Word: polarizer
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...limit to the pugnacity of any Administration. Richard Nixon reached it in Cambodia; John F. Kennedy reached it at the Bay of Pigs. Until now, President George W. Bush may never have encountered an eye he wasn't willing to at least consider poking. But even for him, the polar bear may have finally proven to be a fight...
...move that is delighting environmentalists, the Department of Interior is announcing a new proposal to designate the polar bear as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. The move settles a lawsuit brought by three environmental groups - the Natural Resources Defense Council, Greenpeace and the Center for Biological Diversity - and while the resolution itself was not a stunner, the implications of it are: The government must effectively own up to global warming as the likely cause of the problem. For a White House that has long questioned whether human-influenced climate change exists at all, this is a shift not just...
...secret that polar bears are in very deep trouble, and have been for a while. There are only between 20,000 and 25,000 of them left in the world, divided among 19 populations in Canada, Alaska, Greenland, Russia and elsewhere. Perhaps the best studied of the groups is the Western Hudson Bay population, which scientists have been monitoring since the 1960s. For decades, membership of the group remained relatively stable, at about 1,200 adults and cubs. Between 1987 and 1994, however - precisely the years in which the rise in global temperatures have become the most evident - the number...
...fact that the bears are dying that's so alarming, but the way they're dying - and all of it points to a warmer world. Spring ice that the bears rely on as fishing platforms has been breaking up about three weeks earlier than it used to. Though polar bears don't hibernate, they do retreat to dens in the winter to escape bad weather. When they emerge, they badly need to replenish their fat supplies, and slashing three weeks off the dining schedule does not help. Scientists who track bear populations report that fewer cubs are surviving into adulthood...
...want to build a coal-fired power plant in the Midwest," says Andrew Wetzler, senior attorney for the NRDC. "That requires a slew of federal permits and the polar bear would have to be considered." What's more, the clause requires the government to use the "best available science" in making these determinations, and at this point, the only available - or at least only responsible - science lays the polar bear problem squarely at the feet of global warming...