THE rising number of fat people was yesterday blamed for global warming.

'The Sun' article

You can begin to see where this is all going. I suppose we're all eventually going to be made culpable for breathing, since we all exhale that dangerous atmospheric pollutant CO2.

In case anyone didn't get it, that was the reason for my (what may have seemed to some) flippant response to DFM's post on bicycling the other day.

Note the gratuitous picture of the Polar Bear.

It was the scare-mongering about drowning Polar Bears which first prompted me to look more closely into the arguments behind the theory of AGW. A little research revealed to me that Polar Bears are about as unlikely to drown as any terrestrial mammal in view of the fact that they are phenomenal swimmers. In fact, some authorities consider them to be a marine mammal. Reports of their open-sea swimming endurance range from 60 - 300 miles. Beyond that...

More recent genetic studies have shown that some clades of brown bear are more closely related to polar bears than to other brown bears.

Wiki. Note that many AGW skeptics are criticial of Wikipedia's apparent pro-AGW bias. Decide for yourself.

In any event, It seems likely that the north polar regions have been free of ice for much of Earth's history. True, the Polar Bear appears to have diverged from the main brown bear line to take advantage of the increasing ice, but did so without any obvious influence or assistance from Man. It seems just as likely that brown and/or white bears will be perfectly capable of continuing to evolve as conditions change. Before knees jerk, recall that some authorities argue that past descents into Ice Age conditions appear to have transpired quite abruptly. Think of those Mammoths frozen solid while still chewing their last meals.

Until we can explain past changes in Earth's climate, including the Ice Ages, RWP, MWP, and LIA, we should not be basing policy on flawed GCMs

Currently soot - especially Black Carbon - is the biggest likely contributor to any anthropogenic global climate change. In the US, our coal plants are extremely clean burning due to (somewhat expensive) scrubbing technology mandated and implemented as a result of the 1970's Clean Air Act. China, India and Russia do not "scrub" emissions from their many coal-fired plants; they consider it too expensive. The result is a huge brown cloud that appears to warm more than it cools - in contradistinction to most clouds, which have a negative-feedback effect.

However, we have "outsourced" much of our manufacturing to countries like China, and that nasty brown cloud is the result. No wonder they can "out-compete" our own industries, many of which have been dismantled.

There are always hidden costs. Is this a "Conspiracy Theory?"

You decide.

S