If you want to waste some time the article can be found here:
Predicting survival, reproduction and abundance of polar bears under climate change.
I started out doing just that, but Lubos Motl beat me to it and saved me some time. His analyzis can be found here:
BBC: Polar bears are quantized.
For you physicists out there what the four authors of this paper have made (according to Lubos) is to predict the photoelectric effect of the polar bears.
Quote:
Peter Molnar of Alberta summarized his research as follows: We may not see any substantial effect on polar bear reproduction and survival until some threshold is passed. At that point reproduction and survival will decline dramatically and very rapidly.
Of course this can be applied to all kinds of stuff those nasty sceptics don't agree with:
Quote:
Now, with Molnar's excellent new idea, the situation has changed dramatically. They can always say: "Screw any observations." The observations may show whatever they want and no change can be apparently occurring. However, at some tipping point, when the global mean temperature reaches 15.001917 °C, all the catastrophes take place overnight, very dramatically, and very rapidly. ;-)
Quite right, and according to the authors we are still waiting for observations, as they note in their Conclusion:
Quote:
There is no doubt that climate warming is occurring, and climatologists and other scientists have provided a number of predictive models for temperature, precipitation, sea ice, permafrost, and other issues (IPCC, 2007). Ecologists, by contrast, are still facing considerable challenges to obtain quantitative predictions for the resultant effects on species and ecosystems. It is clear that many species are already affected ([Walther et al., 2002] and [Parmesan, 2006]), but quantitative predictions are lacking for most species, and existing predictions are often associated with large uncertainty, largely due to limited data and insufficiently understood causal chains ([Berteaux et al., 2006], [Krebs and Berteaux, 2006] and Sutherland, 2006 W.J. Sutherland, Predicting the ecological consequences of environmental change: a review of the methods, Journal of Applied Ecology 43 (2006), pp. 599–616. Full Text via CrossRef | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus (47)[Sutherland, 2006]). The mechanistic framework advocated here may help to incorporate cause-effect relationships into ecological predictions, could link expected effects of climate change over various levels of biological organization, and could alert us to the presence of yet unobserved non-linearities in reproduction and survival in response to changing environmental conditions.
......
Mechanistic models are not the only means of predicting the climate change effects on species, but given their potential to predict into yet unobserved conditions, we believe they have been underutilized and present a fruitful line of research to address conservation challenges in a changing world.
(My emphasis)
Yes, right. Maybe this paper could have been published in Biological Hypotheses (there is a journal called Medical Hypotheses), but it does not really meet the requirements of a "Regular Paper".
Lubos Motl, however, despite being a theoretical physicist ends his post by referring to an interesting experiment which I think we all would like to see carried out soonest:
Quote:
A famous weatherman has proposed to perform a somewhat more rigorous research to compute [no, to measure] how many people - currently fed by the AGW panic - will be starved to death once the AGW superstitions will be rejected by all the grant agencies, too.
