“They ran calculations to determine where the spacecraft was located,” said Darrin Osborne, flight director for the now-destroyed Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite, or ICESat. “The students did this seven days a week.”

Rather than a posse of delinquent space hacker youths pranging satellites for lolz, however, the undergraduates in question were actually supposed to be in charge of the ICESat. They had been given a go on the controls as part of the ongoing operations of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado. LASP operates various science satellites for NASA from its space command centre on campus in Boulder, Colorado.

Nor was the ICESat’s fiery dive into the Arctic a cockup by enthusiastic but inexperienced youngsters, perhaps rashly left at the controls while their full-time supervisors nipped out for a crafty cig. The ICESat had been returning data from space successfully for seven years, well outlasting its targeted design life, before its primary sensor – a laser device intended for measuring ice thickness, forest cover and suchlike on the Earth below – failed last year.

Having got all that could be got from the now largely purposeless spacecraft in terms of engineering tests etc, NASA decided to decommission the ICESat and use its remaining manoeuvring fuel to send it down into the atmosphere.

NASA calculations indicated that no more than 200lb of the ICESat’s 2,000lb mass would survive to reach the surface. The de-orbit burn carried out by the Colorado undergrads was apparently perfectly executed:

The satellite successfully re-entered Earth’s atmosphere Aug. 30 and largely burned up, with pieces of debris falling into the Barents Sea – which is part of the Arctic Ocean north of Norway and Russia.

“Although we are sad to see such a successful science mission come to an end, we are proud of our students’ role in bringing the spacecraft safely out of orbit,” said LASP honcho Bill Possel.

Theoretically any Colorado undergrad can apply for a spot at the LASP space command centre, though almost all of the current crop are majoring in engineering, space science or computer science.

“Student operators provide a lower cost to NASA, and CU students at LASP receive hands-on training and experience that helps position them for a future in space-related careers,” says Possel.

“It’s amazing for an undergraduate like me to get hands-on experience controlling multimillion-dollar NASA satellites,” enthuses third-year aerospace engineering sciences student Katelynn Finn.

Sea ice is a thin, fragile, solid layer of frozen ocean water that forms in the Arctic and Antarctic oceans. Not to be     confused with icebergs, which are made of fresh water from compacted snow, salty sea ice is perhaps the most dangerous symptom of the Earth’s rising temperatures.

Sea ice forms on the ocean’s surface in chilly temperatures, starting as a thin slate of crystals that grow outward into a sheet of salty ice. Then the sea ice grows downward and thickens. Sea ice is mobile — winds and ocean currents often push it around on the surface of the ocean.

Although many might suspect that all salinity would be lost in the icing process, if one were to eat sea ice, it would taste very salty! Salt particles are trapped in the ice crystals as they freeze.

Although sea ice normally melts in the warmer summer months, global warming is further affecting its formation. As climate change heats the upper ocean, sea ice will begin melting from below at more rapid and dangerous rates.

The volume of Arctic sea ice has been shrinking for the past 30 years, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. This has forced more broken pieces of ice to float in our oceans and seas, which is dangerous because it raises worldwide sea levels.

Arctic sea ice helps to keep the polar regions cool and helps moderate the global climate. Because sea ice has a bright surface, 80 percent of the sunlight that strikes it is reflected back into space. But when sea ice melts, it exposes the dark ocean surface, which reflects less light and causes Arctic temperatures to rise further.

Changes in the Arctic can influence weather globally, and small temperature increases at the poles lead to greater warming of the Earth over time. Today’s Arctic sea ice coverage is at its lowest since 1979, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration anticipates further loss of Arctic sea ice in the next 30 years.

The amount of sea ice affects the salinity of the water and the way ocean water circulates around the world, which over time can cause changes in ecosystems all over the globe, according to NOAA. Melting sea ice creates problems for wildlife too because some animals in the Antarctic rely on melting sea ice for hunting and survival.

