Over the holidays, I managed to see the fear mongering commercial from WWF (starring Noah Wyle) over and over again, featuring the same tired message that sea ice is melting at an alarming rate and there is nowhere for the polar bears to go. Just like in Al Gore’s pack of lies, “An Inconvenient Truth,” there is moving video of polar bears and their cubs standing on tiny bits of ice with seemingly nowhere else to go.
Well, fortunately for the polar bears, this is a lot of to-do about nothing. Click here to read about how sea ice levels have ended the year at the same levels of 1979. This article is a must read because it shows, on a relatively smaller scale, how premature policy decisions based on predictive modeling is often a bad idea. As the article discusses, this year the United States designated the polar bear a “threatened species” based on dire sea ice predictions that showed the entire North Pole would melt in 2008… it didn’t. Perhaps more care should be taken before enacting economically oppressive cap-and-trade legislation based on equally dire and equally unreliable global warming models.