Bear down! – Send an ambulance and a lawyer!
The big green machine has finally successfully lobbied enough FUD to get the thriving polar bear listed as a threatened species. Never mind the fact that the arctic sea ice has melted before in the last 100 years. See the news release from the Department of the Interior here:
http://www.doi.gov/issues/polar_bears.html
Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne announced on May 14, 2008 that he is accepting the recommendation of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dale Hall to list the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The listing is based on the best available science, which shows that loss of sea ice threatens and will likely continue to threaten polar bear habitat.
So what happens if sea ice grows? Let’s see how well that “best available science” holds up. According to the full DOI press release, computer model scenarios figured heavily into the decision.
Now come the lawsuits for everything under the sun that may potentially affect sea ice and those poor bears. Yep, fire up that big lawsuit engine, let’s get ready to ruuummmmble!
(h/t MattN)
Update: The Sierra Club is not happy about this, because the “decision is riddled with loopholes, caveats, and backhanded language that could actually undermine protections for the polar bear and other species”. You just can’t please some people.
Update 2: If you really want to see green stupidity in action, try the Polar Bear Brainwashing Parking game:
http://www.gamesfree.ca/other_games/810/Polar_Bear_Parking.html
Play the game and watch the “education” at the end. Note to intellectually challenged game designers: Penguins don’t inhabit the arctic.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
That game is not easy. Best I could do was 6 penguins 😉
Sometimes reading this stuff gives me something akin to an incipient toothache–not clear what it is that is bothering me, you know?
So, as I understand it, as a result of a court order the polar bears have been listed as “threatened” because the models (what ever that turns out to actually mean).
That reminded me that the wind blew all the ice out of the Northwest Passage (or something) last year, then somebody was fretting that all there was left was “new ice”. Or that it was coming back to fast to be any good. Or something.
So I decided to try and sort it all out. (What’s up with the PB’s in AZ? Coyote rip off some collars? GPS gone nutso? Telemetry froze?)
Noted a comment by Evan Jones in the posting at http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/02/16/ice-between-canada-and-sw-greenland-highest-level-in-15-years/ “Well, were (sic) within a month of the point where ice will start to decrease. It will be interesting to see how this year’s melting trend goes.”
That was on 16 February instant–“within a month” would have run out certainly by the mid April.
What happened? Did it all decrease? By how much?
@Fernando
Oh! That’s how it’s calculated.
Well shiver my timbers!
And all this time I thought you had to have a PhD to run that outfit
If polar bears are on the ESL, then doesn’t that mean eskimos won’t be allowed to hunt them?
I can quarentee that it won’t be anyone from any politicians, or beaurocrat’s families.
Well, I am happy Polar Bears are now better protected. As I am happy for any species.
I think they should be protected in any case – if global warming is caused by humans or not – if the artic warms or cools now.
I agree the global warming hysteria is a nonsense – because we certainly do not understand what exactly is going on with climate.
But humans do not give the other species of the planet the chance to continue living. The word population grows so fast making it almost impossible for many other species to coexist with us on the planet. It would be stupid to destroy all the nature and other species – and many already became extinct in the past 10 000 years – because of us. We never know if we may need them – or our kids. We have no right to take away nature completely for our kids.
Just because one species is stable for the last 50 years or sligthly grows is not reason, not to protect them ! The artic isnt an attractive region for humans anyways – so why we have to touch it ?
I think at least 30 % of each country, each ecosystem in the world should remain complete wilderness – by a strict law. No species would die out and we would keep the richtness of our planet.
Independent of global warming
What can I say!!
Posted today on “Icecap.com”.
http://www.webcommentary.com/asp/ShowArticle.asp?id=websterb&date=080515
Got ammo?
http://www.weatherby.com/products/ammo.asp?prd_id=13
Larry Sheldon,
Artice Sea Ice Extent April
from NSIDC
Wow, you think with all the brilliant minds on this site there would be more references to data, scientific journals and papers they’ve published.
Crickets…..
That’s because you’re all a bunch of crackpots that wouldn’t recognize real science if it bit you. Real science includes computer models and updating those models to include new information. Real science recognizes that the trend lines for both Arctic and and global sea ice are still headed down as long as you use data that’s more than a year old.
And what the hell is your obsession with sunspots? If there’s no global warming it can’t be sunspots; if there is global warming then sunspots are not the most likely explanation but rather a minor influence. Make up you minds.
REPLY: Folks, don’t feed the troll. Not worth the effort.
Storm:”The word population grows so fast making it almost impossible for many other species to coexist with us on the planet. It would be stupid to destroy all the nature and other species – and many already became extinct in the past 10 000 years – because of us. We never know if we may need them – or our kids. We have no right to take away nature completely for our kids.”
Perhaps you could lead the way and eliminate your own evil humaness as a start.
“If they are a threatened species, does that mean it is now illegal to hunt them for food and fur?”
