Environmentalists Are Using Polar Bears for Political Gain

[Logan13]

Environmentalists Are Using Polar Bears for Political Gain
Friday, January 05, 2007
John Gibson, Fox News

Apropos of today's warm weather in the East and impending return blizzard to the Plains, let us consider the plight of the world's endangered polar bears.

The Wall Street Journal carried a story Thursday about how polar bears may be added to the endangered list by the Bush administration because of fears that their habitat may be melting in our current global warming heat wave. We even had an administration official on this program last week on the polar bear problem.

Well, am I red-faced. Turns out if you look at the polar bear problem, the problem is too many polar bears. Well, maybe not too many, but there's a lot of them.

In the 1950s the polar bear population up north was estimated at 5,000. Today it's 20- to 25,000, a number that has either held steady over the last 20 years or has risen slightly. In Canada, the manager of wildlife resources for the Nunavut territory of Canada has found that the population there has increased by 25 percent.

Turns out the polar bear is being used by environmental groups to force the Bush administration to cave on global warming. To admit it is here, to admit it is bad, and to ratchet back the U.S. economy to slow down our production of greenhouse gases, which would save the polar bears habitat from melting, maybe, even if there are more and more polar bears around to watch their habitat melt.

This is called the spotted owl theory of environmentalism. Find a critter that might be hurt by human activity, and using that critter as a plaintiff in a lawsuit — I'm exaggerating only slightly — get the human activity to stop.

I've seen logging stopped this way, fishing stopped, and now with the polar bear mega population in danger of breaking into a sweat, a whole lot of things might be stopped if environmentalists get their way.

That's My Word.

[Kärnfysikern]

Environmentalist are scum. Utter scum. Ignorant sons of bitches that makes the whole environmental debate look foolish. The few sanes ones are drowned by the hordes of fanatic sheep that repeate like a mantra everything greenpeace and the other econazi's are saying.

They are just as ****ed up as communists and islamists. I would not sheed one tear if they all got deported to a russian gulag for a while to enjoy the sibirian weather.

[mcpeepants]

well polar bears are getting f'ed by melting ice in the north. I read an article recently about how more polar bears are drowning because they have to swim further to get seals. i'll post the article when i find it. i need to see where John Gibson got his 1950s polar bear population numbers. It seems odds since the population of most large mammalian carnivores has gone down and some have become extinct.

[Logan13]

well polar bears are getting f'ed by melting ice in the north. I read an article recently about how more polar bears are drowning because they have to swim further to get seals. i'll post the article when i find it. i need to see where John Gibson got his 1950s polar bear population numbers. It seems odds since the population of most large mammalian carnivores has gone down and some have become extinct.

Survival of the fittest. They will either adapt, or suffer the consequences like every other species has since the dawn of time..............

[Kärnfysikern]

well polar bears are getting f'ed by melting ice in the north. I read an article recently about how more polar bears are drowning because they have to swim further to get seals. i'll post the article when i find it. i need to see where John Gibson got his 1950s polar bear population numbers. It seems odds since the population of most large mammalian carnivores has gone down and some have become extinct.

I dont think the author if the article is stupid enough to try and claim the natural habitat for polar bears isnt shrinking. One only has to go to nasas picture archive to se it and the shrinkage is quite dramatic.

But the way they did stopp logging for instance was stupidity at its finest.

[mcpeepants]

More polar bears giving birth on land By DAN JOLING, Associated Press Writer
2 hours, 45 minutes ago



ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Pregnant polar bears in Alaska, who spend most of their lives on sea ice, are increasingly giving birth to their young on land, according to researchers who say global warming is probably to blame.

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The study by three scientists for the U.S. Geological Survey suggests the state's bear population could be harmed if the climate continues to grow warmer. Though bears are powerful swimmers, at some point they might have to cross vast stretches of open water to reach habitat on shore suitable for building dens in which to give birth.

From 1985 to 1994, 62 percent of the female polar bears studied dug dens in snow on sea ice. From 1998 to 2004, just 37 percent made dens on ice. The rest dug snow dens on land, according to the study.

Researchers "hypothesized that the sea ice changes may have reduced the availability or degraded the quality of offshore denning habits," said wildlife biologist Anthony Fischbach, lead author of the study. In recent years, Arctic pack ice has formed progressively later and melted earlier each season, he said.

The study is under review by the Geological Survey. Fischbach spoke about the findings Monday at the Alaska Marine Science Symposium.

Scientists estimate the Beaufort Sea polar bear population at 1,526. In the study, researchers used satellite technology to track 89 bears in northern Alaska that led them to 124 dens between 1985 and 2004.

source:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070124/...olar_bear_dens

[Flagg]

Polar Bears are very adapt animals and a circumpolar species and is actually regarded as a marine animal as opposed to land. One of the reasons that they're the biggest carnivore on the planet is because their massive bodies and blubber protect them from the huge amounts of swimming they have to do. Still I have to say that if global warming is threatening their survival then that is mans fault. Not everything in this world is about politics.