The newspaper for which I frequently write, the Aberdeen American News, has decided to weigh in on the question whether to list the polar bear as an endangered species.
Maybe the Bush administration thought no one would notice that the decline in polar bears could be addressed without acknowledging the impact of climate change. If so, its plan to list the bears as officially threatened under the Endangered Species Act - like so many other convoluted and confounding initiatives from this White House - raised more questions than it did answers.
And, there can be no doubt that extending ESA protection to the estimated 25,000 polar bears living from Alaska to Greenland without admitting a causal correlation to global warming could only have been concocted by the same see-no-evil political advisers who brought us “Mission Accomplished.”
I dissent. Since I have bought a lot of Miles Davis with what they pay me per column, I do so respectfully. The editorial begins by speaking of the "decline in polar bears." Are polar bears in decline? I have seen no figures to suggest this. There are, by all accounts, a lot more polar bears around than there used to be. Here is a bit from the Los Angeles Times:
Scientists think the global population of 20,000 to 25,000 bears remains robust, rebounding from the 1960s, when hunting had driven down the population to about 12,000. But virtually all polar bear experts predict rapid population declines in the Arctic, which is warming faster than anywhere else in the world and changing too rapidly for the bears to adapt and find other food sources.
A group of Canadian scientists last month declared the polar bear a "species of concern" but stopped short of saying it was threatened with extinction -- a designation that could have restricted hunting by Canada's Inuit people.
Now that last bit is telling. Canadian scientists, whom I suppose to be as competent as non-Canadian scientists, think that concern is in order, but not so much as to stop the Inuits from actively reducing the number of polar bears by killing them.
I gather that a species is usually or always (until now) put on the endangered list when there is evidence of actual stress on that species. It is clear in this case that the polar bear's status has been earned entirely on speculation. Global warming leads to shrinking ice sheets, and that, it is said, will shrink the polar bear's habitat. That's a perfectly reasonable argument. There is just no reason to believe it.
It wasn't that long ago that we were hearing about a global winter, to be caused when global warming shuts down the circulation of Atlantic currents. Surely that would be a great benefit to the polar bears, extending their habitat all the way down to Milwaukee. Maybe global warming means global cooling, or maybe it means global warming. But just right now the global warming computer models are suffering from some embarrassment.
The world stopped warming in 1998. This is wildly inconsistent with the models on which global warming arguments are based. But it gets better. Here is the London Telegraph:
Researchers studying long-term changes in sea temperatures said they now expect a "lull" for up to a decade while natural variations in climate cancel out the increases caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions.
The average temperature of the sea around Europe and North America is expected to cool slightly over the decade while the tropical Pacific remains unchanged.
This would mean that the 0.3°C global average temperature rise which has been predicted for the next decade by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change may not happen, according to the paper published in the scientific journal Nature.
However, the effect of rising fossil fuel emissions will mean that warming will accelerate again after 2015 when natural trends in the oceans veer back towards warming, according to the computer model.
So we are in for another ten years of global cooling. Surely the polar bears will be happy about that? Maybe the general climate models are right, and temperatures will soar after 2015. But they are way off when it comes to what is happening now. Are there more surprises in store? Bet on it. That's the way nature works.
I like polar bears as much as the next guy, at least when they aren't dancing with penguins in Coke commercials. When I consider how well-designed they are for life in the white zone, I am filled with admiration. But the claim that they are endangered by global warming is based on pure speculation. Polar bears have survived earlier periods of warming just fine, thank you. We have no way of knowing what is in store for them in the next century.
Besides, are we really going to regulate everything from automobiles to hog manure based on what is might happen to animals living in the arctic a hundred years from now? Maybe we should, be we ain't gonna. When we think about how best to protect polar bears, we have to think locally: what are the conditions now and the threats to them where they live. When we think about global warming we have to think globally. The Endangered Species Act was not designed for that.
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