Polar sea ice undergoes changes every year. During the winter, the Arctic ice pack grows to the size of the United States. In the summer, half of the ice disappears. In the Arctic, sea ice is about 10 feet (3 meters) thick on average, while ice at the South Pole averages one mile (1.6 kilometers) thick. For most of the year, sea ice is typically covered by snow.

In a few days’ time, officials at the Bureau of Minerals and Petroleum in Greenland will reveal the winners of a new round of licences to drill for oiland gas in its waters. The announcement promises to be explosive.

Among those waiting are most of the world’s leading oil companies, including ExxonMobil, Shell and Norway’s StatOil. Watching with equal attention will be the planet’s leading green groups, who they have pledged to block every effort to drill in the Arctic.

“The Arctic is the last pristine refuge in the northern hemisphere and it is simply not acceptable for oil companies to come here to drill and risk triggering a disaster that would dwarf the Deepwater Horizon spill,” said Ben Ayliffe, senior energy campaigner at Greenpeace. Its ship, the Esperanza, is currently trying to disrupt drilling in the Davis Strait off theGreenland mainland. “We are going to make a real fight of this,”he said.

Last week the future of drilling in the Arctic hit the headlines when it emerged that BP, in the wake of the disastrous oil spill off America’s Gulf Coast, would not be bidding for contracts in the region. But the other oil giants will. And it is not hard to understand why.

Last year, the US Geological Survey estimated that there were more than 90bn barrels of oil beneath the Arctic seabed – an estimated 13% of the world’s undiscovered reserves – with the waters around Greenland, as well as the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, pinpointed as the most promising zones.

Only a handful of test wells have been sunk so far, and no oil has yet been discovered. Oil companies are confident of success, however, while environmentalists are grimly resigned to the idea of wells being sunk. Greenland, Beaufort and Chukchi are all likely to become sites of future drilling – and of major battles with ecologists.

The irony of this battle is not lost on environmentalists. At present, increased fossil fuel emissions are raising global temperatures and melting ice caps, a process that is making it much easier to drill for fossil fuels, as ice sheets break apart and expose shallower waters in the far north.

The divisive nature of these issues is highlighted in sparsely populated Greenland, the world’s largest island. Most of its citizens currently view the prospect of major oil revenues as mouth-watering. At present, Greenland’s 57,000 inhabitants rely on fishing and a £400m annual handout from the Danish government to maintain their livelihoods. Oil money could replace the latter and give the country independence from its Danish overlords. Hence the swift reaction last week to accusations that drilling in “iceberg alley” – as the Davis Strait is known – was environmentally hazardous. The country was well prepared, claimed Kuupik Kleist, Greenland’s premier. “Of course, we are influenced by what happened in the Gulf of Mexico,” he said. “We know that we are talking a huge responsibilty on our shoulders.” Most islanders support this view.

But such assurances do little to comfort campaign groups such as Greenpeace. “These waters, like all Arctic waters, are incredibly dangerous,” said Ayliffe last week. “They have to have ships on standby to push away icebergs or fire water cannons to deflect them. And then you only have a short window in summer to drill before the ice moves back in.”

Greenpeace has targeted Scottish oil company Cairn Energy as its most dangerous foe. Cairn – which is run by former rugby international Bill Gammell, a friend of George Bush and Tony Blair – recently raised several billion pounds from the sale of its stake in its Indian oilfields in Rajasthan and has selected Greenland to be the site of all future exploration efforts. Last week, it announced the discovery of gas reserves there, though it admitted it has yet to find oil. Greenpeace has pledged to block its operations there.

Should there be a blowout of a well in this pristine wilderness, it says, it would be considerably more difficult to drill a relief well than it was in the Gulf of Mexico after a catastrophic explosion crippled BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig earlier this year. Oil could be left gushing from a broken well for years, it is claimed.

Such fears have fuelled environmentalists’ determination to try to block all drilling efforts in the high latitudes as new licensing rounds are lined up in Greenland for 2011 and 2012.

