Subscribe to ThinkProgress Green.

“The survival of polar bears as a species is difficult to envisage under conditions of zero summer sea-ice cover.”

That grim prognosis is from the 2004 Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, by leading scientists from the eight Arctic nations, including ours.  It’s highly likely the Arctic will be virtually ice free in the summer within about two decades, if not one (see “Arctic sea ice volume: The death spiral continues”).

Rear Admiral David Titley, the Oceanographer of the Navy, testified last year that  “the volume of ice as of last September has never been lower” in the last several thousand years.” Titley, who is also the Director of Navy’s Task Force Climate Change, told the Chief of Naval Operations that “we expect to see four weeks of basically ice free conditions in the mid to late 2030s.”

So the polar bear is in a losing battle.  Humanity, sadly, isn’t in any battle at all to stop its own self-inflicted devastation. When will we wake up to the challenge?

Do not go gently into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

This is a NatGeo photo (12/10) via Grist (12/11)

A US government department that has spent six months investigating potential fraud in polar bear studies has failed to collect tens of billions of dollars in royalties from oil companies, it has emerged….

The controversy over [polar bear expert Charles] Monnett has become an embarrassment for the agency, which was renamed after last year’s BP oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Texas exposed the overly close relationship between government regulators and the industry that they were meant to be regulating.

A US watchdog has designated the interior department at ‘high risk’ of fraud, waste and abuse.

I have previously written about the Kafkaesque investigation into polar bear researcher Charles Monnett (see “Breaking Exclusive: Polar Bears Still Screwed by Global Warming“).

As the UK Guardian reports, what’s even more amazing about the whole thing is that while the Inspector General has been sending numerous innumerate  investigators to question Monnett about science whose validity has never been questioned, they have ignored the real incompetence at the Interior Department, which is costing American taxpayers of billions of dollars.  Here’s the rest of that story:

Investigators from the Department of Interior called in a government wildlife biologist, Charles Monnett, for questioning on his design of an ongoing polar bear study, which was conducted on a budget of $1.2m over seven years.

Monnett was suspended on 18 July for unspecified “integrity issues” related to the study, and an alleged oversight of about $50m in research contracts.

But while the interior department has been focusing on polar bears, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has faulted the department for failing to collect billions in royalties from oil and gas companies operating in the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic.

The GAO designated the department at “high risk” of fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement in a report to Congress in February 2011.

“Interior does not have reasonable assurance that it is collecting its share of billions of dollars of revenue from oil and gas produced on federal lands, and it continues to experience problems in hiring, training, and retaining sufficient staff to provide oversight and management of oil and gas operations on federal lands and waters,” the GAO wrote.

The report went on to say that the interior department had consistently failed to monitor oil and gas production – which made it impossible for the government to collect a full share of the royalties it was owed from oil companies.

It is unclear how many billions the government failed to collect, it added. However, it noted a 2008 report from the GAO, which estimated potential losses on royalties from deep water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico between 1996 and 2000 to be as high as $53bn.

The report also noted that the government had collected less than had been expected from 93 of 104 oil and gas operators.

By the time of the latest GAO report, however, investigators were already beginning to look at Monnett’s scientific record. They interviewed a fellow government scientist, Jeff Gleason, last January about a 2006 paper, which indicated that polar bears were at greater risk of drowning because of melting sea ice linked to climate change.

On Monday, however, the investigation switched tack, and began to focus on the ongoing study on polar bear movements.

The interior department ordered scientists to stop work on the study on 13 July. The scientists were allowed to resume work on Monday. No explanation was given for either order.

The study, conducted by scientists from the University of Alberta, had a $1.2m budget, with additional funds provided from Canada, according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (Peer) which is acting as Monnett’s defence.

On Monday, investigators told Monnett he would face questioning about his role in designing the study.

“We intend to discuss actions taken in your official capacity as a biologist and any collateral duties involving contracts as an official of the US government,” Eric May, an official in the department of interior’s inspector general’s office wrote in the letter.

“Those actions include the procurement of a sole source, cost-reimbursable contract with the University of Alberta to conduct a study titled Populations and Sources of the Recruitment in Polar Bears.”

