Chu, Walz to look at renewable energy: Rochester, MN

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu will appear with U.S. Rep. Tim Walz at 11 a.m. at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 343, 9 80th St. S.E.

Chu and Walz will examine three renewable energy projects championed by southern Minnesota residents: a mobile self-contained ethanol plant, cars created and adapted by students at Minnesota State University-Mankato that run on solar and electrical technology, and the IBEW Wind Turbine Training Facility, where electrical workers train to service the turbines delivering clean energy to southern Minnesota.

[Alarmists in the Arctic]

"In fact, since guillemots require at least an 80-day snow-free summer in which to copulate, ovulate, hatch and fledge their chicks - and there were rarely 80 snow-free days in northern Alaska until the 1960's - they wouldn't even be this far north were it not for warmer temperatures. Expanding their range, playing with the edge of a changing climate, his guillemots, he realized, were tracking the region's snowmelt on an annual basis.
...
But for the scientist and his subjects, the biggest new problems, literally and figuratively, are the polar bears.

"From 1975 to 2002, I saw one bear on this island," he said. "Since 2002, they've been here every year. And last year, they were here every day for my last week on the island, a different bear."

The reason is simple. The pack ice that for all those stated years was within sight of Cooper - and the big, fat, abundant, blubber-coated seals on which they dined and feasted - is now nowhere in view. The bears are hungry. They're swimming to Cooper Island in search of chow.

Ok, so he hardly ever saw polar bears for decades; now he sees them all the time, and from this we're supposed to conclude that carbon dioxide is killing them off?

If they were really starving in 2002, why aren't they dead by now?