Good news and bad news.

The good news is that polar bears aren't dying out after all. Sure, plenty of people knew that anyway and plenty of others (though probably too few for continued optimism in the collective intelligence of the human race) worked out for themselves that even if the polar ice does melt, which is a fucking long way from being a sure thing, it wouldn't actually be anything that the species hasn't lived through in the past. Still, good to have it stated clearly in a mass market book (a few more details in The Daily Wail* - not like them to suggest not being afraid and that the scare story has been hyped up).

The bad news is that the warming alarmists don't give a rip about the polar bears being okay because it doesn't suit their agenda (my bold):

Dr Mitchell Taylor has been researching the status and management of polar bears in Canada and around the Arctic Circle for 30 years, as both an academic and a government employee. More than once since 2006 he has made headlines by insisting that polar bear numbers, far from decreasing, are much higher than they were 30 years ago. Of the 19 different bear populations, almost all are increasing or at optimum levels, only two have for local reasons modestly declined.
Dr Taylor agrees that the Arctic has been warming over the last 30 years. But he ascribes this not to rising levels of CO2 – as is dictated by the computer models of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and believed by his PBSG colleagues – but to currents bringing warm water into the Arctic from the Pacific and the effect of winds blowing in from the Bering Sea.
He has also observed, however, how the melting of Arctic ice, supposedly threatening the survival of the bears, has rocketed to the top of the warmists' agenda as their most iconic single cause. The famous photograph of two bears standing forlornly on a melting iceberg was produced thousands of times by Al Gore, the WWF and others as an emblem of how the bears faced extinction – until last year the photographer, Amanda Byrd, revealed that the bears, just off the Alaska coast, were in no danger. Her picture had nothing to do with global warming and was only taken because the wind-sculpted ice they were standing on made such a striking image.
Dr Taylor had obtained funding to attend this week's meeting of the PBSG, but this was voted down by its members because of his views on global warming. The chairman, Dr Andy Derocher, a former university pupil of Dr Taylor's, frankly explained in an email (which I was not sent by Dr Taylor) that his rejection had nothing to do with his undoubted expertise on polar bears: "it was the position you've taken on global warming that brought opposition".
Dr Taylor was told that his views running "counter to human-induced climate change are extremely unhelpful". His signing of the Manhattan Declaration – a statement by 500 scientists that the causes of climate change are not CO2 but natural, such as changes in the radiation of the sun and ocean currents – was "inconsistent with the position taken by the PBSG".

Anyone surprised? Coz you fucking shouldn't be. It seems that anyone who's off message is likely to become person non grata among the enviros regardless of the expertise they may bring to the table. This sort of intellectual dishonesty is the reason I first began to have doubts about the global warming scare some years ago, which in turn led to my becoming an outright sceptic. The way I saw it was that if the arguments were so watertight there'd be no need to sideline opposing views or silence critics. So keep it up, fellas, sow more doubt among people like me who wonder why you live in such fear of people like Dr Taylor.

Twats.


* H/T Al Jahom for The Daily Wail link.