The world’s polar bear population, it is reported, is at its peak, has more than doubled over the past 40 years and has handled itself well in temperatures higher than today’s. The main thing suggesting possible peril decades from now are computer models about as reliable as my big toe is in predicting whether it is going to rain tomorrow.
On this basis, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne has pronounced that polar bears are threatened as defined by the Endangered Species Act, and several environmental groups are openly plotting to use the ruling to stymie fossil-fuel energy consumption. One consequence, an analyst contends, could be to deprive the country of its best chance to grow less dependent on Mideast exports and better control pump prices.
All of this amounts to still more evidence that America is in the grip of radical environmentalists who succeeded through their incessant propagandizing and court action in getting the Bush administration not only to take up the issue, but to cave in to the pressure. In considering “the scientific record,” Kempthorne said, there was no other decision he could make. Really?
The thesis is that global warming is melting Arctic ice that many polar bears need in their hunting forays. NASA thinks differently, notes Kenneth Green, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. It’s changing wind patterns that have done most of the ice damage over the past eight years, the federal agency said not many months before a study’s findings were published in Nature. As Green writes, that study said heating in the Arctic comes from high in the atmosphere, not at a lower level indicating the work of greenhouse gases.
Even if greenhouse gases were the chief risk to Arctic ice, you cannot reliably estimate their future impact based on U.N. computer modeling that forecast net warming this past decade. Patrick Michaels, a climatologist at the University of Virginia, notes that this warming didn’t happen, and adds that “scientists recently discovered that it is likely there will be little if any (net warming) for the next decade.” So all this stuff about the polar bear plight is a matter of politics, not science, he says.
The politics does not end with the polar bear palaver, but extends to the steps that might be taken in the name of saving the creatures. Kempthorne said his ruling had been so constructed as to keep it from compelling other policies meant to quell emissions or stop oil and gas production. But don’t underestimate the persistence and legal wiliness of environmental groups, now hugely practiced at circumventing executive decisions and representative democracy through lawsuits.
One possibility will be to seek the imposition of a vast, recession-inducing, market-adverse system of energy restraints throughout the country, and here is what one think tank observer also fears: Use of the polar bear ruling to fight any congressional change of heart on tapping Alaskan and off-shore oil that exists in significant amounts and just might make an equally significant difference in the lives of millions of Americans.
Keep in mind that all of this would be for the supposed sake of saving some 25,000 bears that don’t seem to need saving. Supposing for the moment that the U.N. computer predictions were unassailable, The New York Times tells us scientists still say polar bears would be safe from extinction for more than 100 years.
Put it all together, and what you get is extremists aiming to dictate America’s destiny. It’s like handing the country over to the whims of my big toe.
Examiner columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He may be reached at [email protected]
