The Think Tank

There are roughly 25,000 wild polar bears in the world, divided between 19 primary populations in the US, Canada, Greenland and Russia.  On average a male polar bear is eight feet long and weighs about one thousand pounds.

They live in one of the few corners of this world that has been largely unaffected by world turmoil… but that is changing.  Global warming – or “climate change” as it is called now – is one of those things not even polar bears can escape.  In fact, its effecting them sooner and with greater impact then anywhere else.

The most studied group of polar bears is the Western Hudson Bay population, which scientists have been observing since the 1960’s.  For decades that groups numbers held steady at approximately 1,200 adults and cubs.  But between 1987 and present, the average number of bears has fallen to 935.  That’s a 22% decrease.  The reason?  Several environmental factors play a role, but the unmitigated champion of the polar bears demise is global warming.  As the world heats up, the ice floes and Arctic ice shelves that the bears hunt and live on are shrinking.

Unlike most bears polar bears do not hibernate, though they do retreat to dens during the harshest parts of the Arctic winter.  When they emerge from the dens with their cubs, stockpiling calories is a vital necessity if they are to survive the still frigid spring and summer months.  Thanks to global warming, however, the ice shelf retreats an average of three weeks earlier then it did just twenty years ago, meaning that the polar bears have that much less time to bulk up.  If they fail to get enough food, they freeze to death.  Other bears find themselves themselves marooned on ice floes that have broken off of the mainland and carried them upwards of 50 miles from their usual territories.  While they are fantastic swimmers, these immense distances are too much for many of them.  Drowned bears are a common site today, the numbers passing 50 drowned bears per season.  Others still find themselves victims to cannibalistic bears, a highly uncommon characteristic for these animals only found during times of severe starvation.

The polar bear situation is dire, and to me seems like a harbinger of our own impending difficulties.

But there is a glimmer of hope on the horizon.

More then a year ago there was a petition made to the Department of the Interior to list the polar bear as an endangered species.  Not surprisingly the petition was ignored, prompting a lawsuit by the Natural Resources Defense Council, Greenpeace and the Center for Biological Diversity to force the DOI to rule on whether or not polar bears were endangered due to human contributions to global warming.  And shockingly, the answer that came back was “yes.”  This is a truly amazing development, given that the Bush Administration has staunchly maintained not only that global temperatures were within normal ranges, but that human beings were not effecting the global climate at all.

The decision by the DOI does not immediately grant polar bears protection under the Endangered Species Act, but instead sets in motion a one year investigation to determine if the polar bears plight is indeed caused by human contributions to global climate change.  Skeptics would argue that the investigations finding will be cherry-picked or doctored as many other now infamous environment studies pertaining to global warming have been.  But the simple fact that the petition for the study was granted gives many people hope.

Should the polar bear be listed as endangered due to man-caused global warming, the Endangered Species Act would come into play.  That would be a real boon to the environmental movement, primarily because the ESA not only prevents building new hazards to the endangered animal, but also calls for the government to produce proactive legislation to foster regeneration of the species – in this case, that would have to be by reducing greenhouses gasses that lead to global warming.  Sadly the ESA has no provision to force retrofitting of existing equipment, but it does require that any new construction be compliant with the new standards set forth by governmental scientific studies.  Given that the US contributes more greenhouse emissions then South Korea, Russia, Great Britain, Canada, Brazil, India and China combined, this could conceivably have far reaching implications: from cars with higher fuel efficiency standards to new requirements for “green” energy production, to CO2 caps and tax credits for CO2 reductions – all things that have been talked about in recent years but have failed to come to fruition only for lack of political will.

So by saving the polar bear, we may inadvertently save ourselves in the process.

If you would like to sign the petition to encourage the Bush Administration to add polar bears to the Endangered Species Act or for further information, please visit www.polarbearsos.com.