SO SAD FOR THE GREENIES: POLAR BEARS NOT DYING OUT AT ALL

Polar bears are mammals with a mission, whether it's Gus obsessively swimming in the Central Park Zoo, or the mother and her cub that I once followed during a dogsled expedition here in the Canadian high Arctic. We watched her with awe and kept our distance, especially after coming across the bloody remnants of her seal dinner on the ice. The message I took home was: "You mess with my habitat, and I'll mess with you." Besides their natural charisma, the bears have another crucial asset for a poster animal: location. Because the Arctic is projected to feel the effects of global warming sooner and more severely than temperate regions, the recent shrinking of sea ice in the Arctic has been promoted as a grim harbinger for the planet.

The polar bear has become, in the words of the WWF conservation group, "an ambassador for Arctic nature and a symbol of the impacts that global warming is increasingly having around the world." Conservation groups and scientists have been making headlines in the past year, warning that shrinking sea ice could make wild bears extinct by the end of the century, possibly within just 20 years.

Right now, though, Inuits like Nathaniel Kalluk here in Resolute Bay aren't exactly worried. "There are a lot more bears now than before," said Mr. Kalluk, who is 51 and has been hunting since childhood. "We'll spot 20 to 30 bears on a hunting trip. Twenty years ago, sometimes we didn't see any at all." This is not an isolated trend. Although the bears seem to be hurting in some places, like the Hudson Bay region south of here, their numbers have increased worldwide. In Canada, home to most of the world's polar bears, the population has risen by more than 20 percent in the past decade.

The chief reason for the rise is probably restrictions on hunting (for which conservationists deserve credit). In this village of fewer than 200 residents, Mr. Kalluk and the other hunters are limited each year to three dozen bears, which they allocate by drawing names out of a hat.

But the increase might also be related to the recent warming, which could be helping bears in some places. After all, the bears have thrived in warmer climates than today's. In the 1930's, the Arctic was as warm as it is now, and in the distant past it was even warmer. The doomsday reports of the melting Arctic have focused on the rise in temperatures compared with the late 1970's, but that was a particularly cold period. So the bears can cope with some global warming, which would increase the diversity of species in the Arctic - and maybe the number of humans, too.

Today only 30,000 people live in Nunavut, an impoverished Canadian territory the size of Western Europe. Ecotourism during the summer is one of the few promising industries in places like Resolute, but the cold and ice keep out all but a few affluent adventurer travelers, scientists and journalists. Personally, I like the high Arctic just as frozen and empty as it is now. But I can see why Mr. Kalluk doesn't mind the idea of a little climate change. "The ice is always going to freeze in the winter," he said, "but it would be better for us if we had a longer summer. We'd have more time to use our boats. There would be more jobs and a longer tourist season." The bears would be still around, and their charisma would be making more money for the locals, not just for the WWF fund-raisers down south

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CARBON DIOXIDE STOPS THE EARTH FROM FREEZING

Several graduate students, along with supervising professor Joe Kirschvink, have released a paper presenting their explanation of what caused "Snowball Earth," a periodic deep freeze of Earth's atmosphere that has been theorized for years. The Caltech team argues that 2.3 billion years ago, cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, gained the ability to break down water, which in turn released a flood of oxygen into the atmosphere. That oxygen reacted with the atmospheric methane, which insulated the Earth at the time, and broke it down. While the oxygen-methane reaction created the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, the protective nature of the barrier cracked. Temperatures plunged to minus 50 degrees Celsius, and ice at the equator grew to 1 mile thick. Although this process took several million years, substantial damage to the methane layer could have occurred in the first 100,000 years.

Life-forms only recovered after microorganisms, clinging then to thermal vents or living underground, evolved the ability to consume oxygen and turn it into carbon dioxide.

It was a close call to a planetary destruction," said professor Kirschvink, who oversaw the project, in a prepared statement. "If Earth had been a bit further from the sun, the temperature at the poles could have dropped enough to freeze the carbon dioxide into dry ice, robbing us of this greenhouse escape from Snowball Earth." Carbon dioxide concentrations became so high over millions of years that the temperature soared to 50 degrees Celsius. As the solar system aged, Earth's mood swings became less extreme.

Scientists have known for a number of years that Earth plunged into one of its periodic ice ages 2.3 billion years ago, a change reflected in glacially formed rocks in Canada. The cause, however, has been the subject of debate. Many experts have said that cyanobacteria evolved to break down water between 3.8 billion and 2.7 billion years ago, too early to cause the deep freeze.

The Caltech team believes the answer lies in the movement of glaciers at the time around the middle latitudes of the planet, which in part is borne out by magnetic readings of the Canadian rocks. The glaciers scraped iron, phosphorous and other nutrients off existing rocks. These ran into the ocean and provided food for a massive algal bloom.

"We could still go into Snowball if we goof up the environment badly enough," Kirschvink said. "We haven't had a Snowball in the past 630 million years, and because the sun is warmer now it may be harder to get into the right condition. But if it ever happens, all life on Earth would likely be destroyed. We could probably get out only by becoming a runaway greenhouse planet like Venus."

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Crooked science and Leftism go together: "We cannot let it go without note that while Darwin never falsified data, Marx did -- chronically. As early as the 1880s, Cambridge scholars demonstrated that Marx manipulated source materials "with a recklessness which is appalling ... to prove just the contrary of what they really establish." One example will suffice. He prophesied: "In proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the laborer must grow worse. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery ... at the opposite pole." But did the statistics for wages actually show workers growing poorer as their employers grew richer? Not at all, so in 1867's Das Kapital he jettisoned the contemporary figures and passed off as contemporary those from 1850."

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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