A conversation with Susan J. Crockford—for Association des climato-réalistes

Contributed by Grégoire Canlorbe @2019  

“So, the long and short of it is that the prediction that the bear numbers would decline by two thirds failed. Not only did the bears not decline, but the global population number rose by at least 16 percent, perhaps more.”

[This interview was originally published by Friends of Science on December 15, 2019.  It is presented here with the permission of the interviewer, Mr. Grègoire Canlorbe]

Susan J. Crockford: I live in Victoria, British Columbia, and I specialize in animals from the late Pleistocene, so probably the last fifteen to twenty thousand years.  I have a contract company called Pacific Identifications Inc. We identify animal bones from archaeological projects and also from biological research: stomach contents, fecal samples, that kind of thing. That’s primarily how I get my income. And then, I am also a former adjunct professor at the University of Victoria—I had held that position since 2004 but in 2019, it was not renewed.

My primary interest—my overall interest—is evolution.  That, for me, really informs everything.  It’s the big picture.  Evolution is the big idea that drives all my interest.  For example, the interesting thing is that a deer bone from 8000 years ago looks like one living today, and so, there is continuity.

Image from Pixabay

But there are also distinctions—when you get species differences, those are apparent.  I became interested in polar bears when I was working on the topic leading up to my PhD dissertation. I was looking at the speciation process that turns a wolf into a dog (what we also call domestication). While trying to unravel what biological process drives that transformation, the wild species that I looked at to compare it to was the brown bear to polar bear transformation. So, I’ve been looking at the Continue reading “A conversation with Susan J. Crockford—for Association des climato-réalistes”

Science, Philosophy and Inquiry on a Galactic Scale: A conversation with Dr. Willie Soon

[This is a reprint of a blog from the Friends of Science web site by Grégoire Canlorbe.  This post originally appeared on Friends of Science and also on Grégoire Canlorbe’s site.  We are reprinting it with the permission of Dr. Willie Soon and the author, Grégoire Canlorbe.  ed]

April 12, 2018

Contributed by Grégoire Canlorbe © 2017     These are the opinions of the author and interviewee. Updated with additional citations/links April 12, 2018 at 11:14 AM MST.

  • Dr. Willie Soon is an independent solar physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who has been studying the Sun and its influence on the Earth’s climate for more than a quarter of a century. A short while ago, he had a conversation with Mr. Grégoire Canlorbe, an independent journalist who is also vice president of the French Parti National-Libéral (“National-Liberal Party,” conservative, nationalist, and free-marketist). Here Dr. Soon speaks for himself.

http://blog.friendsofscience.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/A-dr-willie-soon-Gc-article-1-300x300.png
Canlorbe: You say polar bears are far less endangered by global warming than by environmentalists dreading ice melt. Could you expand?

Dr. Soon: Yes, indeed. I have argued that too much ice will be the ultimate enemy for polar bears. Polar bears need less sea ice to be well fed and to reproduce. Why? Think about this for a minute: Polar bears eat a lot. Any large colony will need a great deal of food. The bears’ Continue reading “Science, Philosophy and Inquiry on a Galactic Scale: A conversation with Dr. Willie Soon”