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De toutes manières, on se fait du soucis pour rien : les extra-terrestres vont nous aider.

Alien technology the best hope to 'save our planet:' ex-defence boss

Governments must reveal what they know, says Paul Hellyer

Chris Lackner, The Ottawa Citizen

Published: Wednesday, February 28, 2007

A former Canadian defence minister says be believes advanced technology from extraterrestrial civilizations offers the best hope to "save our planet" from the perils of climate change.

Paul Hellyer, 83, is calling for a public disclosure of alien technology obtained during alleged UFO crashes -- such as the mysterious 1947 incident in Roswell, New Mexico -- because he believes alien species can provide humanity with a viable alternative to fossil fuels.

Mr. Hellyer has been a public UFO advocate since September 2005 when he spoke at a symposium in Toronto. But with concern over global warming at an all-time high, and Canadian political parties struggling to out-green one another, Mr. Hellyer said governments and the military have a responsibility to "come clean on what they know" now more than ever.

"Climate change is the No. 1 problem facing the world today," he said. "I'm not discouraging anyone from being green conscious, but I would like to see what (alien) technology there might be that could eliminate the burning of fossil fuels within a generation … that could be a way to save our planet."

Mr. Hellyer will be discussing his views at the upcoming screening of a new UFO documentary called Fastwalkers, in Toronto's De La Salle College Theatre on March 7.

Mr. Hellyer, a former Liberal cabinet minister, political turncoat and one-time leadership candidate for the Liberal and Conservative parties, said UFO researchers have amassed undeniable evidence that aliens have visited our planet. Due to the distance such spacecrafts would have to travel, UFOs must be equipped with some kind of advanced fuel source or propulsion system, he said.

"We need to persuade governments to come clean on what they know," he said. "Some of us suspect they know quite a lot, and it might be enough to save our planet if applied quickly enough."

Michael De Robertis, an astronomer at York University and and member of the Ontario Skeptics Society for Critical Inquiry, said there is "little or no compelling evidence" that we have been visited by beings from another planet.

"If (Mr. Hellyer) wants to broker some kind of communication, that would be great," he said. "But I think the probability that there is someone out there for him to make contact with is highly improbable."

But if aliens have indeed visited Earth, there is no doubt their technical knowledge could benefit humanity, Mr. De Robertis added.

"To have travelled hundreds of trillions of kilometres, interstellar visitors would, at a minimum, require a civilization that is thousands -- if not millions -- of years ahead of our own. One would imagine they went through their own fossil fuel era, and that they solved it and didn't go through some kind of pollution holocaust.

"There is no doubt they would have different solutions, different fuels and different energy sources."

Fastwalkers claims to feature more than 30 witnesses testifying to the reality of alien visitations, including former military and government intelligence personnel.

http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/s…f6-50c575ee996c

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Le héros de "L'Homme venu d'ailleurs" (The Man Who Fell To Earth) s'est trompé d'époque, il est venu bien trop tôt. Aujourd'hui nous pourrions lui expliquer comment éviter que sa planète ne devienne un désert aride.

Ah tiens, je croyais qu'il était plus scientifiquement avancé que nous. Mais pourquoi est-il "resté" alors ? :icon_up:

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  • 2 weeks later...
The Ice is Melting…The Sea is Rising…Hurricanes are Blowing… And It's All Your Fault…

Scared?

Don't be

It's Not True

Ainsi commence un programme de Channel 4 sur le "réchauffement global" et sa supposée origine humaine :

http://www.indybay.org/uploads/2007/03/08/…ming_swindle.rm

Pour mémoire, le pamphlet d'Ayn Rand intitulé "Environmentalism: The Anti-Industrial Revolution" :

Observe that in all the propaganda of the ecologists—amidst all their appeals to nature and pleas for "harmony with nature"—there is no discussion of man's needs and the requirements of his survival. Man is treated as if he were an unnatural phenomenon. Man cannot survive in the kind of state of nature that the ecologists envision—i.e., on the level of sea urchins or polar bears. . . .

