First, last night BBC’s Science in Action had a fascinating piece on tests of polar bear hearing thresholds (that is, what is the spectrum of sound that polar bears can actually detect?) being conducted in San Diego. This work is more significant than it may appear because several studies suggest that noise pollution can have a negative effect on polar bear behavior (particularly denning behavior). And oil exploration and development? Well, it ain’t quiet. NRDC flagged this potential last year, in a letter to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service:
Noise disturbance from seismic activities of oil exploration as well as ground and air transportation can be heard within 300 meters of dens…Exposure to noise from drilling and vehicles may cause bears to abandon their dens In other circumstances, den disturbance has been linked to lower birth weight in female cubs.
As one of the scientists in the Science in Action story says:
Noise is a potential problem and it has been in their environment for decades now. The combination of noise disturbance on top of the implications of climate change for polar bears are the problem. Noise in and of itself is not a problem for polar bears, but if you layer it on top of the impacts of climate change, then you have the potential for a real problem.
Second, two of the world’s foremost polar bear researchers, Ian Stirling and Andrew Derocher, just published a world-class smackdown of an article that appeared in Ecological Complexity last year suggesting that polar bears in the Western Hudson Bay weren’t threatened by global warming and, even if they were, could adapt. The whole thing is worth checking out, but this bit (responding to the suggestion that polar bears can compensate to the decline of seals in the Arctic by eating more vegetation) was my favorite:
Polar bears are large animals that, similar to their brown bear relatives, require energy dense foods in the form of fat and protein, to maintain body size and population densities (Hilderbrand et al., 1999; Felicetti et al., 2003). They got that way be eating seals, not berries. (Robbins et al., 2007).
Ouch!
]]>He even provides a graph, which does show a rise in minimum sea ice extent in 2008 compared to 2007:
Not surprisingly, this chart doesn’t really do justice to just how low today’s sea ice coverage is compared to prior years (represented by the dark gray line on top). Here’s another chart, helpfully provided by Andrew Revkin at Dot Earth and also from the government:
What was that about “expanding” hunting grounds again?
]]>Steven Amstrup, senior polar bear scientist for the U.S. Geological Survey in Anchorage, said the bears could have been on a patch of ice that broke up northwest of Alaska's coast.
"The bears that had been on that last bit of ice that remained over shallow shelf waters, are now swimming either toward land or toward the rest of the sea ice, which is a considerable distance north," he said in an e-mail response to questions.
It probably is not a big deal for a polar bear in good condition to swim 10 or 15 miles, Amstrup said, but swims of 50 to 100 miles could be exhausting.
"We have some observations of bears swimming into shore when the sea ice was not visible on the horizon," he said. "In some of these cases, the bears arrive so spent energetically, that they literally don't move for a couple days after hitting shore."
The risk of increased polar bear drownings is one of many affects of global warming and receding Arctic sea ice on polar bears about which biologists have long been concerned. These concerns first surfaced after a mass polar bear drowning off the coast of Alaska, where up to twenty-seven polar bears may have perished during a single storm. Writing about this (and other) incidents in its decision to list the polar bear as a threatened species, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife noted that
This suggests that drowning related deaths of polar bears may increase in the future if the observed trend of recession of pack ice with longer open-water periods continues.
What is the Bush Administration’s response? Why, new proposed regulations that attempt to foreclose any avenue to address global warming pollution through the Endangered Species Act, of course! Speaking of which, yesterday NRDC and over 100 other conservation groups, representing millions of Americans, requested that the Department of the Interior extend its comment period on the proposed regulations and hold public hearings on its proposed regulation. Let’s hope they listen.
]]>Congress, however, never intended this law to be the solution to global climate change. The law is already a complex source of red tape and litigation. The possibility of it becoming a tool for greenhouse-gas oversight — as a consequence of the polar bear listing in May — threatened to overwhelm agency experts and do more harm than good to the cause of conservation.
So the Interior Department recently proposed common-sense regulations that would prevent the law's consultation process from becoming a back-door mechanism to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
This is simply wrong. More than that, it is deliberately wrong.
As I’ve discussed before, the core of the new regulations is a provision that allows federal agencies to determine for themselves if their contemplated activities may negatively affect protected wildlife. And if they decide “no”? Well, then the agency can proceed with its plan without any outside review. These “self-consultations” would replace existing rules that require federal agencies to first consult with independent scientists at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service if they conclude that any of their projects “may affect” a protected animal or plant.
