The bear market for globo warmers

Wall Street Journal Editorial:

Global warming is becoming a new unified field theory for environmentalists, a crisis so urgent and profound that it even justifies leaping the democratic process. Consider the political campaign to prod the Bush Administration to list the polar bear as an endangered species -- even though many proponents admit it isn't endangered at all.

This game began with a 2005 lawsuit against the Interior Department from pressure groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council. Their demand was that the polar bear be designated as "threatened" -- that is, at risk for extinction in the foreseeable future -- under the 1973 Endangered Species Act.

No one disputes that higher temperatures in the bear's Arctic habitat have disrupted the sea ice that bears use to catch food and breed. The problem is that polar bear populations have been rising over the last four decades, and may now be at an historic high. This is the result of conservation management, including international agreements on trophy hunting and federal safeguards like the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

The warmists say current numbers count for little because climate-change models anticipate even more Arctic melting. These projections are speculative, however, and tend to underestimate the dynamism of the environment. Animals adapt to changing conditions, which might mean a shift in population patterns to areas where pack ice is more robust year-round. And the reduction in ice cover may be the result of cyclical wind circulation patterns and natural variability, not exclusively warming trends.

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The globo warmers are selective in the anecdotal evidence they use to push their agenda and in the case of the polar bear they chose focus on projections not supported by the facts. It can be argued that because the bear population has expanded in recent years that warmer temperatures may increase the number of polar bears. While that appears to be the case it is an inconvenient fact for the globo warmers so like they do on global warming itself, they chose to ignore all contra evidence and insist that there is no time for debate or argument over the specious species theories.