by Graham Lloyd, April 10, 2019 in ClimateChangeDispatch
Netflix’s acclaimed Our Planet series has come under fire for “tragedy porn” over images of walruses falling to their deaths from cliff tops, allegedly because of climate change.
The Our Planet footage, narrated by David Attenborough, showed dozens of the animals climbing up 80-meter-high outcrops in northeast Russia because of a lack of sea ice.
They were shown plunging onto the rocks below, with hundreds of dead animals piled on the shoreline. A voice-over by Attenborough claimed their poor eyesight made it hard for them to return safely to the ocean.
But a Canadian zoologist has dismissed the claims as “contrived nonsense” and said the walruses were most likely driven over the cliffs by polar bears.
Susan Crockford, of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, told The Telegraph UK: “This powerful story is fiction and emotional manipulation at its worst.”
The polar bear expert said that at the time the footage was shot in 2017 at Kozhevnikova Cape, Ryrkaypiy, in eastern Russia, the town was being besieged by polar bears.
According to The Siberian Times, 20 bears had surrounded the town, attracted by 5,000 walruses that had appeared at a local protection zone.
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by David Middleton, April 10, 2019 in WUWT
Alternate title:
Saudi Aramco’s recent bond prospectus has generated a lot of media buzz, particularly regarding the production from Ghawar, the largest oil field in the world. Reaction has ranged from “The biggest Saudi oil field is fading faster than anyone guessed,” (not even wrong) to more subdued reactions from Ellen Wald and Robert Rapier, that the prospectus doesn’t really tell us much Ghawar’s decline rate. One thing that the bond prospectus did do, is to paint a picture of the most profitable company in the world and one that is serious when it says it will produce the last barrel of oil ever produced on Earth.
How big is Ghawar? Has it peaked? Is it “fading faster than anyone guessed”? The answer to the first question is: FRACKING YUGE. The answer to the second question was not easily answerable before Saudi Aramco began the process of becoming a publicly traded company. The answer to the third question is: Of course not.
As Saudi Aramco proceeds towards a 2021 IPO, it has had to embrace transparency. This involved an audit of the proved reserves in their largest fields, comprising about 80% of the company’s value. The audit was conducted by the highly respected DeGolyer and MacNaughton firm (D&M). The audit actually determined that the proved reserves are slightly larger than Aramco’s internal estimate.
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La géologie, une science plus que passionnante … et diverse
