New Defenders of WIldlife Ad: "Polar Bears"

From Defenders Action Fund:

Rather than working to save our polar bears, Governor Sarah Palin has launched an all-out effort to block protections for them. According to the Anchorage Daily News, Palin covered up evidence from her own scientists showing the need for polar bear protections. Now shes doing the bidding of the oil companies and trophy hunters in a lawsuit to prevent the government from listing of our polar bears as a threatened species. As governor, Sarah Palin has been a disaster for polar bears, wolves and other wildlife. A heartbeat away from the presidency, she could do even worse.

The North Pole Is An Island

Thawing ocean: The North-West Passage (circled left) and the North-East Passage (top right) are clear of ice

We must elect Barack Obama who will deal with global warming; not McCain and his global-warming-denying running mate [vlad the polar bear im]Palin.

DailyMail: The North Pole becomes an 'island' for the first time in history as ice melts

The North Pole has become an island for the first time in human history.

Startling satellite pictures taken three days ago show that melting ice has opened up the fabled North-West and North-East Passages - making it possible to sail around the Arctic ice cap.

The opening of the passages has been eagerly awaited by shipping companies which hope they will be able to cut thousands of miles off their routes.

But to climate change scientists it is yet another sign of the damage global warming is inflicting on the planet.

Mark Serreze, a sea ice specialist, described the images as an 'historic event' - but warned they added to fears that the Arctic icecap has entered a 'death spiral'.

The pictures, produced by Nasa, mark the first time in at least 125,000 years that the two shortcuts linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans have been ice-free at the same time.

DailyMail: The heartbreaking picture of the polar bears with 400 miles to swim to the nearest ice

I Read The News Today, Oh Boy: June 20, 2008

National Geographic: Kiribati Beach House
Photograph by George Steinmetz/CORBIS

A tiny group of Pacific coral islands, the Republic of Kirabati, with a population of less than a hundred thousand, will be submerged under the ocean in 50 to 100 years as a result of rising ocean waters. Bangladesh, the most crowded nation on earth, population 150,000,000 -- One Hundred and Fifty Million Human Beings -- will be completely underwater by the end of this century, according to NASA scientist Dr. James Hansen.

And those estimates may be accelerated, as data from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) shows that Arctic sea ice is melting even faster than it did last year. An example of the chaos that this will bring is in Iceland, where two polar bears were shot in the past two weeks when they showed up hundreds of miles from their habitat.

And what are the Bush Administration and their rubber stamps in Congress doing to address global warming? Nothing. No, take that back, less than nothing. Republicans in the Senate blocked a bill to cut greenhouse emissions last week. The United States taxpayers are being forced to pay to build permanent bases in Iraq, which are surely to provide security for the oil companies (Exxon, Total, BP and Shell) which have just been awarded no-bid contracts to exploit the Iraqi oil fields. The Oilman-In-Chief sent thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to their deaths for the bottom line of Exxon.

Which of his crimes will Bush pay for? The torture he personally authorized? (though he is now trying to blame it on the soldiers, we know that it was the Bush Administration's official policy, memorialized in legal memos and West Wing meetings.) Maj. General Antonio Taguba writes this week that the Bush Administration committed war crimes, and recommends prosection. The Democratic Sheeple Party is unlikely to do so; we let everyone involved in Iran-Contra go, too.

By failing to prosecute the war criminals who perpetrated Iran-Contra, we populated the Project for a New American Century and all the other right wing "think tanks" with all those unindicted co-conspirators, who spent years conspiring on their next nefarious plan: to get us to attack Iraq. As Digby says: When you let Republicans get away with murder, they will do it again.

Some days reading the news is nihilistic. I'm going to take the weekend off from political blogging & regain my equilibrium.

Flake

BBC: Germany's new polar bear celebrity sleeps at Nuremberg Zoo. The female cub was named Flocke (Flake) following a worldwide poll in which 50,000 people sent in suggestions.