In order to survive, man has to discover and produce everything he needs, which means that he has to alter his background and adapt it to his needs. Nature has not equipped him for adapting himself to his background in the manner of animals. From the most primitive cultures to the most advanced civilizations, man has had to manufacture things; his well-being depends on his success at production. The lowest human tribe cannot survive without that alleged source of pollution: fire. It is not merely symbolic that fire was the property of the gods which Prometheus brought to man. The ecologists are the new vultures swarming to extinguish that fire.

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Czech Pres: Environmentalism is a religion

WASHINGTON, March 9 (UPI) -- Environmentalism is a religion that is based more on political ambitions than science, the president of the Czech Republic warned Friday.

Speaking at the Cato Institute, a public policy think-tank, President Vaclav Klaus said that environmentalists who clamor for policy change to combat global warming "only pretend" to be promoting environmental protection, and are actually being driven by a political agenda.

"Environmentalism should belong in the social sciences," much like the idea of communism or other "-isms" such as feminism, Klaus said, adding that "environmentalism is a religion" that seeks to reorganize the world order as well as social behavior and value systems worldwide.

As for government spending on global warming studies, the former finance minister and of the Eastern European nation and trained economist said that such efforts were a "waste of money," adding that there was already sufficient scientific evidence for those seeking policy change to back up their proposals.

Meanwhile, he pointed out that those seeking to protect the environment could do a great deal under the existing political framework and with existing technologies, such as importing less goods from far-flung regions that require enormous jet fuel use.

Klaus concluded Friday his week-long tour of the United States, having met with a number of senior Bush administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney.

http://www.upi.com/InternationalIntelligen…9-060020-3030r/

Le film préféré du président tchèque : The Great Global Warming Swindle.

Part 1 :

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=90…indle&hl=en

Part 2 :

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=63…indle&hl=en

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Voilà comment on construit un "consensus" : plusieurs scientifiques qui ont participé à cette fameuse émission de Channel 4 ont été menacé de représailles professionnelles et même de mort.

Scientists threatened for 'climate denial'

Martin Durkin, director of The Great Global Warming Swindle, on green intolerance, soft censorship and his "dodgy" Marxist background.

"I wanted to call it "Apocalypse My Arse", but in the end we decided on "The Great Global Warming Swindle". It"s a provocative title, which helps with ratings."

Martin Durkin has a hangover. And a cold. He spent last night, Thursday 8 March, watching the Channel 4 screening of his film The Great Global Warming Swindle in a pub with friends and colleagues. "It"s better than watching it at home. That can be an isolating experience. You become convinced you"re the only person in the country watching it." Now, this morning, he has some things to get off his chest " about the green movement"s demonisation of him for daring to question environmentalist orthodoxy; the "soft censorship" of his earlier programmes; and the endless revelations that he had an apparently dodgy Marxist background.

"Shock, horror", he says. "Exposing that a journalist has a Marxist background is like exposing that he wears trousers."

Durkin"s latest film has won him the accolade " or perhaps slur " of being the "anti-Al Gore". Where the American president-who-never-was transformed his rather dull PowerPoint presentation on the threat of global warming into a marginally less dull big box office flick " An Inconvenient Truth " Durkin has directed a 90-minute made-for-TV movie that basically says: "Everything you know about global warming is wrong!"

Its title a knowing, punk-rebellious nod to the Sex Pistols film The Great Rock"n"Roll Swindle, The Great Global Warming Swindle featured scientists questioning whether global warming is manmade. Some of them argued that the Sun - directly, or through its effect on cosmic rays - causes global warming. Others claimed that CO2 levels are influenced by changes in temperature rather than the other way around. If this were the case, it would turn on its head every fundamental assumption underpinning not just the green movement but also national and international politics, a whole new genre of global warming literature and research, and much of the newly greened education system in Britain: those assumptions being that a rise in CO2 is causing the Earth to warm, that man is responsible for that rise in CO2, and thus we must rein man in. No wonder many seem miffed by Durkin"s film.

