Word: polars
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...very likely to find a penguin on Mars - or a seal or a puffin or a polar bear either. But that doesn't mean there aren't interesting things going on in the planet's polar regions. Life requires water, after all, and water - at least in the form of ice - is found in abundance at the poles. That's why the Mars Phoenix lander is en route to pay a call there, with a first ever touchdown in the Martian Arctic set for this Sunday...
...other similarity in the two films: to this adult's eyes, they were of only middling quality. The Golden Compass was middling-good, with a beguiling central performance by 13-year-old Dakota Blue Richards, a slinky turn by Nicole Kidman as an evil-stepmom type and a nifty polar-bear fight. But the film never cohered, and at the end it trailed off into a preview of the two sequels that now don't look as if they'll be made. The first Narnia movie was middling-bad, its four lead child actors displaying little charm, their world holding...
...polar ice cap has shrunk by more than 20 percent since 1979. Over the past century, global temperatures have risen between 1.08 degress fahrenheit and 1.62 degress fahrenheit—a steep increase considering that during the last ice age the globe was only 9 degress fahrenheit to 15 degress fahrenheit cooler than today. Global warming has already caused sea levels to rise between four and eight inches, and experts predict that if the Greenland ice sheet melted, it would submerge significant parts of many coastal cities around the world , including nearby Boston...
...That seems disingenuous: more emissions mean more warming, more warming means less sea ice, less sea ice means less polar bears. Green groups are likely to challenge Kempthorne's ruling in court, so the struggle over the polar bear is far from over. But the Administration's hair-splitting highlights just how difficult it will be to adapt existing environmental legislation to protect species in a warming future. In the past, an endangered species was usually threatened by specific human action in a limited geographical area - say, logging in the Pacific Northwest destroying the habitat of the spotted owl - that...
...decision to list the polar bear shouldn't be entirely dismissed - it is, after all, the first animal to be listed by the Administration under the ESA in more than three years, the longest gap in Presidential history. "This is a huge victory for polar bears," says Siegel. "It's the clearest acknowledgement by the Bush Administration of the urgency of global warming." But once again with this White House, it may be too little, too late...