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Expanding Polar Bear Population Living on Expanding Polar Ice are Now a Threatened Species

Jimmie | May 14, 2008 | Comments (0)

This story actually makes me angry.

The Interior Department declared the polar bear a threatened species Wednesday because of the loss of Arctic sea ice but also cautioned the decision should not be viewed as a path to address global warming.

Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne cited dramatic declines in sea ice over the last three decades and projections of continued losses, meaning, he said, that the polar bear is a species likely to be in danger of extinction in the near future.

Remember a couple of days ago when I talked about how young people tend to make more decisions with their emotions instead of their intellect and how you should never make a public policy decision based on emotion? Yeah, well, the Department of the Interior is making a decision based on emotion, not facts, and it is a horrible decision for all of us.

Kempthorne says there’s a loss of Arctic sea ice. There isn’t. This winter brought about an increase in sea ice. According to the CBC, ths coldest winter in some years actually was “helping the sea ice expand in coverage by about 2 million square kilometres, compared to the average winter coverage in the previous three years.” In other words, in just the first half of this past winter, we increased the sea ice in the north by more than it had increased in three years. What’s more the ice that expanded was significantly thicker than it was the winter past.

There’s more. The ice between Greenland and Canada extended farther south than it had in the past 15 years.

Indeed, we made back the sea ice we lost during the summer of 2007, when you expect to lose some ice, plus some. Just this past January, the globe was so cold that it completely erased the warming trend of the past ten years, which didn’t actually happen. And the latest long-term climate trend looks toward the cooler, not the warmer. Of course, these are the same folks who once predicted a new ice age, then predicted global warming run amok, so take that forecast with a grain of salt.

The evidence we have right now doesn’t warrant putting polar bears, whose numbers have increased fivefold since 1972, on any endangered species list, restrictions or no.

The Interior Department is basing its decision on what it thinks could happen, based on obsolete evidence. That’s a foolish foundation on which to build lasting public policy. More importantly, it gives the Global Warming Cultists a way of sidestepping the normal democratic processes it would normally have to use to get its preferred policies put into place. Thanks to this decision, the courts will now be the venue where the folks who would rather we lived back in the 1930s will vie for control of our economy. They know they have only to catch a sympathetic judge or two to get what they and a willingly-ignorant MSM has not been able to get in twenty fruitless years of trying to con the public into believing them. That’s a big deal and it spells very bad news for our economy and each of us individually.

We need to lay aside the sob stories of polar bears not yet dead and focus on what scientists are doing right now. We are thinking adults, not reacting children. It’s time we acted like it.