Whatever viewers may have thought about the new theories put forward in Swindle to explain global warming (personally, I found the replacement of the widespread, all-encompassing manmade theory with an all-encompassing cosmic ray theory " sort of "It"s the Sun wot done it!" " a little unconvincing), there"s no denying that the film poked some very big holes in the global warming consensus.

Professor Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, one of the world"s leading experts on malaria, was a revelation. He explained how he had to threaten legal action against the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to have his name removed from the list of "2,000 of the world"s leading scientists" who apparently backed its summary published last month. The problem? Professor Reiter didn"t back it, instead arguing that it was a "sham". The IPCC "make it seem that all the top scientists are agreed, but it"s not true", he said.

And leaving to one side the science of global warming, there was also some stirring stuff on the impact of the environmentalist ethos on political debate and human ambition " especially in relation to the developing world. Many of the talking heads argued that our obsession with restraining development in order to "save the planet" will consign the world"s poorest to a life of grime and squalor. And, ironically, pollution. As one contributor pointed out, the smoke from cowshit and other items that some in the developing world burn in order to warm their homes " because they don"t have electricity and because the only solution put forward for their predicament is that they should use expensive and ineffectual "sustainable" solar and wind power " is recognised by the World Health Organisation as one of the worst pollutants in the world. Tens of thousands of children in the developing world die every year from respiratory problems brought on by such in-house smog. It is peasantry, rather than modernity, that kills them; shit, not cars.

Watching The Great Global Warming Swindle felt a little bit naughty, even subversive. You simply never hear stark criticisms of the politics of global warming in the mainstream media very much. And yet, as Durkin points out, the response to his film has pretty much been a shrill: How can Channel 4 show this stuff?!

"Some people seem really outraged that 90 minutes of airtime was given to "the other side"", he says. He describes as "surreal" the accusation that Channel 4, in airing his film, is somehow distorting the debate about global warming. One commentator declared: "Channel 4 has done a huge public disservice. Or are they planning to show a follow-up that takes apart last night"s wayward thesis?" (1) "These people talk about balance, but the environmentalist view is everywhere!", says Durkin. Indeed, even Durkin"s film was not allowed to stand alone: earlier in the week Channel 4 showed a Dispatches documentary made by green Guardian columnist George Monbiot to "balance out" Durkin"s film, and then repeated it again last night after Durkin"s film. So even when you get to criticise the prevailing view, you have to be sandwiched in between two slabs of Monbiot.

TV has been well and truly greened: there are hectoring lifestyle shows like No Waste Like Home and It"s Not Easy Being Green, the greening of various soap characters, the unwritten law that says all wildlife documentaries must pass comment on how man has endangered tigers/whales/polar bears (usually polar bears), and news programmes frequently leading on The Threat of Global Warming to Life As We Know It, complete with Peter Snow-style swingometer graphics showing creeping deserts, disappearing glaciers and, of course, stranded bloody polar bears.

And yet some have branded Channel 4 as irresponsible for showing a 90-minute critical film which Durkin says he struggled for 10 years to have commissioned.

"It shows that environmentalists and journalists can be utterly intolerant", he says. "They simply will not tolerate any dissenting view. Straight away they try to take it down. You can see that in the kind of language they use " they say "the jury is in" on global warming, or "the science is done and dusted", or you"re a "denier" if you question the consensus. This is not about having a debate but about shutting down debate."

Indeed, many of Durkin"s critics have responded to The Great Global Warming Swindle by trying to slur Durkin and the participants in the film. Or they have gone running to the Office of Communications (Ofcom) to demand that it rap Durkin"s knuckles " a bit like overgrown school sissies squealing to teacher about the boy they don"t like in the hope that teacher will give him a jolly good thrashing.

