Are polar bears going to save the planet from global warming?
Today was an energy trifecta in the U.S. Senate: you could see Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman testifying on the energy sections of the President’s new budget, find out about the Bush administration’s political manipulations of climate science, or talk about global warming and wildlife.
Charismatic mega fauna (CM) fan that I am, I headed for the wildlife hearings, held by the (who makes up these names?) Private Sector and Consumer Solutions to Global Warming and Wildlife Protection subcommittee of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, chaired by Senator Joe Lieberman. Plus there was the distinct possibility that Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), best known for his “Global warming is a hoax” line, would be there.
In his opening remarks, Lieberman wasted no time getting to polar bears. After a quick sortie through Friday’s report from the IPPC (“an astounding number…an enormous jump… reached the point where it [global warming] is comprehensible by us non-scientists”), he went straight to the potential listing of polar bears as an endangered species because of global warming.
Senator John Warner (R-VA) skipped polar bears, but offered another touching story instead. He led off by stating that “I come to this issue, I would have to tell you, uninformed, with an open and objective mind.” Slowly shaking his unbelievably Senatorial mane of thick, silver hair, Warner told the audience, “I have to tell you, when I can’t go to sleep, I reach over and get Trout Unlimited or one of my shooting volumes, and then I quietly go to sleep.” He then launched into a kind of Henny Youngman routine about how his wife had made all the decisions about renovating their new house, all but one: “In my library, I finally got the gun case I always wanted. In it is a shotgun given to me by my father when I was 12 years old. I’ll be 80 in a few weeks. That gun has seen some action.”
After this touching story establishing Warner’s bona fides as a member of the hunting and fishing world, Senator Boxer, chair of the full Energy and Natural Resources Committee, took a bead on polar bears again. Her aides hoisted giant blow-ups of polar bears, including a particularly dramatic shot of an adult bear fully extended in flight, jumping from one ice flow to another. Boxer pointed out that wildlife in all its manifestations was big business in California, supporting 144,000 jobs.
Senator Inhofe was up next, and he was having no part of any hand wringing about cute polar bears or anything else: “Animals are fun and fuzzy and I love them, but they can be used to advance another agenda.” He claimed that environmentalists were using love for wildlife to seek “political changes they can’t get through science alone… [Environmentalists want to] “shut down development” across the U.S.
Inhofe went to great lengths to discredit polar bears as a symbol. (I have been seeing the polar bear/global warming image everywhere in the last few months; it appears that these images may have broken through, posing a severe threat to anti-global warmers.)
Inhofe deplored the decision of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to consider listing polar bears as threatened because of the impact of global warming: “Based on the scientific literature, we don’t have a firm scientific understanding of what is happening in the Arctic.” Since 1950, he claimed the world population of polar bears had gone from 10,000 to 25,000, and that of the 19 known populations of polar bears, 14 were stable or increasing.
Inhofe proceeded to lay waste to every element of the case for global warming. Friday’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) news was not the report itself (which is due out in May) but just a “summary for policy makers.” He said that estimates of sea level rise had been reduced by 50%, and that livestock were producing more greenhouse gases than humans. He named a few scientists who he said had once supported global warming, but had now switched sides. And he talked about how the popular press in the mid-1970s was predicting not global warming, but a new ice age.
(Among the day’s handouts on the press table, by far the most elaborate was a 66-page, magazine-format collection of Inhofe’s floor speeches and other materials attacking the science behind global warming. Featuring a 4-color cover, the document was titled, “Hot & Cold Media Spin Cycle: A Challenge to Journalists Who Cover Global Warming.” And if that title wasn’t enough, there was a prominent teaser across the top: “A Skeptic’s Guide to Debunking Global Warming Alarmism.” All of the documents in this booklet can be found on the Senate Environment and Public Works website.)
However, the expert witnesses before the subcommittee did not join in Senator Inhofe’s furious attacks on the science behind global warming, largely contradicting everything Inhofe had just said. Dr. Brendan Kelly, who has worked with Inuit hunters for much of his career, said that the summer ice cover in the Arctic had decreased 26% in his career.
Kelly produced another heart-rending (if walruses are your CM) example of how this disappearing ice cover was destroying species. Walruses feed on clams and other bottom dwelling organisms. When they are nursing, female walruses alternate between caring for their young on the ice, and diving for clams. But the ice surface has now retreated to water too deep for the female walruses to feed, so that they would have to abandon their young in order to feed themselves.
Kelly had an equally sad story about ring seals, which are key prey for Inuit hunters, and form 90% of the diet of polar bears. Female ring seals give birth in snow caves which they have excavated on the ice. The caves protect the pups from the weather, and to some extent from polar bears. But the warming weather is causing these snow caves to collapse before the pups are weaned, leaving them more likely to die from extreme weather events and predation.
In another example of the impact of climate change on polar bears, Kelly reported on a meeting last week in Anchorage of polar bear researchers, who have very good information on polar bear denning sites from satellite photos over several decades. Most polar bears used to den on sea ice, and not on land. But now increasing numbers of bears were denning on land, as the sea ice moved farther offshore.
As to whether climate change was happening or not, Dr. Thomas E. Lovejoy, one of the country’s most distinguished ecological scientists, talked about how the evidence for climate change had shifted from the anecdotal evidence he cited in his first book to “signals in nature” that were unrebuttable: changes in the times of flowering, migrations, nest building, and egg laying. Because every species would respond to climate change at its own rate, ecological communities would start to “disassemble,” as mismatches occurred between, say, caterpillars and the availability of the plants they eat.
Lovejoy said that most prominent system change to date was the increasing acidity of the oceans as they absorbed some of the excess carbon dioxide. The oceans are now 30% more acidic than they were in pre-industrial times. “Two-thirds of the earth’s surface is changing its chemistry,” Lovejoy said. “This has been a bit of a surprise to the scientific community, you didn’t even hear about it two or three years ago.”
Vast numbers of ocean species build skeletons and shells from calcium carbonate. “At a certain point, many [of the species building shells] will have trouble constructing their shells, or their shells could go into solution,” Lovejoy explained. The increasing warmth of the oceans was a grave threat to coral reefs, which are based on an animal/algae partnership. A small increase in temperature can cause coral to expel the algae, producing coral bleaching. Repeated bleaching can cause the reef to die.
Lovejoy noted that a doubling of carbon dioxide would be disastrous for the natural world. Even stabilizing CO2 at 450 parts per million, which some environmental groups have labeled as “safe,” we would be creating a world in which the ecological impacts would be “pretty messy.”
In other testimony, witnesses described how warmer winters and warmer nights were unleashing a variety of insect pests, like the woolly adelgid that has decimated forests in the Virginia mountains, or the pine bark beetle that has destroyed huge swathes of timber in the Pacific Northwest. Warming temperatures in the Chesapeake Bay were creating an ever-larger “dead” zone at the bottom of the bay in the summer, an area with too little oxygen for fish or other animals to survive. And warmer weather increased the number of striped bass, one of the Bay’s prime sports fish, infected with bacteria that produce large red lesions on the fish.
(If you are interested in more information about this hearing, you can find the prepared statements from the witnesses on the subcommittee’s webpage. As for the rest of the day’s energy events, the Union of Concerned Scientists did an excellent study of the Bush administration’s interference in the normal workings of science, which sparked today’s hearings by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, and a similar hearing by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The Secretary of Energy’s statement can be found at http://energy.senate.gov/public/_files/BodmanTestimony.pdf.)