Bush Administration To Sacrifice Polar Bears To Big Oil

The Bush Administration announced yesterday that it will miss tomorrow's deadline on listing polar bears as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. No surprise, this is political. Bushco wants to grant an oil & gas lease for a 29-million-acre area of the Chukti Sea in Alaska.

If the polar bear is an endangered species, the Interior Department would have to consider the impact on the polar bear's habitat, and the sale probably doesn't go through. So they will grant the oil & gas lease, then list the polar bear as endangered: too late for the Chukti Sea region, though. Hello to more pollution and global warming, goodbye more polar bears.

While the comment period about the endangered species determination is closed, you can always blast the Interior Dept. for delaying the decision. Use this address to contact Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne:

Get involved

The official comment period for whether the polar bear should be considered a threatened species is closed. However, you can share your opinion about the newly announced delay by contacting the U.S. Department of the Interior, which oversees the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Who: Dirk Kempthorne, secretary of the interior

Address: 1849 C St. NW, Washington, DC 20240

Phone: (202) 208-3100 or (800) 344-9453

Log comments at: www.doi.gov/contact.html

San Francisco Chronicle: Groups cite oil leases in U.S. delay on rating polar bear's status

Environmental groups fear that political meddling and a rush to sell oil leases in Arctic waters are behind the Bush administration's announcement Monday that it will miss a legal deadline to determine whether to list the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act.

[]

Environmental groups fear that the polar bear decision has been purposefully delayed to allow a first-time oil lease sale to go forward Feb. 6 in Alaska's pristine Chukchi Sea, which provides one-tenth of the habitat for the world's polar bears.

Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, criticized the administration's decision to proceed with the 29 million-acre lease sale in the Chukchi.

"On the one hand, the Interior Department is dragging its feet on protecting the polar bear, while opening up new oil and gas drilling in sensitive polar bear habitats on the other," Markey said in a statement.

Andrew Wexler, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council in Chicago, said, "The one-month delay comes at a time that is very fortuitous for oil and gas companies that want to drill in the Chukchi."

If the bear were listed before the lease-sale decision, Interior Department's Minerals Management Service might have to delay or stop the sale, Wexler said.

Melanie Duchin, a Greenpeace campaigner in Alaska, agreed that the delay is highly suspect.

"You can't both protect the bear's habitat and drill in it at the same time," Duchin said.

"The sale would set up a one-two punch for the polar bear. On one hand, it would expose the bears to oil spills and all manner of industrial disturbance that comes along with exploration, drilling and transportation. Once those fossil fuels are burned, they exacerbate global warming and melt the polar bear's sea-ice habitat," she said.

2007 Is Second Warmest Year Ever

The climate crisis continues unabated. "The Arctic is screaming" says climate scientist Mark Serreze. The Bush Administration position at the climate talks is: Hurry up and wait. Wait until January 20, 2009. Bush will do nothing. He is the greatest do nothing in the history of do nothings. What has he done to stop global warming? Nothing.

And I'd like to give a shout out to the five morons on the Supreme Court who seven years ago today gave us the Master of Disaster George W. Bush as President, over the vote-winner, now Nobel Prize winner Al Gore. Thank you very fucking much for seven years of the plague of Shrub, Sandra Day O'Connor, Clarence Thomas, Injustice Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, and Anthony Kennedy (four appointed by Ronald Raygun, one by Buckfush41). Equal protection, my ass. Equal protection for rich malevolent assholes.

ClimateProgress: NASA: 2007 Second Warmest Year Ever, with Record Warmth Likely by 2010

Through the first 11 months, 2007 is the second warmest year in the period of instrumental data, behind the record warmth of 2005, in the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) analysis. The unusual warmth in 2007 is noteworthy because it occurs at a time when solar irradiance is at a minimum and the equatorial Pacific Ocean has entered the cool phase of its natural El Niño — La Niña cycle.

