SI Online
Melting a Snow Job
Posted: May 21, 2009
The federal Endangered Species Act is designed to protect the natural habitats of animals at risk of becoming extinct.
Applying ESA to the Alaskan polar bear was the result of a brilliant but misbegotten legal strategy by a Tucson, Arizona-based environmental action group that was supported by a brilliant but misguided PR campaign to brow beat the Bush administration into listing the Alaskan bears for ESA protection in 2008.
But, the worst parts of this gambit are being reigned in by, of all people, the Obama administration which recently defied the PR effort to greatly reduce the scope of the ESA ruling.
The group that led the fight for the ESA listing, the Center for Biological Diversity, argues that the ESA classification provides a legal basis for restricting carbon emissions in the Lower 48 because every person, cow, car, truck, home, shopping mall and power plant generates air emissions that contribute to global warming, which contributes to ice melt in the Arctic, which jeopardizes polar bears.
Obama’s Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, disagrees.
ESA was written to protect wildlife from specific local threats, not global trends, and Salazar said the federal government will look for other ways to both protect polar bears and address Lower 48 emissions.
The ruling brought howls of protest and claims of betrayal, and it will be appealed in court. An online petition drive is also underway demanding that Salazar reverse his decision. We don't know how this food fight will turn out, but the issue is worth tracking for a number of reasons.
First, it provides hope the Obama administration might be able to stand up to the more hysterical rhetoric of environmental groups who have reduced the polar bear issue and other aspects of climate change to the intellectual level of Coca Cola holiday season TV commercials.
Second, it might help sharpen the focus of the ESA listing on measures that might actually do the bears some good.
Humanity’s impact on the bears is best demonstrated by the fact there are presently so many of them. Thanks to international curbs on hunting, the world’s polar bear population increased dramatically over the past few decades.
Contrary to much of what you've heard, the connection between climate change and polar bears is not quite so clear, even though it is clearly worth worrying about.
Global warming has resulted in greater summer melting of the Arctic ice pack. That impacts polar bears because their lives are so tightly bound to the balance between burning and consuming calories.
Ice provides the perfect hunting platform for the bears to catch ringed seals, their preferred food source, because the process requires such little effort. The bears wait by holes in the ice. Seals come up in the holes to get air. Bears whack seals. Bears eat seals. Bears wait for another seal. Whack, Eat, etc. Less ice means a smaller hunting platform is available for the polar bear version of an all you can eat buffet line.
In demanding ESA protection, environmental groups argued these trends will combine to produce an ice free Arctic before we know it where starving polar bears will drown amid the last few ice cubes bobbing in the Arctic Ocean, bringing the species to extinction. But things aren't quite that simple.
For instance, the claim is made repeatedly that the ice melts are the greatest “on record,” but the actual record is extremely short. Arctic ice measurements did not begin in a serious way until 1979. That’s just 30 years ago and in a global phenomenon like climate change, that’s about as long as a cow belch.
And, while the ice is a perfect hunting platform for them, polar bears are agile enough to catch seals by swimming after them, although it requires the expenditure of far more calories. And while ringed seals are their preferred calorie source, polar bears can and will eat just about anything.
Polar bears also live on land as well as ice and, in spite of the focus on summer melts, the Arctic winter remains mighty long with prolonged periods of total darkness and temperatures that plummet far below zero. Nobody we know of is suggesting how or if ice would stop forming under such circumstances, and recent scientific research suggests the ice pack is not only impacted by global warming, but also by changing Arctic wind patterns which moves the ice around.
As for drowning polar bears, four bear drownings were documented in 2004, likely as result of a storm. No other drownings have been documented since then, and, if more drownings could be documented, trust us, we would hear about all of them.
But, this last point also shows how complicated this topic is. The absence of documented drowings does not mean there haven’t been drownings. It’s just that it’s extremely hard to document nearly anything about polar bears because of the enormity of their Arctic habitat, the limited contact between the bears and humans, and the short period of time in which we’ve attempted to keep track of them.
Some will say Seattle Industry must “hate polar bears” to challenge the polar bear orthodoxy. Not so. We experienced polar bears up close and personal in the fall of 2005 in the village of Katkovik on the Beaufort Sea along Alaska’s north coast. The bears gathered to feed on whale carcasses that were set out for them by the villagers. The bears emerged from the ocean to gnaw the carcasses while the villagers watched from the safety of their cars and trucks. The experience was unforgettable and few could view the scene without developing strong feelings about the bears and their future. See photos below.
But the bears and the whole topic of climate change deserve better than the cartoonish ways they are usually presented to the public. As citizens who need to forge a real consensus on climate change, we deserve better too.
As small as it may seem, the Salazar decision to limit the scope of the ESA polar bear decision was a welcome departure from the sheer dumbness of the national polar bear dialogue to this point.
This is the type of change many of us have been waiting for. Here’s hoping it is a sign of things to come.
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Carcasses set out for bears |
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Bears gnaw whale meat |
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Bear looks into truck window shortly before truck occupants decide to flee |
