Without decisive action on climate change, say goodbye to polar bears
AS THE warms faster than any other place on the planet and sea ice declines, there is only one sure way to save polar bears from extinction, the government announced Monday: Decisive action on climate change.
In a final plan to save an animal that greatly depends on ice to catch prey and survive, the US Fish and Wildlife Service identified the rapid decline of sea ice as “the primary threat to polar bears” and said “the single most important achievement for polar bear conservation is decisive action to address Arctic warming” driven by the human emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
“Short of action that effectively addresses the primary cause of diminishing sea ice,” the agency’s plan said, “it is unlikely that polar bears will be recovered.”
That determination puts the plan itself on thin ice. Global climate change, of course, is completely out of the control of Fish and Wildlife, a division of the Interior Department. An international effort to address the issue was signed about a year ago in Paris, but President- elect Donald Trump has questioned US participation in a treaty that nearly 190 governments signed. Trump has waffled in his perspective on climate change. When asked about the human link to climate change following his election, he said, “I think there is some connectivity. . . . It depends on how much.” He also said he would keep an open mind about the international climate accord and whether his administration will withdraw from it.
But the president- elect has also openly doubted the findings of more than 95 per cent of climate scientists who say climate change is driven by human activity. In 2012, he tweeted that “the concept of global warming was created for and by the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non- competitive.”
Fish and Wildlife officials declined to speculate on whether the next president will follow the guidance of its new plan. But the scientists had doubts about the survival of bears before Trump’s election.
“Even when we started the planning process, that was the discussion we were having . . . are we wasting our time here,” said Jenifer Kohout, deputy assistant director for Fish and Wildlife’s Alaska region, and a co- chair of the group that wrote the plan.