ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Ken Taylor has had easier jobs than this one. It's not like the good old days chasing rhinos, climbing into bear dens and wrestling beluga whales in shallow water.
These days, sitting at a desk as deputy commissioner of fish and game, the veteran wildlife biologist has to muster the best science he can find to argue that Alaska's polar bears are in good shape and need no special protection from hypothetical doomsday scenarios.
This requires Taylor to stand up to the prevailing wisdom about global warming in most of the world's scientific community and the public — not to mention some pretty strong opinions in his own department.
But Taylor, point man on polar bears in Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's administration, argues that the scientific justification simply isn't there — at least not yet — to declare the polar bear "threatened" and touch off a cascade of effects under the Endangered Species Act. A decision on the bears is expected from the U.S. Department of the Interior in the next few weeks.
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45-year projection a stretch
"From my perspective, it's very difficult to put a population on the list that's healthy, based on a projection 45 years into the future," Taylor says. "That's really stretching scientific credibility."
The state's own scientific credibility hasn't been helped by the fact that the Fish and Game Department no longer has any polar bear experts of its own. Nor did it help that, when state officials found a scientific study reinforcing their polar bear stance, a congressional committee called a hearing to decry "phony science" and Exxon Mobil-funded "climate deniers."
Still, Taylor has helped produce two reports in the past year arguing against an endangered-species listing.
The state argues that there's too much uncertainty about the future of the Arctic ice sheet on which the polar bears depend. Explanations for global warming other than greenhouse-gas emissions, such as sunspots and variations in the Earth's orbit, need to be considered, the state says.
And despite experts who call the idea "fanciful," the state argues that polar bears forced onto land might be able to adapt quickly by eating birds, caribou and other terrestrial species.
"The country is being hit with sky-is-falling-type articles," said Taylor. "Very little attention is being given to those who say it's overblown."
Palin is leading the state's fight. In an op-ed column in The New York Times earlier this month, she said there is "insufficient evidence" to justify such a listing — an opinion she said was based on "a comprehensive review" of the science by state wildlife officials.
With limited peer-reviewed science available that concludes the bears are doing fine, however, the state devotes most of its space to challenging everyone else's work.
That pits Taylor and his staff — and several national consultants from the warming-is-overblown camp — against polar bear biologists with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Geological Survey and leading international authorities in the World Conservation Union's Polar Bear Specialist Group, not to mention the climatologists of the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Studies by those scientists contend that Alaska's polar bear populations are already showing signs of stress and decline linked to summer melting of their ice habitat.
Ice shrinkage models suggest that two-thirds of the world's polar bears will be gone by the year 2050. Scientists now say the Arctic ice may be melting even faster than that.
The Palin administration's effort to block action by raising uncertainty has moved the state to the dubious margins of scientific credibility, according to environmentalists.
"They're not presenting a fair picture of the science," said Deborah Williams, a former Interior Department official who now heads the climate nonprofit Alaska Conservation Solutions. "It's a terrible disservice, to release something so irresponsibly biased."
National environmental groups sued to prompt the federal endangered-species review. They say the state is giving credibility to industry-funded dissenters whose studies are designed to confuse the public and the press.
"The deniers somehow manage to get a very small number of such papers published, and then those who oppose greenhouse gas regulation or protection of the polar bear seize upon them and promote them and ignore the fact that virtually the entire scientific community disagrees with them," said Kassie Siegel, the climate program director for the Center for Biological Diversity.
State's credibility at stake
At stake is the state's credibility in other areas where a balanced view of science is important, such as predator control and oil-spill cleanups, said Rick Steiner, a professor with the University of Alaska Marine Advisory Program. A federal listing of the polar bear as threatened could have far-reaching consequences, depending on the management plan drawn up to protect the bears.
State officials have expressed concern about effects a threatened-species listing could have on international hunting agreements and future oil and gas development in the Arctic.
Sen. Ted Stevens echoed those concerns this month, saying bear protections could interfere with construction of a gas pipeline from the North Slope.
Rep. Don Young and Sen. Lisa Murkowski have also spoken against the listing, which has been cited by opponents of a pending federal oil lease sale in Alaska's Chukchi Sea.
Past oil drilling on northern lands has not hurt the polar bears, according to federal studies. Environmentalists counter that current interest in offshore Arctic drilling presents new risks, including oil spills into water.
An even bigger question, spreading far beyond Alaska, is: How will a management plan protect the bears from anticipated habitat loss? Will it focus on new protections for the last few bears on land? Or will it provide new leverage over federal permits for projects in the Lower 48, raising challenges on everything from new freeways to coal-fired power plants — all in an effort to curb greenhouse gases?
"When I voted for the creation of the Endangered Species Act in 1973, I never envisioned that gas and coal plants in the deserts of Arizona could be adversely affected by the listing of polar bears in the Alaskan Arctic," Young said this month.
The Center for Biological Diversity and other environmental groups say this is just the result they hope for: using the polar bear to address global climate issues. Anything less and the bears are doomed, they say.
Federal officials say there is nothing in the law to preclude listing species threatened by climate change. They say this is the first time such a listing might be made.
Both sides in the debate agree that polar bear population data are scarce.
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