… barring the unlikely event of a large volcanic eruption, a record global temperature exceeding that of 2005 can be expected within the next 2-3 years.

[]

The six warmest years in the GISS record have all occurred since 1998, and the 15 warmest years in the record have all occurred since 1988.

DailyMail: World told to act now on climate change as 'Arctic is screaming'

"The Arctic is screaming," said Mark Serreze, a senior US scientist.

Edited to add, oh, and by the way, American scientists told the American Geophysical Union meeting this week that there may be NO ARCTIC ICE by 2013. That's six years, folks. Wave goodbye to the polar bears.

We're Melting

WaPo: At the Poles, Melting Occurring at Alarming Rate

For scientists, global warming is a disaster movie, its opening scenes set at the poles of Earth. The epic already has started. And it's not fiction.

The scenes are playing, at the start, in slow motion: The relentless grip of the Arctic Ocean that defied man for centuries is melting away. The sea ice reaches only half as far as it did 50 years ago. In the summer of 2006, it shrank to a record low; this summer the ice pulled back even more, by an area nearly the size of Alaska. Where explorer Robert Peary just 102 years ago saw "a great white disk stretching away apparently infinitely" from Ellesmere Island, there is often nothing now but open water. Glaciers race into the sea from the island of Greenland, beginning an inevitable rise in the oceans.

Animals are on the move. Polar bears, kings of the Arctic, now search for ice on which to hunt and bear young. Seals, walrus and fish adapted to the cold are retreating north. New species -- salmon, crabs, even crows -- are coming from the south. The Inuit, who have lived on the frozen land for millennia, are seeing their houses sink into once-frozen mud, and their hunting trails on the ice are pocked with sinkholes.

"It affects everyone," said Carin Ashjian, a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute scientist who spent early September with native Inupiats in Barrow, the northernmost town of Alaska. "The only ice I saw this year was in my cup at the cafeteria."

At the South Pole, ancient ice shelves have abruptly crumbled. The air over the western Antarctic peninsula has warmed by nearly 6 degrees since 1950. The sea there is heating as well, further melting edges of the ice cap. Green grass and beech trees are taking root on the ice fringes.

Antarctica's signature Adelie penguins are moving inland, seeking the cold of their ancestors, replaced by chinstrap and Gentoo penguins, which prefer open water. Krill, the massive smorgasbord for a food chain reaching to the whales, are disappearing from traditional spawning grounds.

Blogtopia* RoundUp, Wednesday April 4, 2007

US Vice President Dick Cheney watches as US President George W. Bush speaks on the "Iraq war supplemental" in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, DC. Cheney warned Monday the United States faced defeat in Iraq if Democrats succeed in imposing withdrawal.(AFP/Tim Sloan)
President Cheney-Hiding-In-Bushes appoints Swift Boat funder Ambassador to Belgium with a recess appointment, as well as a bunch of other rightwing fruitcakes who are unconfirmable. dailykos

New Hampshire House passes a civil unions bill to give same-sex couples the same rights as married couples. Towleroad

Did Purgegate discriminate against New Mexico US Attorney David Iglesias because of his military reserve obligations? One of the reasons given for his firing was spending too much time away from the office. (Tee hee -- that wasn't even the real reason! He wasn't a loyal Bushie! Karma's a bitch.) A federal watchdog agency is investigating. ThinkProgress

Bloggers have fun with Photoshop: Dependable Renegade, John McCain Visits Portland, Maine, Lower Manhattanite, Charlatan (on Steve Gilliard's News Blog), Art Pottery, Politics and Food, The Vice Petulant in the Bushes

*yes, skippy coined that phrase!


DDP

Tens or thousands of visitors would wear any baby bear out.


More Knut photos at der Spiegel.

Knut!

Three-month-old polar bear cub, Knut, appears to wave during his first outing at Berlin's Zoologischer Garten zoo. Knut made his first public appearance at the Berlin Zoo under the gaze of dozens of photographers and cameramen.(AFP/John MacDougall)

Knut, the abandoned polar bear cub at a Berlin zoo, looks a lot like my sister's dog.

