Starving polar bears shame Bush to
act
Independent News Online (UK)
By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor
Published: 12 February 2006
Starving polar bears are presenting an unprecedented challenge to George
Bush's refusal to take action over global warming - and may succeed where
environmentalists and other governments have failed in getting him to curb
pollution.
Despite the President's obdurate stance on climate change, the US
administration last week took the first steps towards officially listing the
bear as an endangered species. The Arctic ice on which the iconic animal lives
is melting away as the world heats up and, if the listing is finalised, the
Bush administration will be obliged to modify its pollution policies to try to
save the bear.
The move comes as the President faces attack for the first time over global
warming from some of his strongest allies. Evangelical Christian leaders last
week took out TV ads urging action, while, in Britain, Tony Blair has warned
that the world has less than seven years to get to grips with climate
change.
The Prime Minister made his statement on Tuesday, the same day the US Fish
and Wildlife Service started the process of listing the polar bear in response
to a lawsuit by environmental groups to get government protection for the
species. It said the groups had presented "substantial scientific and
commercial information indicating that listing the polar bear may be
warranted".
The bears are vulnerable to climate change because they depend entirely on
the polar ice to catch seals, their main prey. The seals swim too fast in open
water, and so bears have to lie in wait for them to surface for air through
holes and cracks in the ice. The seals congregate in the shallow waters of the
continental shelves, and the bears can reach them only when the sea is frozen.
But the ice now recedes far out to sea every summer.
A new report by the United Nations Environment Programme concludes that the
extent of summer ice in the Arctic has shrunk by more than a quarter in the
past half-century. The US government's official National Snow and Ice Data
Center adds that a "stunning" reduction in sea ice has taken place in the past
four years. Last summer an area twice the size of Texas disappeared.
The centre believes that the rate of retreat is accelerating. Worse still
for the bears, the melting is starting earlier, depriving them of seals in the
spring, when they have always stocked up on food to see them through the
summer.
In desperation, more and more polar bears are swimming to land, and
marauding through towns and villages. Made fearless by hunger, the half-ton
animals have even broken into houses in search of food. One killed a
15-year-old girl in the far western Russian Arctic, while children in the
northern Canadian town of Churchill are being taken to school under guard.
There is even evidence from north-east Russia that polar bears have taken to
eating their own species.
The Fish and Wildlife Service will gather evidence on the state of the bears
over the next two months before coming to a decision at the end of the year.
But Rosa Meehan, the head of its marine mammal programme in Anchorage, Alaska,
has already said: "It's pretty easy to make a connection between what's
happening to sea ice and what might happen to polar bears."
If the bear is listed under the US Endangered Species Act, regulatory
agencies would be bound by law to take into account how their decisions would
affect it. This could lead to tougher measures to control the spread of
pollution that causes global warming, and stricter fuel-economy standards for
vehicles.
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