Warming to the World

The holiday week that functions pretty effectively as a news blackout is just about over. Saddam is no longer the Number 1 story on the front page at CNN (at least at this writing), but he's still right there near the top. I don't know what kind of play this got in the States, but leading one of the national news broadcasts here in Canada earlier this week was a story about the U.S. Department of the Interior proposing to add polar bears to its list of "threatened" species. According to the Endangered Species Act, the government is prevented from making any decision that can add an additional threat to the species or its habitat. This would be a big deal for a couple of reasons--for instance, it would bar the government from developing particular areas of the Arctic. But perhaps more significantly, because the threat to polar bears is pretty much attributed to be global warming, declaring them a threatened species would be a backdoor acknowledgment by the U.S. government that global warming exists.

It's hardly news that as ice in the Arctic is becoming more and more scarce. Polar bears have normally used ice floes to go and find seals to eat during the summer months, but as those floes have been melting, the bears have been increasingly bound to whatever land is available. Seals, you may have noticed, tend to stay away from the land, so there’s less for bears to eat and more starvation. Also, since polar bears have an instinct to float on these chunks of ice, they set out on them as always, but the ice melts when they are too far from land, and more and more bears are drowning. Unfortunately, sometimes it's easy to get the idea in the United States that the U.S. government is behind on global warming but that the rest of the world is more open to the idea. The CTV report that I saw, however, expressed hope that if the U.S. decided to declare polar bears a threatened species that the Canadians would quickly follow suit.

Another distressing news item that almost certainly didn't get the attention it deserved (I'm checking Google News for mentions now and only get 9) is the fact that another of the warning signs for global warming has come to pass, as well. As the oceans have been rising, a few low altitude islands have gone under the waves. Up until now, these islands have been uninhabited, but this week, the first inhabited island, Lohachara, formerly home to 10,000 people, was lost to the sea. It is in the Bay of Bengal near where the Ganges empties into the Indian Ocean. If you saw Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, you know that the area around Calcutta and the mouth of the Ganges is greatly at risk. More than 100,000,000 people live in the area, and even if flooding due to global warming displaces a small percentage of them (and the loss of Lohachara is another step in that direction), that's still a vast number of climate refugees.

I'm not sure how many canaries in the coalmine we need. Global warming doesn't just stop after it gets the polar bears or Lohachara. Other species and low-lying areas are certain to follow. And if that happens, we're all at risk. Oh well, in one more night, we'll all be wishing each other "Happy New Year" and talking about how bright to future is going to be.