Arctic Glaciers Could Be Gone in 24 Years

And you thought Stephen Colbert was telling a joke when he said,

[Interviewing Jesse Jackson is] like boxing a glacier. Enjoy that metaphor, by the way, because your grandchildren will have no idea what a glacier is.

To all the people who say, well, global warming isn't going to happen in my lifetime, better think again. Scientists at the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre say the Arctic Glaciers could be gone by 2030, and gone in the summers by 2016. Time to pull our collective heads out of the sand, before there's nothing but sand left.

The Guardian (uk): Meltdown fear as Arctic ice cover falls to record winter low

Record amounts of the Arctic ocean failed to freeze during the recent winter, new figures show, spelling disaster for wildlife and strengthening concerns that the region is locked into a destructive cycle of irreversible climate change.

Satellite measurements show the area covered by Arctic winter sea ice reached an all-time low in March, down some 300,000 square kilometres on last year -an area bigger than the UK.

Scientists say the decline highlights an alarming new trend, with recovery of the ice in winter no longer sufficient to compensate for increased melting in the summer. If the cycle continues, the Arctic ocean could lose all of its ice much earlier than expected, possibly by 2030.

Walt Meier, a researcher at the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, which collected the figures, said: "It's a pretty stark drop. In the winter the ice tends to be pretty stable, so the last three years, with this steady decline, really stick out."

Experts are worried because a long-term slow decline of ice around the north pole seems to have sharply accelerated since 2003, raising fears that the region may have passed one of the "tipping points" in global warming. In this scenario, warmer weather melts ice and drives temperatures higher because the dark water beneath absorbs more of the sun's radiation. This could make global warming quickly run out of control.

Dr Meier said there was "a good chance" the Arctic tipping point has been reached. "People have tried to think of ways we could get back to where we were. We keep going further and further into the hole, and it's getting harder and harder to get out of it."

The Arctic is rapidly becoming the clearest demonstration of the effects of mankind's impact on the global climate. The temperature is rising twice as fast as the rest of the planet and the region is expected to warm by a further 4C-7C by 2100. The summer and winter ice levels are the lowest since satellite monitoring began in 1979, and almost certainly the lowest since local people began keeping records around 1900. The pace of decline since 2003, if continued, would see the Arctic totally ice-free in summer within 30 years - though few scientists would stake their reputations on a long-term trend drawn from only three years.

Experts at the US Naval Postgraduate School in California think the situation could be even worse. They are about to publish the results of computer simulations that show the current rate of melting, combined with increased access for warmer Pacific water, could make the summertime Arctic ice-free within a decade. Dr Meier said: "For 800,000 to a million years, at least some of the Arctic has been covered by ice throughout the year. That's an indication that, if we are heading for an ice-free Arctic, it's a really dramatic change and something that is unprecedented almost within the entire record of human species."

The winter ice has declined all around the region - bad news for polar bears, which spend summer on land before returning to the ice in spring to catch food.

Pretty Soon We'll All Be 'Just Standing Around in our Shorts, Stunned and Amazed'

Not one member of the White House press corps asked President Dumbass a question about global warming yesterday. While the Iraq war is a pressing problem, the potential loss of life from global warming is exponentially greater. Why isn't anyone talking about it? And, finally, the Washington Post writes an article about global warming and calls it global warming. Way to get a clue, there, boys.

WaPo: Inuit See Signs In Arctic Thaw
String of Warm Winters Alarms 'Sentries for the Rest of the World'

The global warming felt by wildlife and increasingly documented by scientists is hitting first and hardest here, in the Arctic where the Inuit people make their home. The hardy Inuit -- described by one of their leaders as "sentries for the rest of the world" -- say this winter was the worst in a series of warm winters, replete with alarms of the quickening transformation that many scientists expect will spread from the north to the rest of the globe.

