Crockford, S

<a href="http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/4186">http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/4186</a>

=https://wattsupwiththat.wpcomstaging.com/2015/06/23/dr-willie-soon-on-the-vaticans-repeat-of-its-galileo-debacle/
no lnxDr. Willie Soon on the Vatican’s repeat of its Galileo debacle
Alec Rawls / June 23, 2015Putting papal authority behind yet another failed scientific paradigm
GalileoTrial_1633 pix]
Guest post by Alec Rawls
As Galileo insisted about the perversity of his persecution by the Catholic Church: “[I]t is impossible for a conclusion to be declared heretical while we remain in doubt as to its truth.”
Now 400 years later, with the Pope’s new Laudato Si’ encyclical, Dr. Soon notes that the Vatican is again engaged in this same error, lending papal authority to highly uncertain scientific views that lie well outside of the Church’s sphere of moral authority.
Willie’s op-ed can be found at the Breitbart News website. I’ll just post a trio of fair-use excerpts here:
The verdict is clear: Any attempt to stop the use of available fossil fuels for life and all human activities will cause far more harm and lead to more deaths than the theological belief in future catastrophic disasters endorsed by the encyclical. Even worse, the church knows that many of the predicted catastrophic disasters from the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide are highly exaggerated if not outright fraudulent. Yet Laudato Si’ gives credence and praise to these predictions by relying on climate models scenarios that have been proven to be false.
Plus:
I fear that this encyclical is driven not by science, but by social motivations and political yearnings.
And again from Galileo:
“[C]ertainly no one doubts that the Supreme Pontiff has always an absolute power to approve or condemn; but it is not in the power: of any created being to make things true or false, for this belongs to their own nature and to the fact.”
June 23, 2015 in Papal Climate Encyclical.Related posts
Is the Pope Backing Away from the Climate Issue?
Papal Global Warming Encyclical Continues to Split the Church
Climate Insanity on steroids!Post navigation? Wild Claim: ‘climate change…could wipe out health progress over the past 50 years’A shift in climate ‘forcing’ led to demise of Laurentide ice sheet 9000 years ago ?177 thoughts on “Dr. Willie Soon on the Vatican’s repeat of its Galileo debacle”=https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/04/14/a-conversation-with-dr-willie-soon-on-polar-bears-the-sun-and-earths-climate/
MANY lnx grafs
a conversation with Dr. Willie Soon – on polar bears, the sun, and Earth's climate
Guest Blogger / April 14, 2018Science, Philosophy and Inquiry on a Galactic Scale
Contributed by Grégoire Canlorbe © 2017 Publised at WUWT by request of Mr. Canlorbe.    These are the opinions of the author and interviewee. 
Dr. Willie Soon is an independent solar physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who has been studying the Sun and its influence on the Earth’s climate for more than a quarter of a century. A short while ago, he had a conversation with Mr. Grégoire Canlorbe, an independent journalist who is also vice president of the French Parti National-Libéral (“National-Liberal Party,” conservative, nationalist, and free-marketist). Here Dr. Soon speaks for himself.  
Canlorbe: You say polar bears are far less endangered by global warming than by environmentalists dreading ice melt. Could you expand?
Dr. Soon: Yes, indeed. I have argued that too much ice will be the ultimate enemy for polar bears. Polar bears need less sea ice to be well fed and to reproduce. Why? Think about this for a minute: Polar bears eat a lot. Any large colony will need a great deal of food. The bears’ staple diet is seal blubber. But seals are a long way up the food chain. So a fully functional and healthy eco-system is required. And that means oceans warm enough to support the lower links in the food chain from plankton all the way up to seals.
Indeed, a good puzzle for polar-bear science is to answer the question how polar bears survived during the ice ages, when ice covered coastal zones and large parts of the global ocean. Ice was piled miles deep on land, making it extremely difficult for eco-systems to provide enough food. Of course, areas of relative warmth, which population biologists call refugia, always exist. They may well be the key to explaining how polar bears survived the Last Glacial Maximum about 21,000 years ago.
The so-called “environmentalists”, who seem to allow unreasoning emotion and political prejudice to stand in place of rational thought and sound science, became very angry when I asked them whether they would prefer to see a billion polar bears instead of the 20,000–30,000 living now. The real threat to polar bears was unregulated hunting, which reduced the population to perhaps as few as 5,000 bears in the early 1970s.
After the November 1973 agreement to regulate hunting and outlaw hunting from aircraft and icebreakers, the polar bear population rebounded. By 2017 it was approaching 30,000. In 2016 a survey by the Nunavut government found a vulnerable population in the western Hudson Bay region to have been stable for at least five years.
I should say categorically that this polar bear fear-mongering is evidence of mass delusion promoted by group think. As a physical scientist rather than a biologist, I am generally reluctant to get involved in such topics as the influence of climate on polar-bear population, health and biology. But in 2002, Markus Dyck asked me to examine independently these strange and insupportable claims by environmental extremists that polar bears are threatened with extinction by global warming.
Consider the facts. From 6,000 to 10,000 years ago, the Earth was considerably warmer than today. Yet the polar bears survived. In fact, they had evolved from land-based brown bears some 150,000 to 200,000 years ago, and to this day they rear their cubs in land-based dens burrowed into the snow.