Before the film aired, a contributor to a green-leaning website advised fellow contributors to keep an eye out for who is due to appear in the film "and more importantly who they work for" (my italics). This sums up the approach of trying to demolish the arguer rather than his argument, to expose people"s alleged funding or leanings rather than to take up the substance of what they say. (For what it"s worth, most of the participants in the film said they hadn"t received a penny from oil companies, much as they would have liked to.)

In today"s Guardian, Zoe Williams seems to make a sly dig at one of the participants (Professor Tim Ball) on the basis that he is from Winnipeg. Apparently, being based on Farringdon Road in central London is a far better qualification for commenting on climate change, even if you are a ditzy la-la columnist and the weird Winnipeg man a professor of climatology (2). (Durkin points out the irony of people "exposing" that he doesn"t have a background in science. If everyone who doesn"t have a background in science was forbidden from researching or talking about global warming, he says, then that would mean silencing some of the leading environmentalist thinkers and just about every newspaper columnist, who can always be relied upon to churn out an "I"m Scared of Global Warming and So Should You Be!" column despite not knowing what a test tube is.)

On Wednesday, before the film even aired, a left-leaning website provided readers with a link to Ofcom"s website and the instruction: "Please do complain [about The Great Global Warming Swindle], and please do publicise this link and ask others to complain." It gave a link to the Channel 4 complaints website, too, saying that if Channel 4 "get a number of complaints then they will find it harder to commission future programmes from Durkin" (3). This represents a new low in the discussion of environmentalism. Instead of having an upfront, open debate about the science, and the social and political courses of action that might be required to alleviate pollution while still meeting people"s needs and desires, some try to have a film written off by the suited and booted powers-that-be at Ofcom and a director excommunicated from the world of TV.

Durkin has been here before. His 1997 series, Against Nature, also an impassioned critique of environmentalism, was similarly the subject of a concerted complaints effort. This led to the Independent Television Commission (subsequently superseded by Ofcom) chastising Durkin and Channel 4 for using "underhand editing techniques".

"It is soft censorship", Durkin insists. "If there is a huge response to a programme, then the ITC and now Ofcom feel the need to do something. So they end up censuring seriously controversial work. I mean, Channel 4 shows a lot of rubbish, like "wank week". But because hardly anyone complains about that, Ofcom doesn"t say anything. And then people complain about my work, which is serious, and these bodies take action. It might not be formal censorship, but it is a kind of invisible censorship. The end result is phoney controversialism on TV but not much real controversialism. Ofcom is supposed to uphold standards but it does the opposite."

He believes that such official chastisement " which was widely celebrated by some greens in relation to Against Nature and which is being demanded again for The Great Global Warming Swindle " has a "chilling effect" on TV output. The big broadcasters, desperate to avoid being ticked off by Ofcom, will avoid showing anything liable to invite large numbers of complaints. So they stick with the wankers of "wank week" instead. A far safer bet.

Durkin"s experiences with Against Nature also showed that the cheap and conspiratorial shot of denouncing someone by associating them with others can be used to stifle genuine debate. Who was he sinisterly associated with over the Against Nature controversy? Why, LM, the predecessor magazine to spiked which was edited by Mick Hume.

Scour the web for commentary on Against Nature (only if you have absolutely nothing else to do " seriously) and you will find shrill, green-ink enviro-babble about how we sinister Marxists at LM pulled the puppet-strings of Against Nature in order to do big business"s bidding against the poor, beleaguered environmentalist movement. Or something. In fact, a few people who contributed articles to LM appeared as talking heads on Against Nature. That"s all. Not as exciting as the crazed and wide-eyed web conspiracy theories make it sound, I know. Sorry.

