No animal has been the focus of more climate change propaganda than the mighty polar bear. Making its home in the Arctic Circle, this proud beast has come to stand as a symbol for man’s irresponsible attitude towards the environment. Our thoughtless exploitation of fossil fuels is causing the ice caps to melt into the ocean, shrinking the bear’s habitat until there’s ultimately nothing left. For our greed and convenience, polar bears will suffer.
According to a new report from the Global Warming Policy Foundation, though, concerns over polar bears have been blown out of proportion. You might even say they’ve been entirely made up. In Twenty Good Reasons Not to Worry About Polar Bears, author Susan Crockford – an evolutionary biologist with 35 years of experience – sets our fears at ease. With a global population of at least 25,000, polar bears are more numerous than they were 40 years ago. Even for the subpopulations in decline, the cause is thought to be overharvesting rather than melting sea ice.
Crockford makes her case thoroughly, concluding that fluctuations in sea ice will do little damage to polar bear populations. She notes that labeling them a “threatened” species is dependent entirely on predictions, many of which fail to consider the bear’s environmental flexibility. “The truth is,” she writes, “polar bears are doing well despite dramatic declines in summer sea ice, for one simple reason: polar bears don’t need ice in late summer/early fall as long as they are well-fed in the spring.”
International Zealot Day
The report was released on February 27th to coincide with International Polar Bear Day, and it provided a much-needed contrast to the flood of hysterical warnings about the future of this treasured species. Coming as it does from a group of scientists who have been labeled “deniers” by the media, the report will change few minds. Still, it’s important to recognize that not everyone agrees with this much-heralded consensus about global warming and carbon emissions. Still fewer agree on what, exactly, we should do about it.
It also comes on the heels of a new Reuters poll that tells us that 72 percent of Americans feel they are “personally morally obligated” to take action against climate change. Analysts attribute that statistic to arguments made from an ethical perspective, such as those we’ve heard from Pope Francis. They do not, apparently, believe that these numbers might be caused by a uniform, lockstep mainstream media that refuses to acknowledge the debate. When all you hear is: climate change is happening, it’s caused by humans, and it’s going to destroy the world, eventually you’ll start to believe it.
How many of those respondents can write an essay on the science of climate change without referring to an external resource? How many are scientists themselves? How many have done their own original research?
When it comes to the science of climate change, like almost anything else, we know only what we are told. And for the vast majority of people, that doesn’t mean reading scientific journals. It means reading pop-culture analysis of those journals, and the spin that inevitably accompanies it. It means watching biased documentaries that are long on emotional appeals and short on facts. It means bowing before a trend. No one wants to look like a fool. A skeptic may not be any less knowledgeable than a believer, but they will be ridiculed because they are in the minority. In a world where it’s easier to just say, “Yeah, we need to do something” than to fight with your friends, it’s no wonder that the polls look like this.
None of us will be around to see the devastating effects of climate change the powers-that-be insist are coming. But we have already seen the job-killing effects of the propaganda. The polar bears will be fine. The oceans aren’t going to rise up and turn America into Atlantis. If we don’t get a handle on these oppressive regulations, though, the weather may be the least of our worries.
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