Today’s Green #NarrativeFail

Today’s Green #NarrativeFail

by Steven Hayward in Climate, Environment

So in today’s #GreenFail news, it turns out a much-touted survey of college sustainability programs has proven to be, like, unsustainable, dude. This is really going to harsh some mellows. From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

The Sustainable Endowments Institute has announced that it is suspending its production of the College Sustainability Report Card. The report card was one of the first and most controversial of several sustainability-ratings systems that have popped up in recent years. It was followed by a slew of other ratings and rankings that attempted to grade colleges on their green efforts.

Meanwhile, the Globe and Mail in Canada reports that the number of polar bears dwindling rapidly because of global warming are . . . not dwindling. Love the headline: “Healthy Polar Bear Count Confounds Doomsayers.”

The number of bears along the western shore of Hudson Bay, believed to be among the most threatened bear subpopulations, stands at 1,013 and could be even higher, according to the results of an aerial survey released Wednesday by the Government of Nunavut.  

That’s 66 per cent higher than estimates by other researchers who forecasted the numbers would fall to as low as 610 because of warming temperatures that melt ice faster and ruin bears’ ability to hunt. . .

The study shows that “the bear population is not in crisis as people believed,” said Drikus Gissing, Nunavut’s director of wildlife management. “There is no doom and gloom.”

Really, alert newsrooms ought to have the “confounds doomsayers” hed ready at all times on a macro keystroke.

Because here’s another one. From Norway comes this news: “PCBs levels down in Norwegian polar bears.”

In a study of PCBs in polar bear cubs in Svalbard, researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) have found that blood levels of PCBs and related contaminants in polar bear cubs appear to have dropped by as much as 59 per cent between 1998 and 2008. At the same time, levels of these contaminants in their mothers were as much as 55 per cent lower over the same period.

Gosh, those polar bears just won’t get with the doomsaying program, darn it.



Finally, just for grins, it appears that Al Gore’s CurrentTV may be about to become PastTenseTV. TimeWarner cable is threatening to drop CurrentTV from its cable network because it has fewer viewers than Power Line has daily readers. Hey TimeWarner: How about you replace CurrentTV with Power Line TV? We’d deliver a viewership bump automatically.

Oh yeah, just as a bonus: the European carbon trading market continues to fall apart.

Probably not current much longer.