Here’s the point: self-consultation is an idea that has been rattling around Washington, D.C. (promoted by industry groups) for years, certainly long before the polar bear ever shambled its way onto the list of endangered and threatened species. In fact, variations of self-consultation has been tried (often unsuccessfully) on the EPA’s regulation of pesticides and on Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management projects, such as logging and prescribed burns—none of which has thing one to do with global warming. If adopted, the self-consultation rule will apply to all federal agencies and to all listed species. Everything from road construction to off-road-vehicle use to dredging rivers will be impacted. Using the polar bear’s listing as an excuse for such mischief is like blaming a hospital patient for the high cost of healthcare.
USA Today understands the broader implications of such a massive abdication in oversight. In a parallel editorial that also ran today it writes:
But the plan to remove automatic review by fish and wildlife experts is truly alarming. It's one of several regulations the lame-duck Bush administration is trying to push through to reward its backers and tie the hands of its successors.
In this case, it's ludicrous to expect that federal agencies that build dams and roads will seriously search out impediments to their projects. Even small children can cite the fox-and-henhouse parable.
So what about that global warming argument? There is absolutely no reason that the Endangered Species Act, any more than the Clean Air Act, the National Environmental Protection Act, or any of America’s other bedrock environmental laws, shouldn’t be used to control global warming pollution providing, of course, that the situation warrants it and that law applies. If this is an issue that Secretary Kempthorne is truly concerned about, then that’s debate he should have in Congress. What he should not be doing is using the polar bear as an excuse to weaken the Endangered Species Act for all of America’s wildlife.
]]>I'm saying that up until a few days ago, the settled science was that there were only 50,000 gorillas left in the world. I'm saying that millions of dollars have been spent in a way that might have gone to better use, for both the gorillas, and more importantly, for the humans that live in Africa. I'm saying that the WCS, when helping to look for polar bears "studied 28 years of satellite images of sea ice and contributed key data to a study by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) that helped inform the USFWS decision." I'm saying that maybe the WCS should stop looking at their computers and, like they did in Africa, actually try to count the polar bears with something other than a 50-year ice model.
But look, this is still an incredibly weak argument. The gorilla discovery (just like the discovery of vast antelope herds in the Sudan that Pollowitz also cites) is fundamentally a situation in which a new population of wildlife was discovered in suitable habitat that hadn’t been surveyed by biologists. In the case of polar bears, it’s the habitat itself that’s vanishing. The listing of polar bears is based on a pretty simple syllogism—Arctic sea ice is disappearing and will likely be entirely gone by the end of the century; polar bears need sea ice to survive; therefore, polar bears are endangered. Make no mistake, there are mountains of evidence to support this conclusion, but the logic is not hard to understand.
]]>As you may have heard, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) just announced that one of their survey teams has identified a large population of heretofore unknown western lowland gorillas—up to 125,000, in fact. To put that number in some perspective, the entire population of western lowland gorillas was recently assumed to be about 50,000. Cause for celebration, right? Not to folks at Planet Gore. Writing this morning about WCS’s find, Greg Pollowitz snarks: “It looks like ‘scientists’ have totally botched the count of the number of gorillas left in the world.” Then he says that “This is the same WCS that helped count polar bears to list them as threatened...Maybe a visit to the Arctic to actually count the polar bears should be in order.”
Now, as should be apparent to even a causal observer, estimating the population of any two organisms, much less large mammals as different as jungle-living gorillas and ice-dwelling polar bears is a vastly different exercise and one has very little do to with the other. But even that’s somewhat besides the point. Pollowtiz isn’t even making a coherent argument. It was WCS that found the additional gorillas, so the fact that they contributed data which informed the polar bear population estimate should, if anything, bolster it’s credibility not subtract from it. And besides, what is the larger point Pollowitz is trying to make here? That the biologists who did the original gorilla estimates weren’t real “scientists” because there turns out to have been an undiscovered population? That population estimates of wildlife are never to be trusted? In that case no endangered wildlife populations could ever be protected…oh, well maybe that’s his point after all.