Other countries, such as the US, Canada and Norway, have imposed tougher new regulations on deep-water drilling. How long they are kept in operation, as Greenland opens up its waters, remains to be seen. At the same, Russia – which already has vast oil and gas drilling operations at Sakhalin – is known to be eyeing the Chukchi Sea, farther north, beyond the Bering Straits that divide Alaska and Asia. All are thought to possess rich oilfields that will become more and more important as the rest of the world’s reservoirs dry up over the next two decades.

The pressure on the far north is becoming relentless.

The northern ice cover is becoming smaller and thinner, and scientists predict the Arctic Ocean could lose its icecap completely during summertime by the end of the century at the latest, and possibly as early as the 2030s, Finland’s Helsingen Sonomat reported.

Twenty years from now it may be possible to travel to the North Pole by ship, they say. Russia has already organized luxury cruises to the North Pole in its nuclear-powered icebreakers, but the next generation may be able to reach the top of the world in their pleasure boats, they say.

More important would be what the opening of the sea channels could mean for world trade. The Northeast Passage along Russia’s north coast and the Northwest Passage through Canada’s Arctic archipelago would shorten the sea journey from Asia to Europe and to the east coast of North America by as much as a third.

The receding ice could also allow access to rich natural resources.

More than a quarter of the world’s catches of fish currently come from Arctic waters. An estimated 20 percent to 30 percent of the world’s untapped natural gas resources and 5 percent to 13 percent of oil resources are in the Arctic region, researchers say.

All this new opportunity would require the cooperation among countries, politicians in Arctic states say.

In April the World Wide Fund for Nature published a report on questions concerning the administration of the Arctic Ocean.

“Arctic states must remember that the Arctic Ocean is not their backyard,” report author Professor Timo Koivurova of the Arctic Centre of the University of Lapland said. “International maritime law already guarantees the commercial fleets and fishing fleets of all countries in the world access to the area. It would be sensible to get them to commit to a treaty concerning the Arctic region.”

According to news.softpedia.com,  a team of researchers from the Bremerhaven, Germany-based Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research is now taking on a very difficult task – measuring ice thickness in Arctic regions.

This line of study involves flying a high-tech research airplan over regions of the Arctic that have never before been touched or seen by humans.

The end goal of the investigation is to create a clear image of the ice sheets at the targeted locations, in such a way that those modeling climate change using computers will no longer have to rely only on statistics data in their work.

Satellites can indeed be used to look at how fast the ice is moving from one location to another, or in order to determine how much of the frozen water melts over a period of time.

But using the space-based capabilities to chart the thickness of the ice is still tricky and unreliable.

“Taking off on the measurement flights from Station Nord here is a special adventure. Flying through virtually unsettled regions of the Arctic in the high-tech research aircraft is a stark contrast to my modeling work on the computer,” says Rüdiger Gerdes.

The expert holds an appointment at the Alfred Wegener Institute. He explains that the flybys he and his team will do over the Arctic Ocean will take place this week, OurAmazingPlanet reports.

“I’m very keen on seeing the results of the sea ice thickness measurements. Only when we know the distribution of ice of varying thickness can we calculate how much freshwater is carried out of the Arctic Ocean via ice,” the expert adds.

The research initiative took its first analysis flight on August 18, according to AWI communications officer Folke Mehrtens. The Institute is a part of the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centers.

“I got an e-mail from campaign leader Rüdiger Gerdes yesterday that three long transects have been finished successfully, registering sea ice thickness and several other parameters,” Mehrtens said in a recent press release.

Analyzing the Arctic is of extreme importance for understanding global climate, given that they are is easily influenced by changes taking place elsewhere on the planet.

As more and more greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere, rising temperatures promote the melting of glaciers in the Arctic, Antarctic, and on mountaintops.

Researchers around the world are keeping an eye on things, in order to understand how the devastating phenomenon is carrying on.

