Global warming: Bearing up

The assault on reason in the name of global warming continues.

While efforts to declare polar bears an endangered species have temporarily been stalled in Washington, the PR campaign has not let up.

Now there is a book called “The Last Polar Bear: Facing the Truth of a Warming World” by photographer Steven Kazlowski.

As the title implies, Kazlowski tries to create a picture of polar bears desperately clinging to life as the evil humans destroy the Arctic ice pack, leading to the bears’ inevitable doom.

As is often the case when global warming enters the conversation, the seriousness of the situation is greatly exaggerated.

There are an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 polar bears in Alaska, and up to 17,000 in Canada.

Al Gore has sold countless books and DVDs with his familiar wail about the polar bears — that as the ice melts, they won’t be able to hunt their favorite food — seals — and they will be likely to drown.

But polar bears are excellent swimmers, known to swim up to 300 miles without trouble. Their prowess is such that they are classified as Ursus maritimus, or “maritime bear,” and even considered by some biologists to be a primarily marine mammal.

When Gore made his movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” he claimed that many polar bears were drowning as they swam up to 60 miles in search of ice, one of nine claims that helped a British court decree that his film was a political movie and required a disclaimer before it could be shown in schools. According to British Justice Michael Burton, “The only scientific study that either side before me can find is one which indicates that four polar bears have recently been found drowned because of a storm.”

The polar bears, like other bears, are also quite adaptable and able to find other food sources when seals are not available. Except for some localized populations that have been studied, polar bears seem to have been increasing in number in recent years, although an accurate picture is difficult to obtain because there is no exact count how many bears exist now or existed in the past.

Further, the existence of hybrids from the mating of polar bears with brown bears suggests that polar bears may simply be brown bears adapted to Arctic living.

Also, this past winter saw an icepack that was much larger than it has been of late, part of the coldest winter in the northern hemisphere since the 1960s. Nearly all of the ice “lost” to global warming came back this winter, which will no doubt have a positive impact on both the seal and bear populations.

None of those facts is likely to stop the hand wringing by environmentalists. As Patrick Moore, founder of Greenpeace, said, environmentalists long ago abandoned reason.