]]>The crux of these cases will presumably be to question the scientific evidence that supports protecting the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act. That’s going to be a tall order. There is a mountain of scientific evidence pointing to exactly the opposite: the overwhelming indications are not only that polar bears deserve to be protected by the Endangered Species Act. Indeed, in NRDC’s view they should have been given a higher classification, that of an “endangered” species. For a flavor of the sheer amount of evidence we’re talking about, you can look at my testimony earlier this year before the Senate’s Environment and Public Work’s Committee here. Another indication of the weight of the evidence is the fact that, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service sent out their proposed listing for peer review, 13 out of 14 scientists with whom they consulted supported Endangered Species Act protections for the polar bear. (See the Final Listing Rule for details)
Even Professor Jonathan Adler, a long-time critic of the Endangered Species Act and—I think it’s fair to say—a sympathetic ear for both Pacific Legal Foundation and Alaska—thinks that the polar bear’s protections are here to stay. As with the Pacific Legal Foundation’s case and the Safari Club case, NRDC and our allies at the Center for Biological Diversity and Greenpeace will make sure that we weigh in to preserve and strengthen the protections that the polar bear deserves and desperately needs.
]]>Yesterday, the Pacific Legal Foundation, a property-rights law firm, filed a letter on behalf of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and other groups announcing their intention to challenge the listing of the polar bear as a “threatened species” under the Endangered Species Act in federal court. CORE is an organization deeply committed to opposing efforts to control global warming pollution.
The connection? Exxon is a major funder of CORE. Greenpeace has confirmed large contributions to CORE by Exxon Mobil or its corporate foundation as recently as 2005, and statement’s by Niger Innis, CORE’s National Spokesperson, certainly seem to indicate that contributions have flowed to the organization more recently than that (it’s unclear from the transcript exactly where they were directed):
Monica Trauzzi: OK. Are your climate change outreach efforts supported by Exxon Mobil?
Niger Innis: No, they are not. Our climate change outreach, our organization is, I mean, we're a nonprofit organization and you may know the business of being a nonprofit organization, if you're in the business of being a nonprofit organization you need to support from as many different corners and quarters, corporate as well as membership, as you can get. Exxon Mobil is one of many different supporters of the Congress of Racial Equality.
This is, of course, a very nice deal for Exxon. They get to indirectly bankroll a lawsuit that may undo federal protections for polar bears; protections that, not coincidentally, threaten their drilling exploration activities, all while avoiding any blowback.
NRDC and our allies will be monitoring this case closely, and when it’s filed we’ll be there to protect and defend the polar bear.
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I'm a big fan of George Will. He's easily one of the most entertaining and articulate pundits on ABC's This Week and he's a damn fine writer. Besides, my Dad loved the guy. Which is why it was so disappointing to read Will's column on the polar bear listing in today's Washington Post.
It's not just that Will recycles the same old tired arguments against listing the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act, it's that he obviously has made no serious effort to engage the scientific evidence supporting polar bear protection. Instead, recalling that in the 1970's scientists were predicting another ice age, he falls back on some very poor logic: predictions about the climate were wrong thirty years ago so they must be wrong today. This despite what I would think is a pretty obvious point--our ability to use computers to perform complex modeling has increased quite a bit since the 1970s.
Then Will pivots, citing conservationists supposed "hostility to markets" and concludes:
Today's "green left" is the old "red left" revised. Marx, a short-term pessimist but a long-term optimist, prophesied deepening class conflict but thought that history's violent dialectic would culminate in a revolution that would usher in material abundance and such spontaneous cooperation that the state would wither away.
The green left preaches pessimism: Ineluctable scarcities (of energy, food, animal habitat, humans' living space) will require a perpetual regime of comprehensive rationing. The green left understands that the direct route to government control of almost everything is to stigmatize, as a planetary menace, something involved in almost everything -- carbon.
This is an old and ugly smear that, much like Will's logic about global warming, seems frozen in time. If it ever was, today's environmental movement is certainly not hostile to all markets. Indeed, when it comes to global warming most conservation groups support a market-based trading system for carbon. NRDC recently founded a Center for Market Innovation because we recognize the important role that markets have in solving our environmental problems. The truth is that the environmental movement is much more pragmatic than Will gives it credit for. Conservationists don't want control, we just want to solve problems. It's too bad that Will hasn't bothered to update his thinking recently.