So, if you’re like me, you may have a few nagging questions in the back of your mind right now:

Where did that ice island — which is about 40 percent larger than the District of Columbia — go? Did it break up altogether? Is it roaming the North Atlantic, awaiting collision with a ship, Titanic style? Or is it floating up the Potomac, ready to wreak havoc on the Lincoln Memorial?

Ok, so that last question is ridiculous. Nevertheless, the fact that a massive ice island broke off Greenland, only to disappear from the news cycle, is rather unsettling.

Fortunately, the folks at NASA have answered my first question by recently publishing the above satellite image of the area that gave birth to the new island.

It turns out that the new ice island — the largest chunk of ice to break off the Petermann Glacier since 1962, having taken one quarter of the glacier’s 40-mile long floating ice shelf with it — is slowly making its way down a fjord in Northwest Greenland, toward the Nares Strait.

The image above, taken Aug. 16, shows that some pieces of ice have loosened around the edges of the island, which has rotated since calving off the glacier. The glacier itself can be seen in the lower right part of the image, looking longingly at the huge piece of its former self… (”pining for the fjords”, perhaps?)

According to NASA: “Thin longitudinal cracks appear on the ice island surface, and wider lateral cracks push in from the island’s sides. An uneven line of pools, medium blue in color, runs down the length of the ice island.”

Although Greenland’s glaciers calve sizable icebergs each year, the chunk of ice that broke off the Petermann was unusually large. As CWG’s Brian Jackson explained, the iceberg is more typical of the massive icebergs that calve off of Antarctic glaciers than glaciers in the Arctic.

It is unclear what role (if any) climate change may have played in this, as well as with the Jakobshavn event earlier this summer. In general, scientists have observed increased melting of the Greenland ice sheet in recent years through a variety of mechanisms, including warming ocean temperatures that can melt glaciers’ floating ice shelves and speed up the transport of ice from land to sea.

The trip comes just days after the government announced a new policy towards the region, with a heavy emphasis on diplomacy to settle existing boundary disputes.

Among other stops, Harper will check in with soldiers taking part in Operation Nanook, the military’s annual exercise in the region.

The prime minister will also meet with Inuit leaders a week after a formal apology for Canada’s Inuit relocation policies decades ago was issued.

That Harper didn’t make the apology himself, and left it instead to new Indian Affairs Minister John Duncan, has some observers scratching their heads.

Harper will travel to Churchill, Man., Resolute Bay, Nunavut and Whitehorse.

The new Arctic policy also commits the Conservative government, which has long underlined the importance of military prowess in the Far North, to a more “strategic engagement on Arctic issues.”

It is change in tone and comes ahead of what are expected to be tough negotiations among Arctic nations once competing scientific claims over boundaries are laid before the United Nations in 2013.

Countries whose borders spill on to the vast but quickly thawing region have been mapping the ocean floor for almost a decade, an exercise that will culminate in a formal submission to the world body.

Canada and the U.S. disagree over the maritime boundary in the Beaufort Sea. There is also an unsettled argument with Denmark over Hans Island, a barren outcrop between Greenland and Ellesmere Island.

Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon refused to speculate last week on what Canada would do if it didn’t like the way the boundaries were drawn under UN supervision.

At stake is the possibility of untold billions of dollars worth of resources, including oil and natural gas. Some Arctic experts predict competition will be so intense as the ice cap melts, it could lead countries into a new Cold War.

The Conservatives, early in their tenure, responded with a plan to construct three heavily-armed, naval icebreakers, a deep-water port and an Arctic warfare training centre. The port and combat centre are in the planning stages, while the icebreaker proposal has morphed into a plan to build six “ice-capable” patrol ships.

Late last week, the government posted a $150,000 tender seeking bids “to develop a real-time, immersive, interactive, three-dimensional synthetic environment for the Canadian North.”

“Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC) an agency of the Department of National Defence (DND) requires services related to developing state-of-the-art in modeling arctic phenomena for scenarios,” says the tender.

