FWS Polar Bear Plan Includes No Action On Climate: Admits Recovery "Unlikely"

[hatrack]

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Five years ago, in a meeting room in Alaska, two dozen federal wildlife biologists joined other experts to begin formulating a recovery plan for polar bears because the animals' primary habitat, sea ice, was melting beneath their feet in summer.

The planning came with a caveat: It was beyond their control, members said, to recommend rules addressing climate warming — the main threat to the animals — because the agency that oversees polar bears, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, had no jurisdiction over greenhouse gas emissions linked to the warming.

The agency on Monday released the final polar bear recovery plan, which includes provisions for tertiary threats, such as oil spills and excessive hunting. However, it does not push for any action to cut greenhouse gas emissions and bluntly acknowledges the likely outcome for polar bears. "Short of action that effectively addresses the primary cause of diminishing sea ice, it is unlikely that polar bears will be recovered," the plan states.

Jenifer Kohout, co-chair of the recovery team, said telling the story of the polar bear's plight and the connection to climate warming is the main thrust of the plan. "In order to recover polar bears, we believe that we have to address the climate change problem over the long-term," she said.

EDIT

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/fbc29ef1fd5943bd9441c5695d20217e

[In_The_Wind]

1. We would lose a beautiful animal if the Polar Bear becomes extinct.

[Dreamer3]

2. Tragic

[NickB79]

3. We lost the fight to save the polar bears (and the rest of the Arctic ecosystem) decades ago

I figure our last chance to stop the eventual thawing of the Arctic passed somewhere around 1980. From that point on, we were locked in with enough carbon emissions to do catastrophic damage. Even if we could magically stop emitting carbon today, it would see additional warming locked in for decades, if not centuries. Depending on how much positive feedback we've kicked off, it could be millenia. This means we have already doomed Arctic sea ice, and now get to watch as it melts away over this century.

The paleoclimate records bear this out: the last time we were above 400ppm CO2 (3 million years ago), the Arctic was green, not white: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ice-free-arctic-in-pliocene-last-time-co2-levels-above-400ppm/

"If you have a forested Arctic with five different kinds of pine trees ... you can't really have perennial sea ice at the same time," she said.

At this point, my only suggestion to "save" the polar bear is this.

Capture a genetically diverse population of them, and begin captive-breeding programs to hybridize them with grizzly bears and release these offspring into the encroaching boreal forests as the tundra thaws. We already see this cross-breeding to a limited degree in the wilds of Alaska, so it can be done. While the actual species won't survive, their genetics will to some extent, buried in the grizzly genome. 10,000 years from now (assuming grizzlies don't go extinct as well) when the planet finally begins to cool again and sea ice starts to reform, the surviving bear population may re-speciate out as they did 3 million years ago, giving rise to a new species of polar bear. Not the same as the one we have today, but carrying many of it's genes that served it so well before we destroyed it's habitat.