]]>So we've headed back to federal court to challenge the rules under the Administrative Procedure Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, both of which prohibit just the kind of shenanigans the Bush Administration is trying to get away with.
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The dramatic signs of global warming's impact on the Arctic are everywhere these days, but an event last fall in a small Canadian town 100 kilometers south of the Arctic Circle has to rate as one of the most poignant. According to Canada's Globe and Mail, last November three polar bears--a mother and her two cubs--showed up in downtown Déline. The bears should have been far, far north on the pack ice but for some reason never made it, and the mother (who we can only assumed was either badly disoriented or desperate) instead turned south.
All three bears were killed. Polar bears can be dangerous under the best of circumstances and apparently the Royal Canadian Mounted Police didn't want to take any chances. An investigation of the bodies revealed that they were all starving to death.
An assessment by noted Canadian biologist and polar bear expert Andrew Derocher [said] that the sighting is yet another sign of climate change in Canada's North. Normally, these polar bears would be living on sea ice, which is located more than 400 kilometres north on the Beaufort Sea.
We'll never know why this one mother polar bear took her cubs so tragically off course, but I tend to agree with Dr. Derocher that the rapid changes to the Arctic ecosystem is probably as good a candidate as any. Let's hope this incident is received as another wake up call about global warming, and not just another of its sad codas.
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The Endangered Species Act required the Service to make a final decision last January. When they missed that deadline, we sent them a "60-day notice letter" of our intent to sue (something required by the statute). Well, today that 60-day clock has run, and we went to federal court in San Francisco. Hopefully, this is the kick in the chops the Administration needs.
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For years, scientists have been concerned about the substantial increase of mercury concentrations in Arctic marine mammals such as polar bears, beluga whales, and seals. In some places in Canada, for example, levels of mercury in the tissue of marine mammals has quadrupled in the last twenty-five years. Mercury is a potent neurotoxin that can result in a wide variety of health effects in animals and people, and pose a particular risk to pregnant women and young children. Most global mercury pollution comes from coal fired power plants, which release mercury into the air. Other significant sources are industrial processes such as chemical manufacturing, battery production, and gold mining.
Today's Winnipeg Free Press reports that changes to the Arctic's food web, such as melting sea ice caused by global warming, may be one of the primary causes of mercury contamination of marine mammals.
[R]esearchers now believe the increasing levels found in beluga whales are actually due to rising temperatures and disappearing sea ice, which have boosted the productivity of the northern seas by creating a warmer, brighter and more nutrient-rich environment for tiny plants and animals to grow.
According to the theory, new sources of food in an increasingly ice-free Arctic are forcing larger predators to change their feeding behavior, creating more links in the Arctic food chain.
That means more mercury gets concentrated at the top of the food chain, even though the overall amount of mercury in the ecosystem has not increased very much.
This research is intriguing and is consistent with predictions in other studies. Of course, the problem of mercury pollution and global warming goes hand-in-hand: ultimately, the best way to decrease global mercury pollution is to reduce our dependence on dirty sources of fuel like coal. If we did that, we would also be taking a big step toward controlling global warming, thus slowing down the very changes to the Arctic ecosystem that may be driving up mercury contamination of marine mammals. Another thing we can do here in the United States is to follow the example of the European Union and ban on the export of mercury. A bill to do just that has already passed the U.S. House of Representatives and companion legislation is awaiting action in the Senate.
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Scientists, gathered at the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Annual Meeting in Boston, are expressing increased concern over the growing threat to some of the smallest seas creatures in the world, including tiny snails sometimes called pteropods or "sea butterflies." These animals play a crucial role at the base of the marine food chain. The problem is that the world's oceans are steadily growing more acidic as they absorb ever-increasing global carbon dioxide emissions and, as a result, animals like pteropods can have trouble growing the shells they need to survive. Acidification is also responsible for contributing to the loss of coral reefs around the world.
Gretchen Hofmann, an Associate Professor of Biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara says it best:
]]>"These animals are not charismatic but they are talking to us just as much as penguins or polar bears," said Hofmann. "They are harbingers of change. It's possible by 2050 they may not be able to make a shell anymore. If we lose these organisms, the impact on the food chain will be catastrophic," she added.