Yup, you read that right. If those fuzzy bastards get put on the Endangered Species List, it's bye-bye freedom, hello socialist police state.
...at least, that's what we learned a couple weeks ago at the Heartland Institute's International Conference on Climate Change.
The polar bear is widely accepted as the unofficial symbol of global warming. Most people would suggest that the poor, drowning, computer-generated creature from Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth thrust the plight of the polar bear into the national consciousness. Soon after, with the birth of little Knut in a Berlin zoo, the world had a physical being of heartbreaking cuteness to associate with the problem, though the cub, far from the Dorian Gray of his species, is susceptible to the corruption of age, as are most adolescents.
It didn’t take long for Hollywood to cast them as honorable (and rational) warriors, who’d also star in their own features and rub elbows with the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio. So when reports surfaced in 2006 that the shifting climate forced the bears into cannibalism, the public reacted with an outpouring of compassion rather than dismissing them as fearsome predators, as may have been the case in other circumstances. These days, 1993 seems a lifetime ago, when America was captivated by Coca-Cola’s dreamlike Arctic idyll.
The web site of the magazine Architecture Week now features an entertaining and informative excerpt the 2007 book How to Build an Igloo, and Other Snow Shelters by Norbert E. Yankielun, with illustrations by Amelia Bauer.
In addition to providing would-be igloo builders with a step-by-step guide to building an ice fortress, the excerpt explains how tension and compression act on the ice-bricks to keep the structure stranding; it even includes easy-to-interpret force diagrams. Other gems include: why the cross-sections of igloos are more like parabolas than semicircles, “gopher holes,” appropriate saws, and why you should cut a ramp in the snowblocks.
A few other fine points and thoughts on building an igloo:
Polar bears are the best animal mascots to come along in, well, maybe ever; whales, lynxes and spotted owls should all fire their agents. Global warming is a great start, but I see big things for polar bears — you wanna be in pictures, kid? Polar bears are so cuddly that even if I was getting torn apart by one, I think I'd be yelling "you're ...sooo... cuuute...must.... give...savings ...to... IPCC...aaaaaghggh!" with my dying breath.
But ExxonMobil recently funded research into the impact of climate change on polar bear populations. The researchers, including Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, contradicted previous research and took a big dump on Al Gore's PowerPoint presentations by concluding that polar bears aren't threatened. The results were published as "viewpoint" and not peer-reviewed, which has naturally drawn the ire of the scientific community and the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology. From NewScientist:
If the polar bear is listed under the Endangered Species Act, steps to protect its habitat could directly hurt ExxonMobil's economic interests, subcommittee chair Brad Miller wrote in an open letter to the oil giant.
Continue reading 'Polar bears are fine, says Exxon-funded...astrophysicist?' >
