John McCain - unclear on Global Warming

From this article in the November 16, 2004 New York Times:

Election Over, McCain Criticizes Bush on Climate Change
Wasting no time distancing himself from President Bush on an issue that has long divided them, Senator John McCain yesterday called the White House stance on climate change "terribly disappointing" and said inaction in the face of mounting scientific data was unjustified.

Two weeks after the end of a campaign in which he stumped for Mr. Bush's re-election, Mr. McCain, Republican of Arizona, is convening a Senate hearing today on the human effect on climate and what to do about it.

Mr. Bush, citing the cost to the economy and what the administration describes as the uncertainty of the science, has opposed restrictions on carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases since early 2001, when he abandoned a pledge he made in his first presidential campaign to restrict carbon dioxide from power plants.

And some more:

After a McCain climate hearing in September, for example, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian group opposed to regulations as a solution to most environmental problems, described the gathering as "another pep rally to build support for his energy rationing legislation" and said it had "focused on junk science."

But Mr. McCain said yesterday that the evidence, which he called alarming, was clearer than ever.

With several other senators, he visited the Arctic fringe in Norway and Iceland in late summer.

"It was remarkable," he said, "going up on a small ship next to this glacier and seeing where it had been just 10 short years ago and how quickly it's receded."

Particularly disturbing, he went on, is the rapid pace of warming.

"The Inuit language for 10,000 years never had a word for robin," he said, "and now there are robins all over their villages."

Emphasis mine. Now, let's swing over to this post at World Climate Report:

The red, red Koyapigaktoruk comes bob, bob, bobbin� along
One of the most well-known and beloved harbingers of spring is the appearance of our feathered friend, the red-breasted robin. And as is the case with virtually every other cute species, it is the subject of climate change speculation from time to time. But in the robin�s case, it doesn�t surround global warming pushing the robin to extinction. Quite the contrary, global warming is expanding the robin�s range into never-before-seen-territory.

How is this bad news, you may wonder? Well the creative minds behind the global-warming-makes-all-things-worse mantra must have been working overtime, but finally, they did manage to come with a good one�the appearance of robins in high northerly latitudes is a sign the global warming is impinging upon the Earth�s sacred Arctic regions, and robbing them of their uniqueness. Case and point, there is no Eskimo word for �robin.�

And this little tidbit:

The article that caught our eye was titled �The Naming of Birds by Nunamiut Eskimo� by Laurence Irving of the Arctic Health Research Center of the U.S. Public Health Service in Anchorage, Alaska. It appeared in the March 1953 (Vol. 6, pp. 35-43) issue of the aptly-named journal Arctic (available as a pdf here). In the article, Irving describes his time spent among the Nunamiut Eskimo living in the Brooks Range of northern Alaska comparing English names for birds with the Nunamiut Eskimo names of the birds they encountered. Irving believes that the Eskimo names were from usage of older Nunamiut people and not recent additions. In Irving�s article, he provides the complete list of some 103 bird species.

And, what will obviously come as a surprise to some including Sen. McCain and the BBC producers (not to mention New York Times� readers and BBC viewers), included among Irving�s list is the Nunamiut Eskimo word for �robin.� For those interested it is �Koyapigaktoruk��apparently a derivative of the sound of the robin�s song. Irving designates the robin�s status in the region as �NM� for �nesting� and �migrant.�

Further, in his article Irving refers to an earlier compilation of Eskimo names for birds, �The most complete list of Eskimo bird names for this part of Alaska so far published� that can be found in the book My Life with the Eskimo by V. Stefansson published in 1913. As it so happens, the contents of this book are accessible through Amazon.com. If you visit the link http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/1417923954# , and enter the search term �robin� and read the contents of page 493, you will see a description of where robins have been sighted in the Canadian Arctic prior (obviously) to 1913, including along the far northern coast. Accompanying these location descriptions are the word for �robin� in several other Eskimo tongues, including (phonetically) �Kre-ku-ak�tu-yok� (Mackenzie Eskimo) and �Shab�wak� (Alaskan Eskimo).

Makes you wonder who McCain's Science advisers were on that trip. They should have spent a few more minutes clicking and a few less minutes proselytizing a flawed political construct.