The Inuit -- with homelands in Alaska, Canada, Greenland and northern Russia -- saw the signs of change everywhere. Metuq hauled his fishing shack onto the ice of Cumberland Sound last month, as he has every winter, confident it would stay there for three months. Three days later, he was astonished to see the ice break up, sweeping away his shack and $6,000 of turbot fishing gear.

In Nain, Labrador, hunter Simon Kohlmeister, 48, drove his snowmobile onto ocean ice where he had hunted safely for 20 years. The ice flexed. The machine started sinking. He said he was "lucky to get off" and grab his rifle as the expensive machine was lost. "Someday we won't have any snow," he said. "We won't be Eskimos."

In Resolute Bay, Inuit people insisted that the dark arctic night was lighter. Wayne Davidson, a longtime weather station operator, finally figured out that a warmer layer of air was reflecting light from the sun over the horizon. "It's getting very strange up here," he said. "There's more warm air, more massive and more uniform."

Villagers say the shrinking ice floes mean they see hungry polar bears more frequently. In the Hudson Bay village of Ivujivik, Lydia Angyiou, a slight woman of 41, was walking in front of her 7-year-old boy last month when she turned to see a polar bear stalking the child. To save him, she charged with her fists into the 700-pound bear, which slapped her twice to the ground before a hunter shot it, according to the Nunatsiaq News.

In the Russian northernmost territory of Chukotka, the Inuit have drilled wells for water because there is so little snow to melt. Reykjavik, Iceland, had its warmest February in 41 years. In Alaska, water normally sealed by ice is now open, brewing winter storms that lash coastal and river villages. Federal officials say two dozen native villages are threatened. In Pangnirtung, residents were startled by thunder, rain showers and a temperature of 48 degrees in February, a time when their world normally is locked and silent at minus-20 degrees.

"We were just standing around in our shorts, stunned and amazed, trying to make sense of it," said one resident, Donald Mearns.

Today's Environmental News

A winter Olympics without snow, yet somehow this WaPo article fails to mention global warming:

Turin: No Snow, No Problem
City Is Hosting Only Indoor Events, So Competition Not Affected

TURIN, Italy, Feb. 7 -- The official mascots of the 2006 Winter Olympics -- a female snowflake named Neve and a male ice cube named Gliz -- are looking increasingly fanciful as Friday's Opening Ceremonies draw near without a trace of winter in sight. If the forecast holds, temperatures will be warmer at Turin's Stadio Olimpico than at FedEx Field when the Olympic torch is lit, signaling the start of the Winter Games.

Temperatures are predicted to climb into the high 40s in Turin on Wednesday and stay there through the weekend. According to the 15-day forecast, Neve and Gliz likely will be the closest thing to snow that Turin sees for the duration of the 20th Winter Olympiad, which concludes Feb. 26, with no days below freezing on tap. Good thing they're symbolic mascots rather than real ones, lest they be reduced to puddles before the Games begin.

Historically high temperatures in the U.S. last month. Again, no mention of global warming by WaPo despite breaking the old record by 8.5 degrees. 8.5 degrees! Across the country!

January Was America's Warmest on Record

The country's average temperature for the month was 39.5 degrees Fahrenheit, 8.5 degrees above average for January, the National Climatic Data Center said Tuesday. The old record for January warmth was 37.3 degrees set in 1953.

The government moves to study polar bears: because they got sued by environmental groups. Therefore global warming is mentioned by WaPo; it was part of the lawsuit.

Feds Move to Protect Polar Bears

ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- Amid concerns that global warming is melting away the icy habitats where polar bears live, the federal government is reviewing whether they should be considered a threatened species.

[]

The decision comes after the Center for Biological Diversity of Joshua Tree, Calif., filed a petition last year that said polar bears could become extinct by the end of the century because their sea ice habitat is melting away.

The group, joined by the Natural Resources Defense Council and Greenpeace, also filed a federal lawsuit in December to seek federal protections for the polar bear.

