The McCain campaign and Republican party have further revealed themselves to have abandoned any meaningful action on climate change. Today McCain announced his selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his Vice Presidential Nominee. Sarah Palin has gone on the record refuting humans’ role in climate change and has claimed she will sue to overturn the recent ruling on polar bears being threatened by anthropogenic warming, via an attack on its scientific basis.
And perhaps unsurprisingly, Palin supports the teaching of creationism in public schools as well.
[UPDATES: Her anti-climate science stance is getting traction at Daily Green, DeSmogBlog, and Greenpeace. Wired also digs up her stance on creationism.]
[LATE UPDATE: PZ Myers comments, and points out that Afarensis was on top of this back in 2007.]
On Palin’s support for Creationism – read the article.
The polar bear studies are not definitive and, for example, do not appear to have any variable or models that reflect changes in the polar bears’ primary food source IF there is an increase in the frequency of extended ice free periods.
In short, Palin has a pretty good basis to challenge the catastrophic claims regarding predicted polar bear population sizes. The strength of her arguments of course will be based on the strength of her scientific arguments – but there is nothing that I read in the cited reports to suggest that there is not a reasonable basis for a scientific debate.
There’s no warming, and there’s warming but it’s not man-made.
Truly a reasonable basis for debate we have here…
Oh Bernie, what exactly will the Polar Bears eat once their primary food source is dehabitated?
Snow peas?
The polar bear is a very specialised eater.
I must have been unclear in the point I was trying to make. Where do the seals go? How are they represented in the PB demographic models?
In short, the models appear to be under-specified.
Please note, if the data also suggests that the seal population will be adversely impacted by a loss of sea ice then clearly given dependence of PBs on seals they will have a problem. Unfortunately there appears to be a distinct lack of data on the actual impact of reduced sea ice on various seal populations (see http://www.ifaw.org/ifaw/dfiles/file_728.pdf) though there is plenty of speculation that the consequences will be negative. Elsewhere seals seem to do pretty well without ice, if they are left alone. But other commenters may have more data and expertise in this area.