Save the polar bears... save the world

So there's a lot of discussion about the polar bears losing their habitat as a result of global warming. Comes up regularly in the "debate". Anyway I put it in the category of points people will accept simply because they view their validity as a secondary consideration - let me explain. Let's say I told you children were being murdered in the U.S. at a rate of 1,000 a day and we needed to invest heavily in school security to reduce that number. Many of you would look at that and say "maybe its true, maybe not... heck, I'm not even sure I believe it, but does it matter? If it gets people investing in school security that's ok by me."

So I ask the question - is it ok? Don't get me wrong, I don't view this as an easy one... it's far from black and white, and frankly people have been manipulating statistics for years to serve a given purpose (or excluding a stat, for that matter that might not support the argument). And far be it for me to say its "bad" to recycle, or reduce emmissions, or plant a tree. In fact quite the opposite - those are good things. But to manipulate people into doing them by manipulating data that isn't accurate...? Makes me a little uncomfortable. Anyway I'll come back to this one in future posts, for now on to a great example: the polar bears.

So the bears - commonly held global warming belief goes something like this: world gets warmer, ice melts, ecosystems close to the north pole deteriorates, polar bear which (a) lives on ice and (b) depends on that ecosystem dies off. How many of you have seen pictures on the news like the one at the start of this post? I was driving home a few weeks ago and say a billboard with a pitch to save the polar bears, same melting snow all around. On the brilliantly filmed Planet Earth series recently same thing - polar bears swimming and swimming to exhaustion because of no ice... Problem is, it's not really happening - in fact the population is close to an all time high.

Which brings me to an editorial I read a while back in the Wall Street Jouranl - really worth a read (see link below) - the issue is whether the bears should be an endangered species, not because their numbers ARE in decline or historically low, but because warming is EXPECTED to drive them down. This is no rare bald eagle, but a plentiful and thriving species.

"It also turns out that most of the alarm over the polar bear's future stems from a single, peer-reviewed study, which found that the bear population had declined by some 250, or 25%, in Western Hudson Bay in the last decade. But the polar bear's range is far more extensive than Hudson Bay. A 2002 U.S. Geological Survey of wildlife in the Arctic Refuge Coastal Plain concluded that the ice bear populations "may now be near historic highs." One of the leading experts on the polar bear, Mitchell Taylor, the manager of wildlife resources for the Nunavut territory in Canada, has found that the Canadian polar bear population has actually increased by 25% -- to 15,000 from 12,000 over the past decade." - WSJ

Do we change policy and make an economic decision when the data says otherwise? Do we use pictures of melting snow to convince the public there's a problem when the evidence is shaky at best? And of course... does it matter (i.e. maybe investing in wildlife is a good thing even if the way you get the public to endorse it is by lying to them)?

You decide - here's the full EDITORIAL WSJ LINK (might require a login)