The Polar Bears International website is all about … well, one of the most frightening animals around, at least to me. Over on Treehugger.com, Melissa Breyer summarizes some of what she found on PBI:
Source: Wikimedia
The Norse poets from medieval Scandinavia said polar bears had the strength of 12 men and the wit of 11. They referred to them with the following names White Sea Deer; The Seal’s Dread; The Rider of Icebergs; The Whale’s Bane; The Sailor of the Floe.
The Sami and Lapp refuse to call them “polar bear” in order to avoid offending them. Instead, they call them God’s Dog or The Old Man in the Fur Cloak
Nanuk is used by the the Inuit, meaning Animal Worthy of Great Respect. Pihoqahiak is also used by the Inuit; it means The Ever-Wandering One.
I just remember a long-ago National Geographic story about a polar bear finding a beached pod of whales … and it killed every single one of them. By chewing around their blowholes, causing them to bleed out.
But while the names are delightful, what really caught my attention was back on the PBI site:
“The only way to save the bears and their sea ice habitats is to control temperature rise through greenhouse gas mitigation.” -Dr. Steven C. Armstrup
And this is really an example of sloppy thinking, a matter of dictating how when we’re talking about what. First, we identify that we want to save them. What sort of habitat do they need? Maybe thousands of kilometers2 of ice, with seals and whatever else they eat. That requires … historically normal temperatures.
Now, how we get there should not be set in granite. Sure, I agree greenhouse gas mitigation is the most likely approach – but that’s not set in stone. I mean, I keep thinking about all this heat in the atmosphere … and I recall what it can be converted into.
Energy.
So what if someone came up with a way to suck the excess energy out and store it for later use? Wouldn’t that be interesting?
It’s not to beat on Dr. Armstrup. It’s just as an engineer I’ve seen – and been responsible for – sloppy thinking that leads to sloppy solutions, missed solutions, and expensive mistakes. It may seem harmless to improperly state a problem, but words create furrows in our brains, and not everyone can step out of a long, straight furrow that never crosses the “best solution” furrow.
