Sawed Off

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9K8ScRPgs0E

When i was a kid i had a polar bear stuffed toy i slept with. So i dont like seeing things like this.

There was a scene in the Planet Earth miniseries (amazing nature documentary) where you see a polar bear swimming in an Arctic Ocean with no ice visible. The camera pans back and back and back, and still no ice is visible. Then they talk about how many polar bears are drowning every year, as the ice is melting. Heartbreaking.

Not to incite any sort of a flame war here, but there is a lot of conflicting evidence surrounding the Polar Bear listing - specifically this is the first time (that I am aware of) that a species has been listed because of the threat of decline, not actual evidence of same. I became interested in it because of the political battle that formed around it.

I've actually read the peer review of the polar bear draft status (where outside experts comment on the presented evidence for listing), and there is no current evidence of actual species decline. The proposal centers around the fact that global warming is causing a loss of sea ice, thereby threatening the polar bear population. The data in the report comes from two separate models - one of the climate itself (of which there is no truly accurate simulation of yet) and one of the polar bear population decline in response to climate change (which uses a modeling software that some biologists consulted do not trust).

The good news is that polar bears (and other species) survived just find during two separate "interglacial" periods where the global temperature was higher than it is now, and recent data indicates that we may actually be headed towards significant cooling, thereby keeping the polar bears fat and happy.