Last week, the U.S. Department of Interior declared the polar bear a threatened species.
The reason why the polar bear was declared a threatened species is that the declining Arctic sea ice from global warming is threatening the polar bear's habitat.
According to the Associated Press, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne cited dramatic declines in sea ice over the last three decades and projections of continued losses that could lead to the polar bear's eventual extinction.
To reflect the Bush administration's lack of urgency about dealing effectively with the threat global warming is having on the planet, Kempthorne also said it would be "inappropriate" to use the protection of the bear to reduce greenhouse gases, or to broadly address climate change, the AP reported.
The Bush administration's decision to list the polar bear as a threatened species was the result of an order of a federal judge as the administration has sought to avoid the decision for months.
But last month, the judge, ruled the Bush administration had been "in violation of the law", and ordered it to act by May 15.
According to Commondreams.org, polar bears depend on the sea ice for hunting, mating and moving around, but last summer, 200,000 square miles of ice - more than twice the size of Britain - melted for the first time, shrinking the frozen sea to an extent that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted would not occur until 2050. More and more scientists believe the Arctic could be ice-free in summer in little more than 20 years.
According to the Website, in February 2005, US conservation groups petitioned their government to list the polar bear as the first species to be endangered by global warming.
A study commissioned by Kempthorne, from the US Geological Survey concluded that two-thirds of the world's 20,000-25,000 polar bears would vanish by 2050.
The very act of placing the polar bear on the endangered and threatened species list, admittedly because global warming is posing a threat to the bear's habitat, can be interpreted as a call-to-action and not a further excuse to burying our heads in the sand about global warming.
Global warming is a very real threat and will dramatically impact farmers and ranchers worldwide in their ability to feed an ever increasing hungry planet.
The food crisis reverberating globally now is just the tip of the iceberg compared to the full impact global warming will eventually have on food production worldwide.
While Kempthorne also said it would be "inappropriate" to use the protection of the bear to reduce greenhouse gases, another government agency, NASA, has just published a study showing human-caused climate change has made an impact on a wide range of Earth's natural systems, including permafrost thawing, plants blooming earlier across Europe, and lakes declining in productivity in Africa.
According to the study, Cynthia Rosenzweig of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Science in New York and scientists at 10 other institutions have linked physical and biological impacts since 1970 with rises in temperatures during that period.
"This is the first study to link global temperature data sets, climate model results, and observed changes in a broad range of physical and biological systems to show the link between humans, climate, and impacts," said Rosenzweig, lead author of the study.
What Rosenzweig and colleagues also found was that the link between human-caused climate change and observed impacts on Earth holds true at the scale of individual continents, particularly in North America, Europe, and Asia.
What they observed impacts included changes to physical systems, such as glaciers shrinking, permafrost melting, and lakes and rivers warming.
They also found that biological systems also were impacted in a variety of ways, such as leaves unfolding and flowers blooming earlier in the spring, birds arriving earlier during migration periods, and plant and animal species moving toward Earth's poles and higher in elevation.
In aquatic environments such as oceans, lakes, and rivers, they found that plankton and fish are shifting from cold-adapted to warm-adapted communities.
And about 90 percent of observed changes in diverse physical and biological systems are consistent with warming, the scientist found with other driving forces, such as land use change from forest to agriculture, ruled out as having significant influence on the observed impacts.
"Humans are influencing climate through increasing greenhouse gas emissions," Rosenzweig said. "The warming is causing impacts on physical and biological systems that are now attributable at the global scale and in North America, Europe, and Asia."