Yet that hasn"t stopped the anti-LM conspiracy-mongering from making a comeback to coincide with the airing of The Great Global Warming Swindle - 10 years after Against Nature was first shown and seven years since LM was forced to close following a libel action brought by ITN. The new Channel 4 film has been described as "The Great LM Swindle". Anti-globalisation author Paul Kingsnorth has written a satirical skit about what might have happened at the Channel 4 offices when they decided to commission Durkin"s latest film. It ends with one of the C4 bosses saying: "Brilliant work everyone. Lunch at the Groucho to celebrate? spiked is paying." (4) As well as being spectacularly unfunny (miserabilists can"t do satire), the skit is, of course, pure fantasy: spiked had no involvement in The Great Global Warming Swindle and we never buy anyone lunch. Our petty cash is so petty it doesn"t stretch to that.

Durkin laughs about the fact that many environmentalists fancy themselves as leftists, yet "they are always exposing me¦as a leftist!"

It is indeed surreal " pure madness, in fact " for environmentalist writers, activists, politicians, TV-makers and the rest to complain about the showing of Durkin"s film, when their arguments are so widespread and so rarely challenged. Talking to Durkin, it is clear he is nobody"s stooge " not Big Oil"s, not Big Science"s, and certainly not mine or spiked"s. Whether he"s exposing the origins of environmentalism, the scare about GM food or the global warming consensus, he makes film about things that he believes in; it"s just that his beliefs don"t chime with what we"re "supposed" to believe today. In these uncritical, unquestioning times, we could do with more anti-conformist films from "mavericks" like Durkin.

The various attempts to have him shut up, denounced, sacked or whatever speak to a worryingly censorious climate in the climate change debate. And whatever the sceptics in the Swindle film might think, such a climate has not come about as a result of a handful of greens conspiratorially plotting to take down Durkin and anyone else who stands in their way. Rather, it is a product of a broader, society-wide attitude of "You can"t say that!" in relation to discussions of global warming, development, man"s intervention in nature and the future of humanity itself. If we want a proper debate about these issues, we need an open and rigorous public life, rather than sneaky accusations of secret conspiracies and demands for censure.

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/2948/

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ANNONCE POUR LES FRANCILIENS: LE CAFE LIBERTE COUVRE CE THEME CETTE SEMAINE

Si vous êtes interressés par le thème du réchauffement climatique

lundi 12 mars et vendredi 16 mars : le climat et l'activité humaine

Sur fond de controverses sur la compétence voire l'honnêteté du GIEC de l'ONU, la question des relations entre le climat et l'activité humaine est posée. Passionnelle, elle est un des rares thèmes qui techniquement peuvent légitimer une action liberticide mondiale. Nous passerons donc en revue les éléments explicatifs des changements climatiques : activité solaire, interaction avec les ondes galactiques et la formation des nuages, rotations subtiles de la Terre, et, prétend le GIEC, les gaz à effet de serre.

Rappelons que chaque Café Liberté se tient chaque semaine le lundi au Café Luxembourg (station RER Luxembourg) et chaque vendredi au Café Falstaff (Métro Bastille) , départ des hostilités à 20h-20h30.

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Rappelons que chaque Café Liberté se tient chaque semaine le lundi au Café Luxembourg (station RER Luxembourg) et chaque vendredi au Café Falstaff (Métro Bastille) , départ des hostilités à 20h-20h30.

Zut je n'ai pas reçu l'email… Ou bien je l'ai paumé. Bon j'irai peut-être vendredi, merci pour l'info. :icon_up:

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Zut je n'ai pas reçu l'email… Ou bien je l'ai paumé. Bon j'irai peut-être vendredi, merci pour l'info. :icon_up:

J'y serai vendredi pour récupérer de Rincevent le sac que j'ai oublié l'autre fois et j'en profiterai pour te rapporter le thé que tu as oublié chez moi.

Ami des RG si tu nous lis, "le sac" et "le thé" ne sont pas des noms de code pour des commerces douteux, juste que le libéral est distrait…

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J'y serai vendredi pour récupérer de Rincevent le sac que j'ai oublié l'autre fois et j'en profiterai pour te rapporter le thé que tu as oublié chez moi.

