In the 2007 synthesis report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a scientific body created by World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and by the United Nation Environment Programme (UNEP), it declared that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal.” The indicators are crystal clear: “increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global average sea level.”
According to the doomsayers, climate change, if unmitigated, will have irreversible consequences, one of which is the eventual demise of the polar bears living in the Arctic region. Perhaps this was effectively shown in Al Gore’s award-winning documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth. The message was made more dramatic by showing a hapless polar bear struggling to hold on to the last remaining piece of ice, which is slowly shrinking, thanks to global warming.
The plight of polar bears is, of course, remote to most of us Filipinos because there are no polar bears living in the Philippines and thus we feel no certain affinity to them, in the same manner that we have for pawikan, Philippine Eagle, and other endemic species in the Philippines. But An Inconvenient Truth has a powerful way of getting the message across different nationalities. It is no surprise, therefore, to hear people, who have presumably not seen a polar bear in person, urging the government to act swiftly and make drastic measures.
But the purported extinction of polar bears because of global warming is in fact exaggerated. According to Bjørn Lomborg, head of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, “over the past 40 years—while temperatures have risen—the global polar bear population has increased from 5,000 to 25,000.”
Dr. Perry S. Ong of UP’s Institute of Biology, in his lecture “Anthropogenic Global Warming: Beyond the Hype, Doing the Right Thing for the Right Reason,” also disputed the claim that polar bears are dying because of global warming.
Are we, then, barking up the wrong tree when we are urging the government to cut CO2 emissions in order to save the polar bears, and by extension, the rest who will be affected by global warming?
To Lomborg, yes. It’s because global warming isn’t the main culprit why polar bears are dying, but rather it’s wanton hunting. “Campaigners and the media claim that we should cut our CO2 emissions to save the polar bear,” Lomborg said. “Well, then, let’s do the math. Let’s imagine that every country in the world—including the United States and Australia—were to sign the Kyoto Protocol and cut its CO2 emissions for the rest of this century. Looking at the best-studied polar bear population of 1,000 bears, in the West Hudson Bay, how many polar bears would we save in a year? Ten? Twenty? A hundred? Actually, we would save less than one-tenth of a polar bear.”
The most effective way of saving the polar bears, according to Lomborg, is to ban hunting them. “Each year, 49 bears are shot in the West Hudson Bay alone. So why don’t we stop killing 49 bears a year before we commit trillions of dollars to do hundreds of times less good?”
The case of the polar bears, which have become the “poster children of global warming,” is just one of the many “one-sided warnings” that are constantly recited by several people—environmentalists, politician-lawmakers, etc. It is also a manifestation of how our panic about climate change and its impact, as Lomborg said, “does distort the lens through which we see the big picture.”
Thus, the goal in bringing up Dr. Perry S. Ong’s and Bjørn Lomborg’s ideas is to ensure that two sides of the story are heard. Things need to be placed in their proper perspectives lest we lose sight of the forest for the trees.
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