2018 when the decades old ban against drilling of the Atlantic coast ends.
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management admits an estimated 138,000 sea creatures, including nine of the last 500 North Atlantic right whales will be harmed by the weeks of sonic blasts louder than a jet engine every ten seconds reverberating into the deep and into the delicate hearing and sonar structures of sea mammals. The southern coastal states of Virginia and the Carolinas asked for the surveys. For now, New Jersey and New England are resisting exploration efforts. Whales give birth off the coast of Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas. Marine turtles use Florida beaches to lay their eggs. Once a whale's hearing is destroyed by sonic blasts, the animal is done since it needs hearing to locate food, communication and navigation. Limited exploration of the Atlantic continental shelf in the 1980's failed to locate commercial oil and gas deposits, but the industry sees a bonanza of 4.72bn barrels of recoverable oil and 37.51tn cubic feet of gas lying offshore. Environmentalists are justifiably skeptical of the Current Occupant because actions like opening the Atlantic coast to oil and gas development cancel out all his happy talk.