If polar bears are doomed, we all are
The US Fish & Wildlife Service is considering listing the polar bear as a threatened species, under that country’s Endangered Species Act.
Before blasting this idea as an underhanded ploy by evil environmentalists, it is worth considering the exact meaning of the terms in question. The US criteria are not quite consistent with those of the World Conservation Union (which the cognoscenti abbreviate as IUCN). The latter maintains the famous (or infamous, considering how few of its members have actually gone extinct) Red List of Threatened Species, in which “critically endangered”, “endangered” and “vulnerable”, describing an extremely high, very high or high risk of extinction respectively, are collectively known as “threatened”. By contrast, a “threatened” species under the US law means any species which is “likely to become an endangered species within the foreseeable future throughout all or a significant portion of its range”, and an “endangered” species is one “which is in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range”. Also, there is much more scope for discretion under the US rules, while the IUCN criteria for the different categories are very specific.
So, on what grounds should the polar bear be listed as threatened? Among the US agency’s own research, a population forecast says much depends on 45-, 75- or 100-year predictions of the extent of Arctic sea ice, and even then, there’s much uncertainty. Besides, that analysis (PDF) has come under attack (PDF) for serious flaws in its methods and analysis. Turns out that after a few years of slight decline in Arctic sea ice coverage, this winter’s Arctic ice is back to normal levels. (Via Anthony Watts, who links to the useful University of Illinois Cryosphere Today site. It also has a cute story about a stolen polar bear photo, reproduced above, which Al Gore and the media used to tell yet another lie: “They cling precariously to the top of what is left of the ice floe, their fragile grip the perfect symbol of the tragedy of global warming.” Sob sob. Hat-tip: Hard Rain.)
What about polar bear population? Well, it’s pretty much stable, it appears. A National Center for Policy Analysis report entitled Polar Bears on Thin Ice? Not Really!, says that only two of the twenty or so population groups are in decline, which hardly gels with “throughout all or a significant portion of its range”. There’s a picture alongside. The chart illustrates the polar bear populations that are growing, declining, stable and unknown. Hardly looks like a threatened species, does it?
In fact, although the Red List includes the polar bear (and the hippo, which is responsible for more human deaths in Africa than any other large animal), I can’t see which of the criteria it actually meets. The Inuit around Hudson Bay are saying more need to be hunted, because their population is increasing, and in an amusingly headlined article, “Advertisers urged to kill off polar bears,” James Murray reports on a study that finds advertisers should eschew cute pictures of polar bears to burnish their green image.
Listing a species that isn’t actually endangered is likely to do as much harm to noble conservation efforts as did Norman Myers’s 1979 statement, based on supposition alone, that 40 000 species would go extinct per year until 2000. Didn’t happen. Yet it was repeated in Al Gore’s 1993 book, Earth in the Balance, and is only one among many hyperbolic prophesies of mass extinction, which simply have not come true, and don’t look likely to happen in the foreseeable future either. They’re a bit like the cults who predict the end of the world. They’ve never been right, but of course, that only strengthens their faith that they have to be right sometime soon.
Despite the lack of evidence that the polar bear is, in fact, threatened, Brendon Frazier of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, says it should be listed not as threatened, but as endangered. In this AFP article, he explains the reason why:
“An endangered listing can affect the sell-off of the oil drilling rights,” Brandon Frazier, a spokesman for global animal welfare group International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) said. “The authorities would have to get approval through the Fish and Wildlife Service to conduct drilling if there is an endangered species that inhabits the area.” […]
US lawmakers have proposed listing the polar bear as “threatened”, but IFAW said that did not go far enough. “A ‘threatened’ listing leaves open the possibility for exemptions and doesn’t shut loopholes, such as the one that allows Americans to trophy-hunt for polar bears in Canada and bring their heads and hides back to the US,” Frazier told AFP.
So there’s your reason. Anything to stop the big, bad oil companies from drilling. If the polar bear is under threat, the reason is climate change, which in turn is caused by evil humans, who dare pursue industrial development, scientific advance and economic progress.
