Anyone who has seen An Inconvenient Truth, will probably remember that Al Gore talked about two “canaries in the coal mine”: the Arctic and the Antarctic Peninsula Sea Ice.

Al explained, “Starting in 1970 there was a precipitous drop off in the amount and extent and thickness of the arctic ice cap. It has diminished by 40 percent in 40 years. … That’s not good for creatures like polar bears that depend on the ice.”

Yesterday, the Department of the Interior announced the results of a 12-month study of the polar bear population that confirmed these reports and recommended listing the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.

What is so interesting about this is not the mere fact that polar bears may become listed as a threatened species, but for the manner in which the Endangered Species Act is being used.

We are all familiar with stories of how the Endangerd Species Act has been used to protect species.

There are famous cases like the ban on DDT that went into place in 1972 due to the outcry generated from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and the threats to bird populations like the osprey and bald eagle. Ultimately, the ban on DDT has been seen as a key element in the recovery of species like the perigrene falcon.

Another well known example of a remedy is the ban on importation of ivory put in place to protect the Asian and African elephants.

There are more infamous cases like the Tellico Dam whose construction was halted to protect an endangered fish or the northern spotted owl that lead to millions of acres of Pacific Northwest forests being declared protected habitat. (It also led George H.W. Bush to declare that Al Gore was “so far off on the environmental extremes, we’ll be up to our neck in owls and out of work for every American.”)

When we think about endangered species and the possible remedies, we tend to think of things like bans on hunting, commercial restrictions, eliminating the use of certain chemicals, preventing development in certain areas, etc.

What is so unique about the polar bears is that the cause of the population loss isn’t a simple, single thing that can be addressed by banning a particular behavior. The report makes it very clear that the polar bears are not at risk because of hunting, ecotourism, oil spills, pollution from the local oil and gas plants, disease, or predators.

The sole risk to polar bears identified by the report is the receding ice cap which, in turn, is due to global warming.

So what is the remedy to help reverse the course of the polar bear? That is the real question.

Unfortunately, the study takes no position on what reasonable remedies would be except that it does hint that the real problem here is a lack of sufficient regulation. With that said, the proposal does not make any specific recommendations on what sort of regulations would help protect the polar bears.

However, if polar bears are ultimately listed as a threatened species, it would provide a very strong legal basis for organizations to sue the government to try to force regulations to reduce global warming. Environmental groups have a track record of using the legal system to force compliance with the Engangered Species Act and this would open the doors to similar litigation.

In my view point, this is really the first move in a very long chess match. I wouldn’t expect any massive, immediate change because of this. But this does provide environmental groups with another very strong leverage point that they can use to try to force the government into action.

Don’t Count Your Chickens Before They Hatch

One very important point is that this week’s announcement does not mean that the polar bears will be listed as a threatened species.

The next step is for the proposed rule to enter a 90-day public review period in which they will accept comments on the findings. During this period, expect very strong arguments coming out to refute the proposed plan.

Only after this 90-day review period will a determination be made to move forward and list the polar bear as threatened or not.

While this is an important step in the right direction, we could also go back to square one if the ultimate decision is to not list the polar bears.

Report Documents Real World Impact on Polar Bears

The full report of findings from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is pretty dry, but does have some interesting, and also scary, reports of what is happening in the Arctic.

Some of the most disturbing aspects of the study came in the form of recent reports showing the observed effects on polar bears today:

• “During the winter and early spring of 2004, three observations of polar bear cannibalism were recorded. Similar observations had not been recorded in that region despite studies extending back for decades.”
• “In the fall of 2004, four polar bears were observed to have drowned while attempting to swim between shore and distant pack ice in the Beaufort Sea. Despite offshore surveys extending back to 1987, similar observations had not previously been recorded.”
• “In spring of 2006, three adult female polar bears and one yearling were found dead. Two of these females and the yearling had no fat stores and apparently starved to death, while the third adult female was too heavily scavenged to determine a cause of death. This mortality is suspicious because prime age females have had very high survival rates in the past.”

Making the Case

In order for a species to be considered as “threatened” it needs to be established that it is “likely to become an endangered species within the foreseeable future throughout all or a significant portion of its range.”

Therefore, much of the report is focused on looking at current trends and projecting forward to determine whether the species meets the definition above.
In order to establish that there is a threat to the polar bears, the report first needed to establish that there is some sort of change happening that is likely to hurt the species.
The report established that changes are already happening in the Arctic: “The amount of sea ice in 2006 was the second lowest on record (since satellites began recording sea ice extent measurements via passive microwave imagery in 1978).”

Even more importanly, the report concluded that the change was accelerating “due to a positive feedback loop.” (This is is exactly what the cartoon in An Inconvenient Truth showed.)

The report predicted severe changes in the coming years: “Results of a new study … suggest that abrupt reductions in the extent of summer ice are likely to occur over the next few decades, and that near ice-free September conditions may be reached as early as 2040.”

To use a phrase from An Inconvenient Truth, the report looked at these reported changes as canaries in the coal mine indicating a much more subtantial problem looming on the horizon: “If current trends continue, polar bears and other species that require a stable ice platform for survival could become extinct by the end of the century.”

However, the report stopped short of predicting the complete extinction of the polar bears saying that “this opinion is not universally shared. Other polar bear biologists have indicated that it is possible, even with the total loss of summer sea ice, that a small number of polar bears would survive semi-indefinitely and not go extinct provided there is still some ice cover during the winter and marine mammals continued to be available for capture or scavenging.”

It seems to me that it is a pretty serious situation when the conversation at hand is whether a population will go completely extinct or whether a “small number” of the population will survive “semi-indefinitely”. While I suppose this distinction is a technically important one, under both conclusions, the vast majority of the polar bears are dead.