However both the federal government and the Canadian military have stressed they don’t see the Arctic becoming a battleground. The bigger concern is the impact of greater commercial shipping in sea lanes once clogged with ice.

Studies done for National Defence, and released under access to information, noted that several countries, including Canada, are already constructing ice-capable merchant ships, but that the economic viability of using the Northwest Passage to ship goods between continents remains in doubt.

The reports predicted that it will be 2060 before Arctic passages are free of ice in the summer. But the date isn’t firm and scientists say it could be early in the 22nd century before that happens.

It was a near-perfect assault on reason, but it failed. The U.S. Senate decided not to sacrifice the U.S.economy on the alter of global warming. We were lucky. Author Michael Crichton saw this assault coming in 2003 when he said: “The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda.” President Eisenhower saw the danger in 1961 when he warned that “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite” dominated by the power of public money. And George Orwell anticipated an endless stream of propaganda coming from a “Ministry of Truth” in his novel “1984.”

As with all propaganda, there is a shred of truth mixed with crafty deception. The global temperature did rise over the last 150 years as we came out of “The Little Ice Age.” But it has not risen further in many years, according to the best data we have from NASA satellites. Professor Phil Jones, the central figure in the Climategate scandal, admitted in a moment of candor that there has been no warming since 1995. Others have pointed out that the global temperature was actually lower 20 years after James Hansen of NASA first warned Congress about “catastrophic warming” in 1988. Alarmists lament their inability to explain this,although the reason is clear: carbon dioxide is not the culprit. 

Our present warm period peaked in 1998 with a “Grand Maximum” of solar cycles and has been constant or slightly cooling on average since, as the sun turned remarkably quiet. From various temperature proxies, we know that the present 10,000-year interglacial epoch has seen similar warmth at thousand-year intervals. Each warm period has been slightly cooler than the previous one as we slide toward another deep ice age. 

Fleeting warmth this year came from an El Nino involving pooling of warmer surface water in the tropical eastern Pacific and was replaced by a La Nina and a declining global temperature. Such brief fluctuations are expected on a fluid planet with vast oceans and atmosphere that are never in equilibrium. 

What about sea level rise? That’s “the greatest lie ever told,” according to Swedish scientist Nils-Axel Morner, who has long studied such changes. Aside from virtual changes caused by coastlines rising or sinking, worldwide sea level has been constant for decades. 

The Arctic is melting a little more this summer than it does on average, but Antarctic sea ice has been growing more than normal. It’s also been unusually cold in South America and Australia. 

Perhaps the most stunning evidence involves carbon dioxide itself. While recent evidence from Hawaii shows steadily rising CO2 in the atmosphere, older measurements show a peak in the 1940s that was higher than the level observed today. That says that natural processes are regulating CO2 in our atmosphere, a concept with strong theoretical backing.  

We certainly don’t know everything there is to know about climate, but we do know that Orwellian pronouncements about a catastrophe are dangerous propaganda disguised as science.

WASHINGTON — Above the Arctic Circle in Canada near Greenland, five Inuit villages have won a court order that blocks a German icebreaker from conducting seismic tests of an underwater region that abounds with marine life — and possibly with oil, gas and minerals, says mcclatchydc.com

For the villagers who live in this mostly treeless region of fiords, icebergs and polar bears, the case was a victory that forces the national and territorial governments to consult them over the use of their homeland. The decision comes as Canada, Alaska and other Arctic regions are deciding whether to allow oil and gas development in Arctic waters that are covered by ice for nine or more months each year.

“We’ve been saying all along that we aren’t anti-development, we aren’t anti-science,” said Okalik Eegeesiak, the president of the Qikiqtani Inuit Association, which asked the court of Nunavut Territory to block the geological study. “But we want to be involved, to be sure our environment and our wildlife are protected as much as possible.”

