Heed the polar bears

Long the poster child of global warming, this week the polar bear became its official icon.

Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne proposed designating the bears "threatened" by the rapid melting of Arctic sea ice, which is essential to their survival.

It's the first time the Bush administration has attributed a species' decline to climate change.

Still, with typical administration equivocation, Kempthorne said Wednesday that although his department was worried about the polar bear, it wouldn't speculate on why the ice was melting or what to do about it.

Polar bears are an indicator species - a signal to watch for impending problems in the Arctic and around the world. They're struggling because of rising temperatures caused, in part, by the buildup of heat-trapping gases from tailpipes and smokestacks.

This country needs to stop ignoring the flares and put out the fire.

Several years ago, the photogenic white bear, beloved of children, became global warming's media darling. Images of creatures crowded on shrinking ice floes have adorned magazine covers, TV ads, and Web sites beneath headlines warning, "Be worried; be very worried."

The alarm is justified by research indicating that Arctic ice could decrease as much as 80 percent in the next 50 years.

That would deprive polar bears of habitat they need to travel, hunt, mate and den. Scientists doubt the speed of change will give the bear time to adapt to hunting onshore.

In western Hudson Bay, Canada, the southernmost polar bear habitat, spring ice is breaking up three weeks earlier than it did 30 years ago and freezing later in the fall. Researchers have observed thinner bears, lower reproductive rates, and reduced juvenile survival. That group, one of 19 clusters worldwide, dropped 22 percent between 1987 and 2004.

The three Alaskan groups, numbering about 4,700 of the 20,000 to 25,000 bears worldwide, seem in less immediate danger. But they, too, show stress. Bears have been observed swimming miles offshore in open water. Four drowned in 2004, a highly unusual occurrence. Starving, some have resorted to cannibalism.

Three environmental groups sued in 2005 to protect polar bears under the Endangered Species Act. "Threatened" is less dire than "endangered," which means a species faces imminent extinction.

The Interior Department will decide within a year whether to grant the "threatened" designation. If so, it must devise a recovery plan to reduce activities that cause harm - a tricky prospect. States, led by California, have tackled global warming by imposing mandatory reductions of carbon emissions from cars, trucks and power plants, but, so far, Congress has ducked the debate.

The stakes are much higher than polar bears. A warmer Alaska has been linked to river erosion, insect infestations, and the sinking of roads and pipelines into a not-so-permafrost. If humans don't act soon, the Arctic may be only the beginning of a radically changed world.

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The following editorial appeared in the Seattle Times on Friday, Dec. 29:

Global warming and polar bears

It took the threat to an iconic mammal from the coldest reaches of the north to get the Bush administration to entertain a serious debate about global warming.

The U.S. Interior Department filed a proposal Wednesday in the Federal Register to list polar bears as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. The filing triggers a 90-day comment period, during which the agency will hold hearings and collect written testimony. The agency has been studying stresses on the polar bear, partly under pressure from a lawsuit from three environmental groups.

The move is significant, because the Bush administration has been reluctant to engage debate about the mounting evidence the world is warming and posing potential harm to the environment, wildlife and humans. A growing scientific consensus says human-generated greenhouse gases are contributing to global warming.

While the administration has all but resisted the connection, many states and cities, including Seattle, have started to raise awareness about the looming threat.

Solving the challenges facing polar bears is where the rub is in federal policy. About 4,700 of the world's polar-bear population, which might number as many as 25,000, live in Alaska and spend part of the year in Canada and Russia.

The government cannot merely curtail fishing or mandate localized habitat improvement as it might for an endangered fishery, or limit logging to protect northern spotted owl habitat. The forces threatening the bears are not simple to address.

Scientists have observed earlier seasonal melting of Arctic sea ice, which provides polar bears platforms from which to hunt. Bears have been found swimming in the open ocean - a few have drowned. The adults are skinnier, cubs are facing more difficult odds, and there's disturbing evidence that a few have resorted to cannibalism.

Interior's proposal acknowledging the bears are in trouble is a welcome sign that the federal government will engage more fully on the issue of global warming. This overdue conversation should begin in earnest.

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The following editorial appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Friday, Dec. 29:

First bears and then ...

The plight of the polar bear, together with a lawsuit, has forced an admission from the Bush administration: Global warming is real.

The reality-adverse administration has had to come to grips with a hard fact: The bears' icy habitat is melting - and due to climate change. The Interior Department is proposing to declare the bears a threatened species.

This acknowledgment of global warming ought to be the first step of a more aggressive approach to solving the huge problem. The administration must come up with a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Otherwise, Congress must act.

President Bush and his people had been determinedly agnostic about global warming: It may or may not be happening, and if so, perhaps it's due to human activity or perhaps not. More studies are needed.

That agnosticism contrasted with the growing certainty among scientists that, by geological standards, the Earth is rapidly warming, and humans are the culprits.

The proposal to declare the bears threatened meets the terms of a lawsuit settlement with three environmental groups, which argued that the government was shirking its legal duty to respond to the animals' dire plight.

Of course, it's not just these huge, beautiful beasts who are in peril but also their whole ecosystem. One reason for concern is that their plight might presage that of humans.

As summer ice vanishes in the Arctic, bears are becoming scrawnier. They normally swim from one ice floe to another to hunt. As the floes vanish, polar bears in Alaska have been spotted engaging in long-distance swimming in search of nourishment - an ordeal that claims some lives. Other bears have resorted to cannibalism to survive. And cubs are dying at a higher rate than normal.

Would global warming have such an impact on humans? Who knows? But the possibility can't be ruled out.

Already, the warming has affected a tiny human habitat, the western Alaskan village of Newtok (population 321), where, according to The Associated Press, melting permafrost is contributing to flooding, which is forcing the village to move, although it now lacks the wherewithal to do so.

Just declaring the polar bears threatened, a level below the "endangered" designation, could trigger action. Because global warming is the cause, U.S. industries could be forced to reduce their output of greenhouse gases. In any case, the Bush administration must become proactive and come up with an aggressive plan for curbing global warming.