Alaska to Polar Bears: Drop Dead

It’s been nothing short of infuriating to watch Alaska’s resistance (sub.) to the possible (though unlikely) listing of polar bears as a “threatened” species. The state has exactly zero polar bear researchers on its staff at the Department of Fish and Game, and it’s devoted most of its time and resources to claiming that there aren’t enough data to justify invoking the Endangered Species Act on behalf of the bears. Rather than carry out actual population surveys of their own, they’ve turned to professional skeptics: The state’s case, for example, has relied quite significantly on the work of J. Scott Armstrong, a marketing professor from Penn’s Wharton School who makes his living by insisting that forecasters who don’t adhere to his method are destined to be wrong.

The confrontation has a familiar look and sound.

Gov. Sarah Palin is leading the state’s fight. In an op-ed column in The New York Times earlier this month, she said there is “insufficient evidence” to justify such a listing — an opinion she said was based on “a comprehensive review” of the science by state wildlife officials.

With limited peer-reviewed science available that concludes the bears are doing fine, however, the state devotes most of its space to challenging everyone else’s work.

That pits [deputy commissioner of Fish and Game Ken] Taylor and his staff — and several national consultants from the warming-is-overblown camp — against polar bear biologists with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Geological Survey and leading international authorities in the World Conservation Union’s Polar Bear Specialist Group, not to mention the climatologists of the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Studies by those scientists contend that Alaska’s polar bear populations are already showing signs of stress and decline linked to summer melting of their ice habitat. Ice shrinkage models suggest that two-thirds of the world’s polar bears will be gone by the year 2050. Scientists now say the Arctic ice may be melting even faster than that.

In addition to claiming a scarcity of data on polar bear populations, the state’s position so far has been to insist — and I’m not kidding here — that global warming might not actually result in Arctic ice-shelf depletion, and they’ve suggested as well that polar bears might simply adapt better to living on land. This latter hypothesis should remind us of Jonah Goldberg’s Katrina-week suggestion that people hunkered down in the Superdome might do well to stockpile weapons, “grow gills and learn to communicate with serpents.” (Interestingly, that infamous entry appears to have been scrubbed from The Corner’s archives.)

In the end, of course, Palin’s administration is lobbying against the listing for a number of reasons, all of which have something to do with future oil and gas exploration in the state. With that in mind — and if indeed the polar bears manage to forsake the ice shelves for year-round subsistence on land — I suppose they’ll have plenty of humans to eat once they run out of caribou.