The Great White Bear (36 page)

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* Who knows why polar bears do the things they do? I wondered if perhaps the tire had picked up some moisture or some salt. Don Moore of the National Zoo, who had been on Buggy One but was not with us on this particular buggy on this particular day, offered that perhaps the bear was simply exhibiting the species' inherent curiosity and was using all its senses to examine what now stood before it.

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* In the Antarctic, as well. Although the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has shown signs of warming and melting—particularly the Antarctic Peninsula, where the Larsen A, Larsen B, and Wilkins ice shelves have essentially disintegrated—parts of the larger East Antarctic Ice Sheet have been cooling. Part of the reason for this seems to be the existence of the "hole" in the stratospheric ozone layer above Antarctica, which causes an intensification in cooling wind patterns. Ironically, as the ozone hole repairs itself following international regulations to eliminate the chemicals that created it, that effect will be eliminated and Antarctica is likely to warm more rapidly—the solution to one environmental problem contributing to another.

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* There is another nightmare scenario. Locked in ice crystals in Arctic soils and ocean sediments are billions of tons of methane; should warming advance sufficiently to melt those crystals and release that methane—which, as John Tyndall discovered, is itself a highly potent greenhouse gas—the consequences would far outstrip any feedback effects from diminished albedo.

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* Essentially, the number of live births per capita in the population.

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* Whether or not that was true, critics took note of the fact that two of the paper's co-authors were Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, two perennial advocates of the position that any global warming that may be occurring is within the boundaries of natural variation and likely primarily caused by changes in solar output. When
Climate Research
published a paper they coauthored, which argued that the twentieth century showed no signs of being atypically warm, half the journal's editorial board resigned in protest at what they felt was an insufficiently rigorous peer review of a paper that did not merit publication.

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