Par conséquent, ledit Rincevent y sera Vendredi aussi. Tant que j'y pense : si Dom P passe ici, qu'il sache que je pourrai alors lui rendre son CD.

Ami des RG si tu nous lis, "le sac" et "le thé" ne sont pas des noms de code pour des commerces douteux, juste que le libéral est distrait…

Et maintenant, quelques messages personnels : Le petit Shah est mort. Je répète, le petit Shah est mort… Quand Pégase se lève, la fourmi croonde. Je répète, quand Pégase se lève, la fourmi croonde…

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Par conséquent, ledit Rincevent y sera Vendredi aussi. Tant que j'y pense : si Dom P passe ici, qu'il sache que je pourrai alors lui rendre son CD.

Et maintenant, quelques messages personnels : Le petit Shah est mort. Je répète, le petit Shah est mort… Quand Pégase se lève, la fourmi croonde. Je répète, quand Pégase se lève, la fourmi croonde…

Dites, j'ai bien envie d'y aller aussi, à ce café liberté. Y a moyen de se reconnaître pour se serrer la pince et/ou boire une bière ? J'avais pensé à un bandeau avec le pseudo sur un haut de forme…

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Et en plus, le climat ne coopère pas. Déjà qu'il y a quelques semaines, le Congrès américain avait dû suspendre une session extraordinaire sur le "réchauffement global" à cause… d'une tempête de neige maousse costaud. Maintenant, c'est une expédition partie pour le pôle nord en vue de montrer que la glace fondait à une vitesse v, v' qui a été suspendue à cause… d'un froid excessif et des gelures affectant un de ses membres. Ironique, isn't it ?

Frostbite ends Bancroft-Arnesen trek

By PATRICK CONDON, Associated Press Writer Mon Mar 12, 5:28 PM ET

MINNEAPOLIS - A North Pole expedition meant to bring attention to global warming was called off after one of the explorers got frostbite. The explorers, Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen, on Saturday called off what was intended to be a 530-mile trek across the Arctic Ocean after Arnesen suffered frostbite in three of her toes, and extreme cold temperatures drained the batteries in some of their electronic equipment.

"Ann said losing toes and going forward at all costs was never part of the journey," said Ann Atwood, who helped organize the expedition.

On Monday, the pair was at Canada's Ward Hunt Island, awaiting a plane to take them to Resolute, Canada, where they were to return to Minneapolis later this week.

Bancroft, 51, became the first woman to cross the North Pole on a 1986 expedition. She and Arnesen, 53, of Oslo, Norway, were the first women to ski across Antarctica in 2001.

But the latest trek got off to a bad start. The day they set off from Ward Hunt Island, a plane landing near the women hit their gear, punching a hole in Bancroft's sled and damaging one of Arnesen's snowshoes.

They repaired the snowshoe with binding from a ski, but Atwood said the patch job created pressure on Arnesen's left foot, which led to blisters that then turned into frostbite.

Then there was the cold — quite a bit colder, Atwood said, then Bancroft and Arnesen had expected. One night they measured the temperature inside their tent at 58 degrees below zero, and outside temperatures were exceeding 100 below zero at times, Atwood said.

"My first reaction when they called to say there were calling it off was that they just sounded really, really cold," Atwood said.

She said Bancroft and Arnesen were applying hot water bottles to Arnesen's foot every night, but had to wake up periodically because the bottles froze.

The explorers had planned to call in regular updates to school groups by satellite phone, and had planned online posts with photographic evidence of global warming. In contrast to Bancroft's 1986 trek across the Arctic with fellow Minnesota explorer Will Steger, this time she and Arnesen were prepared to don body suits and swim through areas where polar ice has melted.

Atwood said there was some irony that a trip to call attention to global warming was scuttled in part by extreme cold temperatures.

