The GOP now has a VP candidate who thinks there are too many polar bears. These furry mammals have made the egregious mistake of chosing to move to the area Ms. Palin and her oil buddies would like to start landcaping.
Fortunately, she won’t have to personally go shoot all of the remaining polar bears, since her oil friends are working on drowning them all.
Nine polar bears are at risk of drowning after the ice floe where they lived melted because of global warming, scientists have said. The bears were spotted in open ocean off the northwest coast of Alaska, miles from their normal hunting area by US government oil survey scientists flying over the Chukchi sea.
Scientists who study the polar bear see this group of nine bears trying to swim 400 miles to safety as a bad sign. In an area as vast as the unprecedentedly-large open waters of the Arctic, spotting one group this large and this lost means there are likely many others.
In May, the US Department of the Interior listed polar bears as threatened under the Endangered Species Act because the Arctic ice they hunt on is melting so quickly.
“The Arctic is a vast ocean and to find nine bears swimming in one area is extremely worrying because it means that dozens more are probably in the same predicament,” said Margaret Williams, Director of WWF’s Alaska office. … Arctic scientists said they feared the annual ice-melt had passed its ‘tipping point’ where not enough freezes each winter to make up for what melted the previous summer.
With Vice President Palin at the helm, the Department of the Interior will get the assistance it has needed. She already does have experience working with the Dept. of the Interior, having launched a lawsuit against it to ensure that polar bears can be killed to open the way for oil rigs.
Palin opposes the Bush administration’s decision to list polar bears as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. Alaska sued Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne earlier this month to try to overturn his decision.
Palin argues there isn’t enough evidence to support a listing, and she fears it will harm oil and gas development in prime polar bear habitat off Alaska’s northern and northwestern coasts.
Palin’s vast first-hand experience with polar bears will come in handy when dealing with those elitist academics who think they know so much, just because they study these things for decades. People like “Dr” Mark Serreze – Senior Research Scientist, Associate Research Professor, CIRES Fellow at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, who has been explaining that as the Arctic ice shrinks each year, it accelerates the next season’s loss in habitat for the polar bear. According to this know-it-all, there there had been some hope that the loss was not happening at the worst possible rate, this summer that hope has been dashed:
“The summer melting used to slow down by the beginning of September. We thought it was slowing this year, but it’s suddenly sped up instead.’
So, with the good work of her partners at BP, Exxon and Shell (to name a few friends she shares with John McCain), Gov. Palin has succeeded at speeding up the removal of this nuisance animal.
Polar bears are moving to land earlier in the season as sea ice melts earlier in the spring, which means they don’t have enough fat reserves to survive the ice-free season (Norris, Rosentrater, and Eid 2002). A polar bear’s reproductive system is also strongly linked to their fat stores, which in turn are linked to finding food on the ice. If the bears are forced to move to land too early, they become unusually thin by the end of the summer. This affects their ability to reproduce and weakens future generations that are born.
So, more oil equals less ice which leads to more drowned and starving bears who have fewer cubs that are more likely to die trying to become full-sized bears to be shot by hunters. Now there’s some highly evolved (er: “intelligently designed”) thinking
That’s what we need, more grownups like Gov. Palin in charge!
Besides, animals make great clothing…
3 comments