Another Environmentalist Lie: Global Warming Is Not Harmful to Polar Bears

"Cable TV satirist Stephen Colbert coined a term "truthiness," which the online encyclopedia Wikipedia explains is "to claim to `know' something ... `from the gut' without regard to evidence, logic ... or actual facts." Truthiness, thus, is an emotional appeal meant to short-circuit intellectual examination of claims being made.

A prime example of its effectiveness came in late December when environmental lobbyists persuaded the Bush administration to recommend that the polar bear be listed as threatened due to global warming.

In lieu of evidence, environmentalists offered mostly anecdotes that polar bears are at risk: isolated reports of a few polar bears drowning in Arctic waters normally containing sea ice as well as a few instances of cannibalism among polar bears.

Then they took a long leap of logic to posit that human-caused global warming will melt most of the ice at the North Pole within 50 years, and that without the ice, polar bears will be unable to hunt seals, their preferred prey.

Fortunately, both for policy and the polar bears, the plight of this one population does not reflect the population trend as a whole. Indeed, since the 1970s, while the world was warming, polar bear numbers increased dramatically from around 5,000 to as many as 25,000 today.

Historically, polar bears have thrived in temperatures even warmer than at present -- during the medieval warm period 1,000 years ago and during the Holocene Climate Optimum between 5,000 and 9,000 years ago...

Charlotte Observer