Four dead bears found in an aerial survey of the Beaufort Sea (Monnett & Gleason, 2006)]
Readers curious about Al Gore’s false statement that a scientific survey had found polar bears drowning because they could not find ice should see my talk on how environmentalists are the real threat to polar bears: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmoKRz5VcbI. The survey cited by Gore in his sci-fi comedy horror movie in fact found that just four polar bears had drowned, three of them very close to land, and they had died because of high winds and high waves in an exceptional Arctic storm. The authors of the paper were later victimized by their academic colleagues at the instigation of environmental extremists because they had stated – correctly – that it was the storm, and not global warming, that had killed the bears.
What is more, in the dozen years before the survey, the sea ice extent in the Beaufort Sea, where the survey took place, had actually increased slightly. At no point was Al Gore’s story true. In 2007 the High Court in London condemned Gore for his false statements about polar bears, whose Linnaean classification is ursus maritimus – the Bear of the Sea. It is now known that they can swim for more than 100 miles over periods of several days. Al Gore could not even ride a pushbike that far.
One positive aspect of my work in science is that I have befriended many seekers after truth. A polar bear expert, Professor Mitch Taylor of Lakehead University, told me late in 2017:
Just finished up in Davis Strait with 275 DNA samples. The bears were in better condition this year than they were during the 2005–2007 study years. The Wrangel Island bears in the photo are in good condition, but the Davis Strait bears were even fatter. Markus [Dyck] has found the same in the Cape Dyer area. Local people confirm the bears are very fat this year and are also reporting a big increase in ringed seals (immigration, not local productivity).
Keen readers who may want solid information and frequent scientific updates about the overall health and trends of all 19 subpopulations of polar bears should visit the website of another friend of mine, Dr. Susan Crockford: http://polarbearscience.com.
Is climate change naturally cyclical? Canlorbe: Climate change is surely nothing new. It is a long-established, cyclical behavior of our planet, which has long been oscillating between glaciations and interglacial warm periods. Should we diagnose Mother Nature with a bipolar disorder?
Dr. Soon: Earth’s climate system dynamically oscillates between icehouse and hothouse conditions in geological time or, to a lesser degree, between the glacial and interglacial climates of the last 1–2 million years. But, as with many interesting questions about the Earth’s climate, there is no certain answer. The data do not support over-simplistic accounts.
Sea level rise – mother of all scares
I was fascinated to discover that changing sea levels, including extremely high global sea levels 65–250 feet (20–75 m) above today’s mean, occurred during the “hothouse Earth” era. One does not need an enormous ice sheet for sea level to be high, chiefly because the Earth’s coastal zones and ocean basins may be more porous and capacious than one would imagine. Indeed, deep geological studies proffer good evidence to support my position. I included this empirical evidence in an essay I recently co-wrote with Viscount (Christopher) Monckton of Brenchley. 404 -->  https://web.archive.org/web/20181204045824/https://www.nas.org/images/documents/NAS_insideDivestment_forum.pdf
In addition to the ever-changing shape and depth of the ocean basins and coastal zone boundaries, one must also bear in mind the “leaky Earth”: There appears to be a continuous exchange of water between the ocean bottom and the Earth’s crust, as Professor Shige Maruyama of Tokyo Institute of Technology has shown.
Sea level has risen by 400 feet over the past 10,000 years. For the past 200 years it has been rising at about 8 inches per century, and that rate may well continue. It has very little to do with global warming and much more to do with long-term climate cycles. In fact, so slowly has sea level been rising that environmental-extremist scientists have tampered with the raw data by adding an imagined (and imaginary) “global isostatic adjustment”, torturing the data until they show a rate of sea-level rise that has not in reality occurred.


The Earth in the solar system in the galaxy in the universe

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University of Victoria adjunct professor <a href="http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/4186" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Susan Crockford</a> doesn't seem interested in discussing the monthly payments she appears to receive from the climate denying<a href="http://www.desmogblog.com/gm-dumps-heartland-institute-will-no-longer-fund-climate-denying-spinstitute" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Heartland Spinstitute</a>.

“<a href="http://www.martlet.ca/martlet/article/uvic-prof-climate-change-deniers-payroll/" target="_blank" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Crockford would not respond to emails, and refused to speak with the Martlet</a>,” reports a UVic student newspaper attempting to probe the payments.

