By James Delingpole:
The world’s exploding polar bear population which has now reached record highs of 30,000.
30,000 polar bears is a lot. As someone else remarked (remind me where and I’ll link to it), when Al Gore was born the population was just 5,000. Even as recently as 2005 it was estimated at no more than 22,500.
When the population of something explodes six-fold in 70 years that’s a sign that it’s doing pretty well, right? In fact, frankly, at that point it ceases to be a species in any kind of danger and starts to look more like a pest.
So why do the greenies persist in treating it like it’s a rare and precious species on the verge of extinction due to man’s selfishness and greed (TM)?
This is the question asked and answered by the best short video you will ever see about the polar bear non-problem.
It has been made by Canadian polar bear expert Susan Crockford for the Global Warming Policy Foundation and it calls for the US Administration to reassess the polar bear’s (utterly bogus) classification as a “threatened” species.
As the film makes clear, the polar bear is not “threatened” and hasn’t been for many decades (not since hunting was mostly banned). When in May 2008 the US Fish and Wildlife Service listed it as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act this was a political gesture not a scientific one.
The flimsy justification for the polar bear’s “threatened” status was the dramatic decline in summer sea ice which – so the fashionable theory ran – would render polar bears unable to feed because whenever they pursued seals they’d collapse through the thin ice.
This is a plausible theory so long as you know nothing about the feeding habits, behaviour and seasonal cycle of polar bears.
Polar bears, it turns out, do most of their feeding in early spring when they consume 8 months’ worth of their total food needs.
Mostly, they eat ring seals which are abundant in spring but have largely disappeared from the bears’ hunting grounds by summer, leaving only the lest tasty and harder-to-catch adult bearded and harp seals.
…
To be clear, polar bears are not “threatened”, “vulnerable” or otherwise “endangered” – and have not been at any time during the long period in which they have been exploited by snake-oil-selling greenies as the poster child for man-made global warming.
When Al Gore showed them drowning in his Inconvenient Truth, it was bullshit.
When Greenpeace produced this moving propaganda film about a homeless polar bear wandering forlornly round London to a Radiohead soundtrack, it was bullshit.
When Plane Stupid released this Trustafarian bedwetters’ video in which polar bears dropped dead from the sky due to man’s selfishness and greed (TM), it was bullshit.
The polar bears are doing just fine. Better than fine.
