Who, pray tell, is behind this horrible conspiracy?

I don't have a good answer to that, but I suspect some of it is based on money/grants, job security and/or simply wanting to believe and/or some kind of political agenda. I don't know. 

I feel bad for these scientists and biologists, because their hard work is being dismissed and discredited by their unknowingly use of the manipulated data. I am sure they trusted these sources and didn't question thier validity. Most of these studies were done before the discovery of the manipulated data. 

EC, I don't disagree with you, but the back and forth ad nauseum can best be handled offline between the warring parties. I could go back a couple years and pull the same weary debates, almost verbatim, and repost here and nothing would have substantively changed. 

I wouldn't say it's an "uncomfortable topic," but I would say the two sides in this fight are not going to persuade the other to change their view. 

Perhaps if this kind of diatribe continues we institute a three-comment rule for individuals. After your third comment on the topic, you're done.

Kurt - I know I won't change the minds of those so adamantly on the otherside.  It's not for their benefit that I post.  There are many who have not yet made a conclusion on this (and many other) issue(s).  They need to hear all the evidence so they can have all the information upon which to base an opinion. 

I'm all for the 3 comment rule.  Please implement it!  Like I said, there are those of us that work in the field, and then there are merchants, and realtors that aren't in the fields  pretending they know more than everyone else that studies this stuff and has boots on the ground experience. The threads get hijacked beyond belief.  It gets old VERY Fast.  My vote is to implement the rule!!!  CNN recently pulled their comment sections because of the trolling.  Popular science did it too, because too many trolls hijacked and controlled the threads, outshouting scientists and people that had a clue.

Well, perhaps those who don't believe in baseball should comment on one of the dozen other threads than one about the World Series.

Kurt - my understanding is that all of the endangered thoughts about wolverines is about the lower 48, is that so? I do believe, despite our changing habitat here, that the Alaskan wolverine population is not in question yet?

Whatever you want to think Trailadvocate,  I really don't care.  These comment sections aren't going to influence congress, or even the NPS. No one outside of his few friends on this forum are going to care what beachdump thinks...because anyone with any sort of background in science or biology, or works in the field will clearly see through their mindless claptrap and propaganda, and see most of these comments simply as the rantings of fools.  Call me an elitist, but I don't care.  It's so evident that these guys don't work in the fields and until they go through the rigors and actually do something more than parrot from conspiracy sites, they'll have no real influence, other than being a minor irritant on a forum.  I really would like to actually discuss topics on this site without the usual de-evolutionary BS that goes on here 24/7, but I realize that not going to happen here. So carry on.  I'm done with this site  - there's better places to go and have real discussions with like minded people in the fields of conservation without having to put up with this constant garbage from the atypical anti-park fools, and the anti-science crowd.   I'm out.

If one prefers to "believe" in flawed/manipulated/fabricated science over the real the science, wouldn't they be considered to be part of the anti-science crowd. 

Climate change PROVED to be 'nothing but a lie', claims top meteorologist

http://www.express.co.uk/news/nature/526191/Climate-change-is-a-lie-glob...

Hehehehe. Thanks, dumb. I had to stop reading after the line about 'polar ice is actually increasing', because I was laughing so hard. Plus I did independent research on the authors 'credentials'.

Let's do what Kurt said - leave the climate science to others and just deal with the parks here.

So you think it's okay to manage the parks and it's resources based on false information. I don't. 

Beach, you're taking things a bit out of context by ignoring the link that explained the increase in Antarctic sea ice. Here's part of it:

The North Atlantic is warming and staying warm, setting up far-reaching atmospheric patterns that affect the Antarctic Oscillation. In combination with the year-to-year influences from El Niño and La Niña, this pattern tends to intensify the westerly winds around Antarctica. It could also help explain regional differences around Antarctica: sea ice is increasing in some areas, while decreasing in others.

You can find the entire explanation, as I noted previously, here: 

http://nsidc.org/icelights/2014/01/31/why-is-there-so-much-antarctic-sea...

Read the entire paper, Eric. A warming climate is driving the melting of the Arctic ice sheet, which is driving, in part, the growth of the Antarctic ice sheet. But, eventually...

“If the current warming continues, the increase in ice may continue for some time,” Zhang said.  But, the increase will likely not continue indefinitely. “If the warming gets stronger, there will come a point when ice growth is smaller than the ocean heat flux available to melt ice,” he said. Under those conditions, sea ice extent and volume will begin to decrease.

Charting a complex environment

All of these explanations reveal how complex the Antarctic environment is, and how numerous factors affect its sea ice regime. Scientists continue to investigate the reasons behind Antarctica’s increasing sea ice, examining possibilities both close to home and further afield. As the studies show, most trends are small and mean different things than the Arctic sea ice trend, but scientists also agree this isn’t a signal of non-warming in Antarctica.

 

Sounds like a convenient excuse to me. 

All of these explanations reveal how complex the Antarctic environment is,

In other words, they really don't have a clue.  Maybe its the expanding Antarctic ice that is warming the Northern Atlantic.

The population of the southern hemisphere is a mere 10% of the human race - 800,000,000 to be exact. Most of the pollution, and industrialization is in the northern hemisphere. 

Folks:

Ice dynamics are limited by 2 large factors: cold and H2O.  Put simply, there's relatively abundant moisture in the Arctic, and mean annual temperatures are only somewhat below 0c.  Thus the Arctic ice is mostly limited by cold: as it warms, ice melts.  Antarctica is a desert with little evaporation & precipitation, but so cold that even with warming much of the continent is well below freezing.  To the extent that global change / warming changes winds and increases moisture, because moisture is more limiting, the combination of increased temperature and increased moisture produces increased ice.

At a different spatial & temporal scale: Buffalo (& SLC) get lake effect snow while it is still warm enough that the upwind lakes are not frozen over.  As the winter gets colder, they don't get more snow, they get less snow: the moisture becomes more limiting than the temperature.  If you warmed a large region around Buffalo and the lake didn't freeze over as long, they'd get more snow in the winter, not less.

The same thing is true with tree rings: ring width (tree growth rate) can be limited by growing season temperature & length or by moisture, depending on where the tree is.  If I want a tree ring signal of rainfall variation across years and drought, I need to use records from old trees on desert mountains, where their growth is primarily limited by moisture, not growing season length.  If you are trying to reconstruct / crosswalk temperature variation, you need to select trees from areas where growing season is more limiting than water availability, so the tree ring signal primarily reflects temperature variation.  In both cases we need to test the most recent rings against historic weather data to demonstrate what the ring width signal is.  And if we can get the funding, we should use additional biophysical signals such as variation in stable isotopes across the rings.  [I also have to deal with reduced needle area of conifers in years following a dry year due to needle drop and thus photosynthetic area limiting growth rate; good scientists are careful to test for spurious effects so we don't mislead ourselves.]

If even basic understanding of Liebig's law of the minimum is a convenient excuse, so be it.