[yankeedame]

One thing in the enviro-nazis favor is that polar bears have this PR image of some great big, goofy, fuzzy critters. I mean, we've all seen those pictures of the polor bear laying on his tummy in the snow, laying around on his back like a couch potato, floating around his poo at the zoo...But take away the word "polar" and see how this article would read:

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"A prime example of its effectiveness came in late December when environmental lobbyists persuaded the Bush administration to recommend that the polar bear be listed as threatened due to global warming.

"In lieu of evidence, environmentalists offered mostly anecdotes that polar bears are at risk: isolated reports of a few polar bears drowning in Arctic waters normally containing sea ice as well as a few instances of cannibalism among polar bears.

"Then they took a long leap of logic to posit that human-caused global warming will melt most of the ice at the North Pole within 50 years, and that without the ice, polar bears will be unable to hunt seals, their preferred prey.

"Fortunately, both for policy and the polar bears, the plight of this one population does not reflect the population trend as a whole. Indeed, since the 1970s, while the world was warming, polar bear numbers increased dramatically from around 5,000 to as many as 25,000 today.

"Historically, polar bears have thrived in temperatures even warmer than at present -- during the medieval warm period 1,000 years ago and during the Holocene Climate Optimum between 5,000 and 9,000 years ago.

"Polar [These] bears have thrived during warmer climates because they are omnivores just like their cousins the brown and black bears. Though polar bears currently eat seals more than anything else, they also will feast on fish, kelp, caribou, ducks, sea birds, the occasional beluga whale, musk ox and scavenged whale and walrus carcasses.

"Mitchell Taylor, a biologist with Nunavut Territorial government in Canada, pointed out in testimony to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that modest warming may be beneficial to bears since it creates better habitat for seals.

"Alaska's polar bear population is stable, and Taylor's research shows that the Canadian polar bear population has increased 25 percent from 12,000 to 15,000 during the past decade...."

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Reads a lot different this way, doesn't it?

[JessieHelmsJr]

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