"They were experiencing temperatures that weren't expected with global warming," Atwood said. "But one of the things we see with global warming is unpredictability."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070312/ap_on_sc/polar_trek_1

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Et non François Hollande qui n'a pas de coquille!

Je note une coquille dans ce que tu as écris : il fallait lire :

"Et non François Hollande qui n'a pas de couille!"

Un Q de trop pour Hollande, c'est dommage, il en a déjà trop !

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snow.jpg

Quant à cette fameuse photo que l'on abondamment diffusé :

0,,5378775,00.jpg

Rob Lyons

The bear necessities of climate change politics

A photo of two polar bears seemingly stranded on an ice floe has come to symbolise man’s destruction of nature. But is it all that it seems?

‘They cling precariously to the top of what is left of the ice floe, their fragile grip the perfect symbol of the tragedy of global warming. Captured on film by Canadian environmentalists, the pair of polar bears look stranded on chunks of broken ice….’

That is how an article in Australia’s Daily Telegraph, entitled ‘A planet on the edge’, chose to open a discussion of the latest climate report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (1). To view the article, and the photo of the polar bears, click here. The student who took the photograph, however, gives a slightly different account: ‘They were on the ice when we found them and on the ice when we left. They were healthy, fat and seemed comfortable on their iceberg.’

Amanda Byrd, an Australian graduate student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF), says she took the picture around three years ago - in the summer. The photograph was not ‘taken by environmentalists’ but as part of a field trip with the university.

Over the past few months the photo has been published widely as a snapshot of the dangers of global warming. Byrd, however, is wary of seeing the photo as direct evidence of manmade climate change. ‘I believe in the climate change phenomena, but for me to say that the image is a direct link, I would be speculating’, she tells spiked. ‘The ice in the Arctic is definitely growing less, and the bears in the migratory route in the Beaufort Sea (where this image was taken, 90 miles off Barrow) have to swim further.’ Byrd is clearly a little miffed that ‘the image you have seen around the world was distributed without my consent, and [with] the wrong byline’.

That hasn’t stopped others from using the image to back up stories about climate change. Science Panel Calls Global Warming ‘Unequivocal’ declared the New York Times recently, in an article illustrated by the polar-bear photo. (The NYT, like others before it, also attributed the photo to the wrong person). Such is the controversy over the photo that getting permission to republish it is very difficult now, hence our provision of the link above for those who want to see it.

It seems that facts such as who took the photo, when it was taken and what it really shows do not matter so long as a Greater Truth is revealed in its republication. And polar bears have become the ‘poster species’ for revealing that truth. As Simon Garfield noted in the UK Observer Magazine: ‘In the past few weeks it has become difficult to open a newspaper or webpage without seeing photographs of the beautiful yellowy-white animals leaping, or lying on sea ice in the Arctic, the newly helpless emblem of climate change.’ (2)

‘Helpless’ is a strange way to describe a half-tonne predator. As the BBC website notes: ‘The polar bear is the largest land carnivore and has a reputation as the only animal that actively hunts humans.’ Stranger still is the transformation of polar bears into the fluffy victims of our age: ‘Polar bears are predominantly carnivorous, and mainly feed on ringed seals and less so on bearded seals. A small part of their diet includes beluga, narwhal, walrus, fish, seabirds, reindeer and carrion.’ (3) It wasn’t so long ago that seals were every green’s favourite victim animal. Now it seems that seals are out, and seal-scoffing bears are in.

While Byrd’s photo has been doing the rounds, the photographic stock libraries of the world have been heavily raided for other ‘polar bear, sea ice’ pictures. Consider the leaflet that fell out of my newspaper, and maybe yours too, on Sunday. ‘THE BIG HEAT: a story of greed, broken promises and wilful ignorance - and you get to write the ending’, it said, leading up to an invitation to join Friends of the Earth (see a section of the leaflet below). The leaflet continues: ‘The warmer climate is killing wildlife and the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world, threatening already endangered species like polar bears.’ It’s all accompanied, of course, by a photo of a polar bear alone on broken-up sea ice, looking longingly up towards, well, presumably a helicopter in which the photographer was probably perched.