That’s what they’re fighting for. If the polar bear gets listed as threatened, this can be used to stop almost any new industrial development, anywhere. Even if the impact is so tenuous nothing but global warming alarmism can rationalise it. If the polar bear gets listed as endangered, then so is the growth in prosperity that has fueled the rising quality of life among rich and poor alike. It’s not about the polar bear. It’s about us. It is, to quote William F. Buckley, about standing athwart history, yelling “Stop!”.
Now who’s the conservative?
The interminable Penn and Teller did a thorough debunking of the Endangered Species Act, showing it to be yet another mechanism for government to control the rights of property owners by claiming “protection” over animals.
See the episode in 3 parts at YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Penn+and+Teller+Endangered+Species+Act&search_type=&search=Search
Also, your hat-tip spurred me on for a brief update of my site. Will hopefully have some decent substance on it soon…
That’s good news. And people tell me blogging doesn’t change the world. Dust off those BS detectors.
Yeah, shameless plug, but my BS meters are going to be coming into direct contact with Scientology and its E-meters soon. Just a little preview ;)
[…] - The “spike” has a well written story about the Polar Bear issue, along with some […]
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/sea.ice.minimum.2007.html
“Historically, the annual minimum in NH sea ice area occurs sometime near the end of August or during the month of September. The median (1979-present) annual sea ice minimum occurs on September 8, but the dates have ranged by nearly a month from as early as August 26 to as late as September 24.”
Comparing a late winter’s image to mid-summer meltdown is rather misleading. Or did you not read the website?
Incidentally, polar bears are listed as vulnerable not “threatened”.
See: http://www.iucnredlist.org/search/details.php/22823/summ
“While some have speculated that polar bears might become extinct within 100 years from now, which would indicate a population decrease of >50% in 45 years based on a precautionary approach due to data uncertainty. A more realistic evaluation of the risk involved in the assessment makes it fair to suspect population reduction of >30%.”
I compared this February’s level with last February’s level, and found them to be more or less equal. Of course it is misleading to compare winter with summer, which is why I didn’t do so. In fact, I didn’t mention summer at all.
It is also misleading to look at one summer’s anomaly (which in 2007 was unusually large) and holler dire warnings about the “disappearing Arctic ice”, as the media has been doing. After the incessant scare stories of the summer of 2007, I was a little surprised to see that this winter’s ice extent is right back to where it was last winter. Going by the news stories, one would have expected it never to recover.
The fact is that Arctic ice extent has only been tracked for 30 years, and the decline of the last decade or so is far from the catastrophic “disappearing” act that we see blaring at us from every TV and glaring at us from every glossy news magazine.
On your second comment, Jeff, “vulnerable” is “threatened”, according to the IUCN classification. I clearly explained this in paragraph two of my post, on the exact meaning of the terms in question. The term “threatened” applies any and all of the three classifications of “vulnerable”, “endangered” and “critically endangered”.
No wonder it takes tens of thousands of environmentalists two weeks at a five-star luxury resort on a tropical island paradise to agree to meet to agree to discuss a framework for an agreement. Half the time they’re spending their lush donor funds on diverting themselves nitpicking about definition details they forgot had been perfectly clearly stated upfront.
Having re-read my original post, I was surprised to discover that I never even said the polar bear was listed as “threatened” by the IUCN. I was discussing the proposal to list it as “threatened” by the US Fish & Wildlife Service, under the US Endangered Species Act. All I said about the polar bear in relation to the IUCN was that the Red List “includes” it.
So not only are you bickering about something that would have been perfectly correct had I actually said it, but you’re bickering about something I didn’t even say.
Quite amazing.
Ivo, your argument seems to infer that the IUCN is composed of bunny/tree hugging lunatics; and that by doing their job (listing and creating awareness towards protecting endangered and vulnerable species) they could be regarded as “infamous”.
You also state “In fact, although the Red List includes the polar bear (and the hippo, which is responsible for more human deaths in Africa than any other large animal), I can’t see which of the criteria it actually meets.”
The IUCN reviewed the polar bear’s status in 2006, and it is listed as vulnerable. Due to the loss of their area of occupancy, as well as other potential environmental impacts. (Mining, for example.)
So a group of concerned environmentalists have requested the US Fish & Wildlife Service to consider listing the polar bear as a threatened species - in an obvious attempt to minimize mining damage - that does not paint the IUCN in quite the negative light you attempt to portray.
