I received an email from the Sierra Club urging me to
sign a petition to declare the polar bear an endangered species.
The Department of the Interior is considering this and
it would cover much of the Arctic, including the sea ice of the Arctic Ocean. The Sierra Club is worried because Shell
Oil wants to drill for oil in the Beaufort Sea,
a part of the “critical habitat for the bear.”
So, for anyone who doesn’t think that thwarting all
attempts to drill for oil in the Arctic isn’t the real reason to “save” the
thriving polar bear population, the answer is that it has nothing to do with
polar bears and everything to do with the primary goal of all environmental
organization, denying energy sources to Americans and everyone else.
Indeed, the Sierra Club said declaring the polar bear
endangered was “necessary to stop harmful activities such as oil
drilling.”So I guess it doesn’t get any
more plain than that.
The Sierra Club went on to blatantly lie about the
status of polar bears, claiming that “survival rates for polar bear cubs are
plunging.” It is common knowledge that male polar bears are known to kill cubs,
but the survival rates have much more to do with the mother bear’s ability to
catch ringed seals.
Ironically, polar bears’ favorite delicacy is the pups
of ringed seals. Mother Nature doesn’t much care who wins the survival marathon
and the Sierra Club is not calling for an endangered species declaration for
ringed seals.
The Sierra Club is lying. The Natural Resources
Defense Council is lying. The World Wildlife Fund is lying. They couldn’t care
less about polar bears. Their objective is shutting off access to anywhere that
has oil or natural gas reserves.
In a July 2006 a report, “Polar Bear Politics: Underestimating
the survival capacity of one popular bear” by Jennifer Marohasy, the Director
of the Food and Environmental Unit at the Australian based Institute of Public Affairs
was published. The estimate of the population is “about 25,000 polar bears
existing in 19 relatively discrete populations across Norway, Denmark,
Russia, Alaska,
Greenland, and Canada.”
“Forty years ago, there were only about 5,000 bears,
the worldwide population depressed by hunting.” In the 1970s, nations agreed to
restrict hunting, resulting in the growth of the population.
The BIG LIE is that the Arctic
is melting because of “global warming.” The Arctic
has, in fact, “warmed” over the past two decades and there has been a reduction
in sea ice, but there has been no “global warming”, only a natural cycle of
warming that followed a Little Ice Age that ended around 1850 after three
hundred years.
In fact, in October 2007, NASA announced the results
of an in-depth study of Arctic sea ice and concluded what melting had occurred
was due “a change in wind patterns” that had “compressed the sea ice, loaded it
into the Transpolar Drift Stream, and then sped its flow out of the Arctic.”
Wind patterns, not “global warming.”
The Earth is now into a new cooling cycle that began
in 1998 and which meteorologists predict will last for several decades. What
they won’t tell you is that they have their fingers crossed that it does not,
in fact, signal a new Ice Age. The period between ice ages is about 11,500
years and the Earth is at the end of the interglacial period that has allowed
for the rise of human civilization in the past five thousand years or so.
So, the fate of the polar bear is such that they are
more likely to survive a new Ice Age than billions of humans in the northern
hemisphere.
As should be obvious to everyone, the reduction of
Arctic sea ice or the population of ringed seals has had no correlation
whatever with the growth of the polar bear population. Indeed, if there hadn’t
been a period of glaciation about 250,000 years ago and a bunch of formerly
brown bears had not become isolated and had not adapted successfully, there
would be no polar bears.
Further putting the lie to the Sierra Club and other
environmental organization’s predictions is the fact that polar bears live in remote
and inhospitable parts of the Arctic. In
addition, they are not stationary, roaming over an area as large as two hundred
square kilometers in search of tasty seals. Most of the time, humans can’t even
visit or fly over the vast bulk of the Arctic
to make any kind of count.
The Sierra Club has no idea how many polar bears
actually exist in the Arctic and any claim
that they are “endangered” is pure balderdash. I could use another word to
describe such claims, but my Mother told me not to.
So, to sum up, the Sierra Club is LYING about polar
bears and you would be well advised to take anything else they have to say with
a grain of ArcticSea salt.