"I think it's a very important acknowledgment that global warming is transforming the Arctic and threatening polar bears with extinction," said Kassie Siegel, lead author of the center's petition.

On to the New York Times; one of the Bush soldiers in the War on Science has had to resign, because it turned out he didn't even have his pathetic journalism degree. Not science, journalism. And he didn't even finish. This 24-year old kid was telling NASA scientists what not to say:

A Young Bush Appointee Resigns His Post at NASA

George C. Deutsch, the young presidential appointee at NASA who told public affairs workers to limit reporters' access to a top climate scientist and told a Web designer to add the word "theory" at every mention of the Big Bang, resigned yesterday, agency officials said.

Mr. Deutsch's resignation came on the same day that officials at Texas A&M University confirmed that he did not graduate from there, as his résumé on file at the agency asserted.

Save the Polar Bears, Save the World

Apparently polar bears are the canaries in the mines for the modern world, as this is my third "polar bears affected by pollution" post recently.

Toxic waste creates hermaphrodite Arctic polar bears

Wildlife researchers have found new evidence that Arctic polar bears, already gravely threatened by the melting of their habitat because of global warming, are being poisoned by chemical compounds commonly used in Europe and North America to reduce the flammability of household furnishings like sofas, clothing and carpets.

A team of scientists from Canada, Alaska, Denmark and Norway is sounding the alarm about the flame retardants, known as polybrominated diphenyls, or PBDEs, saying that significant deposits have recently been found in the fatty tissues of polar bears, especially in eastern Greenland and Norway's Svalbard islands.

Studies are still being carried out on what impact the chemicals might be having on the bears, but tests on laboratory animals such as mice indicate that their effects can be considerable, attacking the sex and thyroid glands, motor skills and brain function.

There is also evidence that compounds similar to the PBDEs have contributed to a surprisingly high rate of hermaphroditism in polar bears. About one in 50 female bears on Svalbard has both male and female sex organs, a phenomenon scientists link directly to the effects of pollution.

"The Arctic is now a chemical sink," declared Colin Butfield, a campaign leader for the Worldwide Fund for Nature, which last month indicated that killer whales in the Arctic were also suffering from elevated levels of contamination with fire retardants as well as other man-made compounds. "Chemicals from products that we use in our homes every day are contaminating Arctic wildlife."

The pollutants are carried northwards from industrialised regions of the US and western Europe on currents and particularly on northbound winds. Contaminated moisture often condenses on arriving in the cold Arctic climes and is then deposited, ready to enter the food chain.

Previous Posts:

USA Poisons the World

Bush Killing Polar Bears

USA Poisons the World

From the LA Times:

Polar Bears Face New Toxic Threat: Flame Retardants

Already imperiled by melting ice and a brew of toxic chemicals, polar bears throughout the Arctic, particularly in remote dens near the North Pole, face an additional threat as flame retardants originating largely in the United States are building up in their bodies, according to an international team of wildlife scientists.

Bush Killing Polar Bears

Global warming is accelerating exponentially, thanks to the US, our production of greenhouse gases, and the Bush Administration's stubborn & insane refusal to recognize that global warming is real. Just ask a polar bear. Try to find one that hasn't....drowned.

From Britain's Sunday Times:

Polar bears drown as ice shelf melts

SCIENTISTS have for the first time found evidence that polar bears are drowning because climate change is melting the Arctic ice shelf.

The researchers were startled to find bears having to swim up to 60 miles across open sea to find food. They are being forced into the long voyages because the ice floes from which they feed are melting, becoming smaller and drifting farther apart.

Although polar bears are strong swimmers, they are adapted for swimming close to the shore. Their sea journeys leave them them vulnerable to exhaustion, hypothermia or being swamped by waves.

According to the new research, four bear carcases were found floating in one month in a single patch of sea off the north coast of Alaska, where average summer temperatures have increased by 2-3C degrees since 1950s.