Perhaps we should be able to settle the argument about polar meltdowns in August or September this year. When the polar bears wake from their annual hibernation to find a largely smaller (sic) icecap as has consistently been the case over the past 30 years of recording. (http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/sea.ice.minimum.2007.html)
Your Winter past to Winter previous illustration is worse than meaningless. Its purposefully misleading.
Ivo, the substance of your argument appears to be that environmental controls are bad and industrial progress is good . . .
If you truly believe a concerted effort to preserve our environment and to lower CO2 emissions (at the expense of almighty “Progress”) is simply doomsday alarmism; then I would recommend that you to go and take a nice relaxing break in the countryside you’re condemning. I hope you get stung by a bee. ; )
First you say a summer-winter comparison is meaningless. Then you say a winter-winter comparison is meaningless. I think the restoration of all of the area of occupancy, despite a particularly low-ice summer, is meaningful. This suggests that the short-term trend isn’t as steep as some had feared. Your baseless prophesy is what strikes me as meaningless. Besides, if I was trying to mislead anyone, I wouldn’t have linked to the full statistics.
The IUCN listing doesn’t appear to conform to the strict criteria it specifies. In fact, after reading the criteria, I was surprised to find that the polar bear had been listed. Maybe I’m missing something, but if you can point out any criterion other than VU-B-1 under which it might qualify, go ahead. I think VU-B-1 is the closest, based on the speculative presumption that the ice cap is inexorably melting. The problem is that this criterion clearly requires that the population occurs over less than 20 000 square km, which doesn’t hold true for polar bears. Therefore, the IUCN listing appears to contravene its own criteria. And yes, that does diminish the IUCN’s work in my eyes.
The American criteria are far more vague, which means bureaucrats have a great deal of latitude and discretion in their listing decisions. Since the polar bear population is not declining, since we cannot conclude all that much about an ice cap we’ve only been observing for three decades, since our theory about the Arctic ice cap appears to be contradicted by Antarctic and global sea ice cover, since polar bears aren’t going to sit around waiting for Godot if faced with mild changes in their environment, since mining or drilling affects only a miniscule fraction of their habitat and since resources companies are pretty good at conservation nowadays, I’m of the opinion that there’s insufficient reason to declare polar bears a threatened species.
Which raises the question, why petition for such a listing? Well, the motive is clear from the explanation given by IFAW’s Frazier, namely that the only reason to list them is to have an excuse to block drilling, or other industrial development on earth. It doesn’t even have to encroach on the Arctic, because the speculative link is global warming, which is, well, global. The petition for a listing has nothing to do with “concerned environmentalists”. If the concern were genuine, they wouldn’t undermine the credibility of valid conservation efforts by listing a poster-species that clearly does not qualify as threatened, for transparently political and anti-development reasons. This entire episode is activism, not science.
Sorry, your ability to comment clearly outpaces my ability to answer you. Therefore, this will be my last answer:
The substance of your argument seems to be that all progress is bad, and all environmental laws, regulations and protective measures are good.
Is that a valid summary of your position? If not, please be so kind as not to apply that sort of generalisation about my views, when I’m making an argument about a particular case. Please be so kind not to assume that because I oppose the alarmism and political motives of many environmentalists, that I am somehow opposed to a clean, healthy, productive and pleasant environment. Perhaps I just have other ideas about how to achieve that, and whether or not listing a perfectly healthy species as threatened with the sole motive of blocking drilling advances those aims.
Actually I would rather heap the majority of industrialists and environmental gainsayers into a spiritually unconscious, generally materialistic & neo-conservative vested-interest bracket…
Incidentally, if you’d read any of the originating articles and links properly (instead of copying the gist of wattsup’s assumptions and aspersions blindly) you’d have realized that the “endangered” categorization is in regard to the Alaskan polar bears which are truly threatened by extinction.in.that.state.
To recap (and this is partially paraphrased from JD’s response to wattsup): you show a single point of a single parameter measured for a single year,
a single satellite photo taken at a single point in time,
a single example of irresponsible media using a single photograph of a single bear,
then you ridicule a single person and conclude that it’s unreasonable to think there might be a long-term trend with Arctic sea loss, or threats for polar bears.