For all the polar bear stories, it is far from clear that these bears are an endangered species. Even if a warming world did make things more difficult for them, Arctic temperatures have been considerably warmer in the past – and polar bears survived those periods. It’s not even clear that polar bear numbers are in decline.

In January, Kassie Siegel from the conservation lobby group the Center for Biological Diversity wrote in the Los Angeles Times: ‘The bear is entirely dependent on sea ice, using it as a platform on which to travel, hunt and give birth. Yet each year, as the Arctic warms, the sea ice shrinks. Polar bear populations are already suffering from drowning, starvation and lower cub survival. Absent cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, the summer sea ice, and the polar bear, may disappear entirely in less than 40 years.’ (4) Yet others disagree – including Mitchell Taylor, a Canadian polar bear biologist.

Last May, Taylor wrote: ‘Climate change is having an effect on the West Hudson population of polar bears, but really, there is no need to panic. Of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct, or even appear to be affected at present. It is noteworthy that the neighbouring population of southern Hudson Bay does not appear to have declined, and another southern population (Davis Strait) may actually be over-abundant.’ (5)

Counting polar bears must in any event be a rather difficult process. They are well-camouflaged beasts (their fur is actually translucent) and are generally solitary, except when breeding, spending most of their time wandering around a very large, white barren wilderness. Saying anything for certain about them must be pretty tricky.

Yet the recent elevation of the polar bear into a victim of mankind’s recklessness isn’t really based on the facts or figures of polar bear life. Rather, these bears have become a big blank white canvas on to which any fairytale of human destructiveness can be written. To return to the Friends of the Earth leaflet – it says: ‘There are some voices, including slippery politicians and greedy commercial interests, who will tell you there is nothing to worry about.’ Its picture of the polar bear demonstrates otherwise, apparently. This is the Disneyfication of politics: bad, greedy people on one side, and ‘cuddly’, helpless polar bears on the other. How long till we get an animated fable about polar bears to sit alongside the penguin eco-flick Happy Feet?

Whatever the truth about climate change, we need to get beyond these childish tales of two legs bad, four legs good – of wicked man, and innocent beast. If the world is getting warmer due to human action, it may still make perfect sense to continue burning fossil fuels. What we need is a cool-headed and balanced discussion about the costs and benefits of different courses of action, from Kyoto-style emissions cuts and new, non-carbon technologies, to adaptive measures and the promotion of economic growth as a means of coping with problems. And we need to start putting the interests of human beings first.

The debate we’re getting – simple but cynical tales of human greed, backed by cute photos of cuddly creatures – is the polar opposite of the debate we need.

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/2969/

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Aujourd'hui selon Nicolas Hulot, "l'esprit du pacte écologique a volé en éclats". C'est donc un fait scientifique : le réchauffement écologique provoque une sévère poussée de cornes !

Sinon je ne sais pas si vous avez vu cette page d'une bonne tenue du salon beige, qui résume la position "CO2 sceptique" de certains cathos.

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Malgré cette contestation et tant d'autres, il y a encore beaucoup de chemin à faire.

Petite anecdote : je me baladais à Aix cet après-midi et devant la mairie, comme souvent, il y avait sept ou huit militants de Greenpeace en train de faire leur propagande. Quand je pense que c'est le département A du KGB ( chargé de la désinformation) qui les a fait prospérer… mais quand est-ce qu'on en sortira ?

Sinon un passage sur le blog du ql m'a fait connaître ce documentaire, Mine Your Own Business. Il met les environnementalistes en face de leurs responsabilités : il leur montre qu'au nom de leur fantasmes de riches, ils empêchent le développement des pays pauvres. Percutant.

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