Many Inuits depend on hunting, fishing and trapping to feed their families, both for cultural reasons and because food shipped above the Arctic Circle is so expensive. After the Canadian government told the people on Lancaster Sound — the villagers’ traditional hunting area — that it planned to conduct the seismic tests, everyone who attended meetings in May opposed the testing, Eegeesiak said.

They were concerned about the immediate impact of the tests on wildlife, but the BP oil blowout also was on everyone’s mind, she said.

“We saw every day on TV how difficult it was to contain the spill in the Gulf of Mexico,” she said, noting that a spill in the ice and minus-40-degree temperature of winter would be impossible to stop.

Canada, like the U.S., is wrestling with how quickly to push into the Arctic for oil and gas.

Climate change is happening much faster at the high latitudes of the Arctic, giving more opportunity for drilling in ice-free water. The world’s addiction to oil, meanwhile, is driving development deeper into the ocean, in places such as the Gulf of Mexico, and into the far north of Alaska and Canada.

Quite possibly, Lancaster Sound, a place that teems with wildlife, will be spared. The government of Canada announced in December that it planned several years of study to determine whether to make the region a marine conservation area.

Most of the world’s narwhals and some 40 percent of its beluga whales travel through the sound and feed and give birth in its waters. Rare bowhead whales are there, too, along with many walruses and seals. Millions of birds of many species nest nearby in great concentrations, including ivory gulls, phalaropes and snow geese.

Tourists visit to see the birds, whales, polar bears and icebergs, ride dog sleds over the ice or hunt for musk ox and polar bears.

Canada’s minister in charge of environmental affairs and parks, Jim Prentice, said in July that the government remained committed to the idea of a marine park but wanted to go ahead with the seismic mapping to help determine its boundaries.

“The mapping of undersea geology is essential to making better decisions on land use and economic development in the north,” Leona Aglukkaq, who represents Nunavut in Parliament, said when the government announced the seismic survey.

On Aug. 8, however, the Nunavut Court of Justice blocked the seismic mapping in Lancaster Sound a day before the icebreaker Polarstern was scheduled to begin its work.

Justice Susan Cooper noted that Inuit representatives said the seismic testing would harm and drive off the marine mammals they hunted. The Canadian government argued that the testing would have little or no impact. The judge weighed the evidence and ruled that the government’s assurances weren’t so clear-cut.

“If the testing proceeds as planned and marine mammals are impacted as Inuit say they will be, the harm to Inuit in the affected communities will be significant and irreversible,” she wrote in the ruling. “The loss extends not just to the loss of a food source, but to a loss of culture. No amount of money can compensate for such a loss.”

The German research organization that’s conducting the expedition, the Alfred Wegener Institute, said it was waiting to hear from Canadian officials. The Lancaster Sound seismic study was supposed to be part of a longer expedition to understand the geology and history of the Arctic Ocean, institute spokesman Ralf Roechert said. The rest of the trip is proceeding as planned.

Roechert said the scientists on the icebreaker used the best equipment available for seismic testing and made sure that the work didn’t harm marine life. “In over 20 years, no incident has been detected,” he said.

Wegener officials have said that the seismic study planned on the Polarstern wasn’t the type that was needed for targeted oil and gas explorations.

The Pew Environment Group, which advocates creating the marine conservation area, argued that seismic testing wasn’t necessary to create a marine park. The Inuit association said that underwater mapping for a park already was done in 1989. The Inuit have rights under their land agreement with Canada to continue hunting, fishing and trapping and to be part of decision-making.

“This is a controversy about oil and gas,” said Scott Highleyman, the director of Pew’s Arctic program. “Now that the judge has ruled, we’re looking forward to working constructively with both the Inuit and the government on creation of a park in Lancaster Sound — something we are all in agreement about — to prevent this kind of conflict in the future.”

Even that, however, might not protect Lancaster Sound entirely from the risk of an oil spill. International companies increasingly are exploring for oil and gas in nearby western Greenland.

Meanwhile, the next move on Arctic drilling in Alaska is expected soon.