The <a href="http://www.desmogblog.com/heartland-institute-exposed-internal-documents-unmask-heart-climate-denial-machine" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Heartland Institute's Denialgate documents</a> indicate that the spinstitute gives Crockford $750 per month. She is one of three Canadian university professors on the denier dole at Heartland, along with <a href="http://www.desmogblog.com/madhav-khandekar" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Madhav Knandekar</a> and <a href="http://www.desmogblog.com/what-passes-brain-trust-heartland" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Mitch Taylor</a>.

Greenpeace contacted the University of Victoria to raise conflict of interest questions relating to Heartland's payments to Crockford, who has a <a href="http://watchingthedeniers.wordpress.com/2012/02/15/heartland-institute-leak-susan-crockford-of-university-of-victoria-recruited-to-help-think-tank-undermine-ipcc/" target="blank" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">history of denying climate science</a> as a <a href="http://www.climatescienceinternational.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=516" target="blank" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">speaker</a> for its anti-science <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=International_Climate_Science_Coalition" target="blank" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">International Climate Science Coalition</a>. See<a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/310239-letter-to-university-of-victoria-re-heartland.html" target="blank" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Greenpeace's letter to the University of Victoria</a>.

But apparently the University isn't interested in investigating the matter, stating that, because Crockford is “not a member of regular faculty,” it won't probe allegations of conflict of interest.

“She is a member as a non-remunerated appointment as an adjunct, a professional zooarcheologist associate,” a university spokesperson told <a href="http://www.martlet.ca/martlet/article/uvic-prof-climate-change-deniers-payroll/" target="_blank" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">The Martlet</a> correspondent Mark Worthing.

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<div class="blogreadmore" style="margin: 0px; padding: 15px 0px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: 0.39px; line-height: 19.5px; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Read more: <a href="http://www.desmogblog.com/heartland-payments-university-victoria-professor-susan-crockford-probed" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Heartland Payments to University of Victoria Professor Susan Crockford Probed</a></div>

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Fri, 2012-04-06 13:29BRENDAN DEMELLE

Heartland Payments to University of Victoria Professor Susan Crockford Probed

University of Victoria adjunct professor Susan Crockford doesn't seem interested in discussing the monthly payments she appears to receive from the climate denying Heartland Spinstitute.

“Crockford would not respond to emails, and refused to speak with the Martlet,” reports a UVic student newspaper attempting to probe the payments.

The Heartland Institute's Denialgate documents indicate that the spinstitute gives Crockford $750 per month. She is one of three Canadian university professors on the denier dole at Heartland, along with Madhav Knandekar and Mitch Taylor.

Greenpeace contacted the University of Victoria to raise conflict of interest questions relating to Heartland's payments to Crockford, who has a history of denying climate science as a speaker for its anti-science International Climate Science Coalition. See Greenpeace's letter to the University of Victoria.

“She is a member as a non-remunerated appointment as an adjunct, a professional zooarcheologist associate,” a university spokesperson told The Martlet correspondent Mark Worthing.

But one of Crockford's colleagues at UVic had plenty to say about the disconnect between the university's science-based position and the spin emanating from the Heartland Institute.

“It is regrettable that anyone affiliated with the University of Victoria participated in the activities of an organization like the Heartland Institute,” says Dr. Thomas F. Pederson, Executive Director of the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions (PICS) at UVic. “The University prides itself on being an institution of higher learning that deals with facts and that is nowhere more true than in the field of science. Those who deny that the planet is warming as a direct result of human activity are denying facts.

…

“The Heartland Institute is one of a collection of so-called think tanks that have been extensively supported by elements within the American fossil fuel industry,” says Pederson. “Their mission is quite clearly not to think, but instead to sow confusion with respect to the global warming issue.”

Susan Crockford's actual expertise is far removed from climate science, but that's never proven to be an obstacle to receiving invitations to speak at Heartland Institute events.

According to a description of her work by The Martlet, Crockford is

“a sessional adjunct professor in Archaeozoology in the Pacific Rim with research focuses on the domestication and breed development, evolutionary theory and the evolution and history of the domestic dog.”

What the what? An expert in canine evolution - already tricky territory for certain science deniers - knows what exactly about climate change science?

What does Heartland's Denial-a-Palooza audience see in Crockford's dogged ability to provide $750 per month woof - ehem, worth - of climate confusion?

Is anyone else doggone confused here? Canine get an explanation? (Sorry, it's Friday, brain is mush!)

Tags: Heartland InstituteUniversity of VictoriaInternational Climate Science Coalitionclimate denialSusan Crockfordanti-scienceconflict of interestdenialgateDenierGatethe martletmark worthingspinstitutecanadian climate science

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