You further ridicule the IUCN for being instrumental in raising the polar bears global population from about 5,000 - 40 years ago - to it’s precarious population of 25,000 today…
Then on this line of evidence you infer that it’s just silly to be thinking about energy-policy changes or interfering with the path of “Progress.”
If you’re going to make a valid argument you really should try not to misconstrue facts or create such tenuous associations.
My humble apologies for failing to write a full-length scientific paper that exhaustively assesses all factors. But because I knew there would be nitpickers who would rather read those, I did link to both an assessment (which could be the one you’re referring to), as well as a detailed audit that finds it to be deficient in 73 of the 90 forecasting principles it was able to rate. The audit found that the forecast depends on a long causal chain of assumptions, the failure of even one of which would break the chain and invalidate the conclusion. And you accuse me of creating tenuous associations, when you happily accept all the questionable connections in the causal chain between polar bears and energy policy?
As for the IUCN, I ridiculed it not for saving the polar bear. Has it occurred to you that there is a rather major discrepancy between 40 years of healthy population growth and a listing as “vulnerable” in 2006? That perhaps the IUCN doesn’t deserve credit for “being instrumental”?
No, I ridiculed the IUCN for failing to follow its own published criteria for listing. (Notably, though I asked that you address that point, you ignore it. Instead, you once again merely change the angle of your attack.) I ridiculed the IUCN for fuelling “mass extinction” predictions that never come true. I ridiculed it for undermining noble conservation efforts and degrading the integrity of its Red List by engaging in politically motivated alarmism over the polar bear.
As for progress, you may not feel you need it, but substantial numbers of people still lack the basic essentials that you take for granted. Progress has lifted millions out of poverty, has almost doubled our life expectancy in the last 100 years, has slashed infant mortality, has reduced hunger and improved nutrition, has reduced deaths from infectious diseases by almost 90%. It has done these things in both the developed and developing world, but the latter is hardly at a stage where you can blithely sacrifice progress on the altar of environmentalist fervour. Especially not when that fervour is just plain wrong, as it is in the case of the polar bears.
And he used the dreaded “neo-conservative” label!! Oh nooes!
Hail to the Chief.
Both sides have valid arguments, and I am a firm believer in supporting everyone’s individual right to their own opinion. However, what you are arguing about isn’t really the issue. You have gone back and forth about the EXTENT of sea ice cover, which yes, it has extended back to previous levels, and is even covering more area than it has in the past. But what is really the issue is the QUALITY of the pack ice, the thickness, and predictability, etc. So although it may cover a large area, it has been thinning and is becoming much less stable. This effects polar bears, yes because they often den on pack ice (not just hunt) and are being forced to den on land because the ice is not stable or supportive enough to den on. This also effects us as humans, whether it be the “environmental alarmists” or “tree huggers” or the “progress loving conservatives,” whatever you want to call anyone. Environmentalists respect the land because we understand we need resources from the land, like oil, mining, or logging, for instance (all of which we need, we just have to be responsible about it and use the resources wisely). But oil drilling and exploration depends greatly on the pack ice being stable, at least somewhat predictable. Shipping lanes which deliver much needed supplies to villages and towns along Alaska’s coast only have a certain amount of time when the ice is predictable, and that window is getting smaller and smaller because with thinner pack ice. It can be very dangerous for shipping and oil companies alike. The prospect of an ice-free arctic is actually a beneficial one to the economy. Imagine the new cruises, shipping lanes, etc. that would open up! However, this would definitely impact polar bears’ survival. The bears can most likely adapt and move to land. However new ship ports, development along the coast of say, Alaska, is going to completely change the landscape that people have come to love. This then may have negative impacts on the tourism industry, as well as endanger humans who live here. If polar bears are forced to spend more and more time on land, they are going to come into contact with humans much more. So, I am no scientist, as I am sure neither are you all, but it is necessary to at least look at all sides and the fact that just the factor of sea ice extent is not enough to tell us what is really going on. I don’t know if there is even one right answer, and it is hard to say what exactly should be done. I just thought those few things would be interesting for you all to think about.
[…] some credit for injecting some reason into the issue. UPDATE - The
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