The Interior Department is expected to announce whether it will make any changes to the Bush administration’s five-year plan for offshore drilling, which runs from 2007 to 2012.

The Obama administration must decide whether it will sell any more leases in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, whether to withdraw Bristol Bay from potential leasing and whether to leave in place 215 leases that were sold to oil companies for the Chukchi Sea in 2008.

]]> http://arcticfocus.com/2010/08/19/arctic-villages-stop-seismic-tests-as-canada-mulls-oil-future/feed/ 0 http://arcticfocus.com/2010/08/17/opinion-temporary-fix-of-arctic-oil-not-worth-steep-price-to-polar-bears/ http://arcticfocus.com/2010/08/17/opinion-temporary-fix-of-arctic-oil-not-worth-steep-price-to-polar-bears/#comments Tue, 17 Aug 2010 13:46:45 +0000 roman http://arcticfocus.com/?p=1548 According to mercurynews.com, political habits die hard in the Alaska governor’s office, and Sean Parnell seems determined to carry on Sarah Palin’s war against the polar bear.

Parnell’s recent op-ed in the Mercury News (”Habitat designation won’t help polar bears but will kill Alaska’s jobs,” Aug. 8 revealed the depths of his willingness to let this iconic Arctic species — the planet’s largest bear — accelerate toward extinction in exchange for a few months of fuel for our oil-addicted economy.

It’s not what most Americans want, what the Endangered Species Act requires or what the great white bear of the North deserves.

Contrary to Parnell’s blithe assertions, the science is clear that polar bears are already in deep trouble and — literally — sinking fast.

A landmark study led by the U.S. Geological Survey in 2007 concluded that global warming, left unchecked, will likely eliminate all polar bears in Alaska in the next 40 years, with a significant chance of losing them in the next 20. The scientific evidence was so compelling that the Bush administration listed polar bears under the Endangered Species Act in 2008, citing global warming as the cause.

Polar bears are creatures of the Arctic sea ice and cannot survive without it. It’s where they hunt seals, mate and raise their young. As the planet warms, the sea ice has been melting far faster than scientists projected even a few years ago. The Polar Bear Specialist Group — the most authoritative voice on the science of polar bears — already classifies eight of the world’s 19 populations as declining, including both in Alaska’s Beaufort and Chukchi seas. These declines are all due to global warming, overhunting or a combination of both factors.

For the bears’ survival, it is essential not only to address global warming but also to reduce other threats like oil spills. Oil is highly toxic to polar bears, and animals that are coated with oil will die. There is no way to clean up a spill in Arctic waters, and as the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico has tragically reminded us, where oil development occurs, oil spills inevitably follow.

Parnell wants to drill for oil in the Beaufort and the Chukchi seas off the north coast of Alaska — straight into the heart of polar bear habitat. Predictably, he opposes designating these biologically productive areas as critical habitat for the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act. Critical habitat designation would give these areas special protection and require a higher level of environmental review before activities like oil development would be allowed.

But, ultimately, saving the polar bear will require cutting the greenhouse gases that are heating up its home. The Arctic has long acted as a sort of planetary air conditioner, because snow and ice reflect most of the sun’s energy back into space. But as the summer sea ice disappears — and more of the sun’s heat is absorbed by open water and land — it’s as if we’ve unplugged that air conditioner. More heat is absorbed, accelerating warming and the thawing of the permafrost, which in turn releases more greenhouse gases. And the vicious cycle continues.

The melting Arctic creates climate feedbacks that could trigger catastrophic, runaway warming if we do not act. Leading scientists warn we must begin dramatic greenhouse pollution reductions now to reduce the risk of extreme climate disruption.

Given this imperative, Parnell’s plan to sacrifice the polar bear to extract oil from the remote reaches of the Arctic simply can play no part in any rational energy future. It’s time to move beyond oil to a saner, safer strategy, not just for the polar bear but for the rest of us as well.