On polar bears, have you honestly looked into WHY the population seems to have doubled or even tripled since the 50s and 60s? As a guy who claims to look at “both sides” I’d have expected you to have noticed that those early estimates were based solely on the reports of explorers, and the first scientific attempts to estimate the population (70s 80s?I forget) were between 20k and 40k.

And no, not all polar bears depend on polar ice to survive, but the majority of currently known populations depend on seals and other food they only catch on the ice. Sure, a few bears can survive without ice, but they’re increasingly invading human settlements for lack of food and the average weight of baby polar bears had been dropping in the past few decades — indicating that their mothers are having an increasingly hard time finding food.

But then I also read what the other side had to say and found their arguments to carry more credibility.

Responsible environmental care is a good thing, but most of the current debate is motivated by a political agenda and a desire to control advanced civilizations.

By the way, polar bear estimates put the population at 20,000 to 25,000 – almost 2x the size of the population in the 1960′s. Furthermore, polar bears do not need ice in order to survive.

A great many scientists are upset about the IPCC’s and Kyoto’s misrepresentation of science. http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/story.html?id=522276&p=1

Over 18000 lakes in Sweden are now dead due to rising acidity from rain which pulls aluminum out of the soil. This pollution comes from England and is freely admitted by the British government based on scientific evidence.
http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/yourenv/eff/1190084/pollution/acid_rain/

As for the Prince William Sound, it doesn’t look like an oil-slick any more, but it’s certainly not recovered (despite what Exxon’s press releases say). Chronic low-level pollution is still stunting the growth of many animals and is projected to significantly damage populations for at least another ten years.
http://www.unc.edu/news/archives/dec03/peters121803.html

There may be more trees in N America now (I don’t know where you got that) but entire habitats based on old growth forests have been destroyed — number of trees doesn’t replace types and age of trees!

Pretending that we somehow know the polar bear population is in no danger is silly. Certainly the Nunavut governments claim the polar bear population is rising (they profit largely from continued sport-hunting) but ignoring the fact that they depend on ice flows that are yearly becoming smaller or at least much thinner (this last year the area covered increased even if volume decreased) is just as bad as any alarmism.

The 2000-acre (not 40) footprint in ANWR only includes the area for drilling and airstrips. This utterly ignores the hundreds of miles of maintained roadway and pipeline as well as gravel mines and ice roads.

You cite updated predictions based on better models as evidence that the current models are wrong? I understand the apparent correlation (the projected change went down so they might project zero change later on) but such a claim has no logical basis. Would you rather they refuse to update their predictions when new models are developed?

This isn’t and shouldn’t be a polarized debate — it’s not “skeptics vs. alarmists.” We’re polluting the planet, and some of that could have a serious negative effect. Ignoring some scientists who models climate effects just because they got cited by the hated UN won’t give you a good idea of what we know and what we can know any more than learning about climate change solely from Gore’s populist video.

The acid rain threat was overblown.
Prince William Sound has recovered quickly from the Exxon Valdez disaster.
There are more deer than ever before in N. America.
There are more trees in North America than when the first white settlers arrived.
The polar bear population is in no danger.
The Alaskan pipeline has actually helped to increase caribou populations.
Drilling in ANWR would leave a very small footprint (40 acres, I have read) in a region that no one visits and is covered with ice and snow for most of the year.
Remember the first IPCC report predicted temperature changes of 9C to 14C this century. The second report, five years later predicted .8C to 3.5C.

And I could go on and on. I am not in favor of slashing, burning, or wasting our environment. I just believe that we can use our natural resources without causing permanent damage. Our country has reduced pollution greatly over the last 30 years. Today, most pollution is coming from China and India and Russia. Environmentalists need to focus their energy on those countries.

David, if the problems not man-made, getting rid of man is not a solution.

And in your last sentence, you reveal your true feelings, the point on which we will never agree. Man is not a pest. Man is a part of this world and has been given the opportunity to cultivate its resources. We must, and can, do so responsibly.

Bad science, alarmism and hysteria is not helpful to progress. However, it is moving us toward a society governed by fear for the benefit of elitists like Al Gore and others. Environmental alarmism is about control.

There are 2 issues with your post, from my standpoint:

1. While I agree in principal that by continuing to use up our fossil fuels it will force us to use alternatives in the future, without the advance development of them before the fossils run out, where will we be? There has to be a push asap on coming up with these alternatives, while we still have oil in the ground. We will need that oil to build whatever will be the alternative.

2. Whether or not one believes in climate change/acid rain/warming/cooling/pollution, who wants to live on an earth with problems like that, no matter where they are? Especially when we know (even if we are not changing the climate, which I think we are) that there are things we can do that do not pollute or toxify groundwater and the like?

The solution is not to ignore what could be going on, man-made or not, and continuing to drill for oil in far away places, tear up the Canadian tar sands, and shoot mercury and other chemicals into the air. The solution is to work towards cleaning this place up so we don’t have to live with this crap, and neither do our kids. Whether we are causing it, nature is causing it, or aliens are – the end result is the same…a polluted planet. And that is when it will regenerate – by getting rid of the pests for a while – us.

“One apocalyptic vision is Acid Rain. In 1980 the Environmental Protection Agency claimed that Sulfur Dioxide emissions caused Acid Rain, which had supposedly increased the average acidity of Northeast lakes one-hundred-fold over the last forty years and was killing fish and trees alike. A year later the National Research Council predicted that the number of acidified lakes would double by 1990. So, naturally, Congress included stringent provisions to cut so2 emissions (already down 50 percent from the 1970s) at a cost of billions of dollars annually when it reauthorized the Clean Air Act.

Yet in 1987, epa research raised doubts about the destructiveness of acid rain. Then came the most complete study of Acid Rain ever conducted, the half billion dollar National Acid Precipitation Assessment Project (napap), which concluded that the allegedly horrific effects of Acid Rain were largely a myth. Among other things, the study found that lakes were, on average, no more acidic than before the industrial era; just 240 of 7000 Northeast lakes, most with little recreational value, were critically acidic, or “dead”; most of the acidic water was in Florida, where the rain is only one-third as acidic; there was only very limited damage to trees, far less than that evident elsewhere in the world where so2 emissions are minimal; half of the Adirondack lakes were acidified due to natural organic acids; and crops remained undamaged at acidic levels ten times present levels. In the end, napap’s scientists figured that liming the few lakes that were acidic would solve the problem at a fraction of the cost of the Clean Air Act’s Acid Rain provisions.”

Smog is definitely a problem, but it is typically a localized problem in areas with high population density. Ironically, our current energy policy is going to force people to move closer together, thereby increasing smog.

The earth has an incredible ability to regenerate itself.

I think the key that you’re missing is that it is the consumer products that are least efficient and that waste the most. We don’t have to cut progress or R&D, when just applying currently available technologies can double our fuel economy! The energy consumed by my lasers is pretty crazy, but compared to the amount of energy making VCRs blink 12:00 across America, it doesn’t even register.

We’ve cut car and TV and oven power consumption by half, but consumers don’t care because they don’t relate high gas prices to saving electricity. We can either let the free market do it’s thing and START conserving when gas hits $10/gallon even in America (and electricity hits 30 cents a KWh) or we can stop selling the inefficient devices now and allow a much smoother transition when fossil fuels become too rare to compete with other, more expensive fuel sources.