Mover Mike

What a day in The Oregonian. First, on the editorial page is The bear necessities, about the secretary of the interior, Dirk Kempthorne, listing the polar bear as an endangered species and this comment:

But there is now widespread consensus that polar bears are imperiled. And so yes, Kempthorne seemed to be saying, he recognizes that the bears' habitat is shrinking. And yes, climate change almost certainly is playing a major part in that.

NO IT"S NOT!

Recently in a new book titled Cool It by Jorn Lomborg, named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2004, Lomborg wrote about the polar bears:The Polar Bear Specialist Group of the World Conservation Union

...told us was that of the twenty distinct subpopulations of polar bears, one or possibly two were declining in Baffin Bay; more than half were known to be stable; and two subpopulations were actually increasing around the Beaufort Sea. Moreover, it is reported that the global polar-bear populastion has increased dramatically over the past decades, from about five thousand members in the 1960s to twenty-five thousand today, through stricter hunting regulation. Contrary to what you might expect-and what is not pointed out in any recent stories-the two populations in decline come from areas where it has actually been getting colder over the past fifty years, whereas the two increasing populations reside in areas where it is getting warmer.

... nowhere in the news coverage is it mentioned that 300 to 500 bears are shot each year...

Kempthorne's response might be, well we are looking down the road 45 years. Please, weathermen have a difficult time predicting the weather more than 10 days in advance.