Obviously, I am not an expert in this area either, but it is appears that most of the 50,000-odd bears live in not-Alaska, so unless the Canadians knuckle under, this nonsense won’t apply to Eskimos (all of whom live in Russia, anyway don’t they? And I don’t remember if there are polar bears where the Aleuts live. Maybe some Inuits will be involved.
Scandal up that way a while back: A Tlinkt man was discovered in a Haida bed.
How old does sea ice get?
Pierre Gosselin said: “Concerning the bears, it’s high time to pressure the candidates into telling us NOW what steps they intend to take to solve “this problem”. The Interior Dept has spoken, now ask McCain and Obama what actions they intend to implement. Nail them down now so that the American people know what to expect.
Pierre, US politicians only lie when their mouths are moving. And Osama and McCaca have been moving their mouths in abundance now-a-days. I’m not too certain how it is in Germany (haven’t been there in many, many years) but in the US only nitwits believe politicians. They are in it for power, for themselves, and for all their relatives – damn the electorate!
Jack Koenig, Editor
The Mysterious Climate Project
http://www.climateclinic.com
PS: this will only be the second time in my life that I refused to vote in the presidential race. The other time was whem Jimmy Caca ran against bumbling Ford. In that race, as in this, you can’t even vote against one or the other — they both suck!
We can’t create more ice for the Polar Bear habitat so what can we do? Club baby seals to make more room for the ESL PB?
@Pierre Gosselin
Come to Canada, you can still hunt them here…and in Churchill Manitoba, you need to take special precautions from this ‘threatened’ species:
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/1098655185981_2/?hub=Canada
And bad polar bears go to jail where they are possibly not given food:
http://www.geocities.com/mikepolarbear/faq.html#jail
Good thing they aren’t ‘threatened’ in Canada, or we might have to parole them.
Anthony,
You say there may be exceptions for native eskimos. This therefore will apply in Alaska right? But presumably those native eskimos are also Alaskans – how can there be one law for some Alaskans but not for others?
REPLY: That’s why we have lawyers ready to harpoon this law from any angle imaginable.
As an aside, I just went to the WordPress dashboard, and under the science section they have 4 posts listed. Three are for this blog.
Sheesh, ya big bully… 😉
You better watch out. You know hat happened when Harry Potter was hogging three of the top ten spots of the NYT bestseller list? The “banned” HP by excluding all “juvenile fiction”–no matter HOW well it was selling. (“They killed Harry! Bastards.”)
Next thing we know, the Rev will be redefined as a “non-scientist”, and WTFUWT will be determined to be “non-scientific” and thereby purged from the category!
As for the polar bear population, judging by its 300-to-500 percent increase it is obviously out of control. I recommend pruning.
Note that the Arctic sea ice graph has a suppressed zero. Even 2007’s reduction doesn’t look so spectacular.
Polar bears may well be endangered. Like deer along the front range of the Rockies. With few preditors, including hunters, they have outgrown their food supply and are not in great health. If those cuddly PB’s have tripled or quintupled in the past 40 years, what kind of pressure does it put on their food supply? They starve and the Goreons say “We were right!” Another excuse to go after Big Oil. Why do you rob banks? (W. Sutton)
How much did the trial lawyers association lobby to get this ruling?
Let me get this straight: Canada has 13 of the 15 tracked “population groups” of polar bears, and isn’t doing anything extraordinary aside from restricting the hunting for the bears, and the US, that has 2 of the 15 population groups of polar bears has designated the polar bears as “threatened”.
What would the US Congress do if, say, Canada reduced all restrictions on hunting of polar bears completely? The population drop would be nearly instantaneous as well as tremendous! To me, it seems the biggest danger to bears is Canadian hunting restrictions. Say, the population of Canadian polar bears goes so high as to be a nuisance and hunting is temporarily encouraged. While the US is enacting legislation to increase the polar bear population, Canada would be doing their best to reduce it!
With tongue firmly in cheek, I’ll propose that Canada hire some human coyotes and truck their spare polar bear population across the Alaskan border…
“Folks, don’t feed the troll. Not worth the effort.”
I wish you could just drop them. No discussion necessary, I’m just sayin…..
If polar bears were a part of my neighborhood, I’d sure as hell take nature completely away from my kids as I wouldn’t want my kids to become their next meal.
Alan S. Blue. Thanks. Looked. Looks to me like we are tracking a “more ice than last year” but “less ice than the long running average”. Is that right?
’bout what a know-nothing would expect, given that things happen in cycles and we aren’t apparently all the way out of the last ice age. But it makes me wonder sometimes when I go out to feed the birds and spot a few Juncos (“snow birds”) when I thought they had all left for the summer.
A fellow poster on another forum summed it up perfectly:
“The problem I have with declaring polar bear as endangered is this: the proclamation dilutes and cheapens the pursuit of protections for other species that are in far worse danger of becoming extinct. Its important to put your priorities in order.”
I couldn’t agree more.