The letter asked Monnett to meet government investigators on 9 August. Peer said Monnett will be asked about his compliance with government contracting regulations as well as his relationship with the lead researcher, a reputed polar bear scientist, Andrew Derocher. Ruch said Monnett’s management of the polar bear study had been approved by his supervisors at the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Regulation and Enforcement (Boemre).

“Every aspect of this study was approved by his chain of command, with a fairly transparent paper trail,” Ruch said in a statement.

Ruch noted that the justice department had turned down the investigators’ request to file criminal charges against Monnett.

According to documents obtained by the Guardian, the Alberta study was using satellite collars to track polar bears and their response to changing ice conditions. About 20 bears are still wearing the collars.

The letter to Monnett from the interior department’s inspector general marked the first time the scientist has been informed of the scope of an inquiry which has already been under way for months.

Peer initially suggested the government was homing in on Monnett’s 2006 paper, which first exposed the threat to polar bears from the melting sea ice owing to climate change.

Two interviews with Monnett and Gleason focused heavily on that 2006 research paper.

Monnett’s observations marked the first time scientists had drawn a connection between melting sea ice produced by climate change and the increased risk of drowning to polar bears.

Other studies have confirmed Monnett’s findings. A study last month from the WWF found that polar bear cubs forced to make long-distance swims with their mothers had a much poorer rate of survival than bears that did not have to swim as far.

But Michael Bromwich, the head of the bureau, insisted the paper had nothing to do with the investigation.

The controversy over Monnett has become an embarrassment for the agency, which was renamed after last year’s BP oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Texas exposed the overly close relationship between government regulators and the industry that they were meant to be regulating.

Hmm.  “The overly close relationship between government regulators and the industry that they were meant to be regulating.”  I’m glad Interior fixed that problem with their name change.

Below are old comments from the earlier Facebook commenting system:

• James Newberry · Top Commenter (signed in using Hotmail)

What this is about is how Big Oil owns and runs all three branches of the federal government. Blood from our troops and victims, climate change from carbonic acid gas, and corporatism where the federal reserve note is used to purchase agenda, decisions and law through orchestration of legislation by finance of campaigns. Tens of billions of additional “subsidies” for Big Oil is not surprising.

With reference to McKibben, take the six wealthiest corporations on earth and you will find five oil/gas/coal/uranium conglomerates. These receive hundreds of billions of public dollars in direct and indirect subsidies per year, globally (see IEA, for example). Thus their multilevel political power. Their most recent political manifestation is called the Tea Party (funded by Koch).

No one should be surprised by this corrupt and ecocidal behavior. It is sanctioned by the people of the USA at the very heart of our corrupt military-industrial-money complex. It is called “money is free speech.” Another phrase is “corporate fascism of the national insecurity crony capitalist state.” Money is a dominant type of political power in today’s globalized belief system.

Some day it will all crumble to dust, along with planetary ecology (including bears).

Like · Reply · Subscribe · August 4 at 1:31pm

andrewsdanielj (signed in using Yahoo)

First they came for the climate scientists….

I was wondering when they’d start going after biologists considering there already is a contingent going after those godless evolutionists. I think most people don’t equate biology (or biologists) with evolution because tv shows us as people who run around having grand adventures chasing and playing with animals in the great wilds of the world. Okay, there is some truth in that ;) , least in wildlife biology, but they don’t realize how intertwined evolution is in biology. I suppose once they make that connection we’ll see more of this persecution. I’m wondering if they’ll start going after our (Canadian) experts like Marty Obbard?

Next up…geologists (the kind that don’t find oil and gas and minerals, of course)? Paleontologists? Oceanographers?

–dan

Like · Reply · Subscribe · August 3 at 10:37am

Joan Savage · Top Commenter · SUNY-ESF

Department of Interior failed to keep complete files on the royalties due to American Indians for natural resources taken from Indian land under DOI trust management. The Cobell v Norton court settlement for $3.2 billion (the small amount that could be documented) is pending Congressional approval for payment. Not an optimistic situation. That’s yet another contrast between DOI’s mismanagement of billions of dollars worth of natural resources and the curious Monnett case.

Like · Reply · Subscribe · August 3 at 10:58am

George Ennis · Top Commenter · University of Toronto

So if understand the situation it’s not a criminal investigation and it has nothing to do with his paper. So what the hell is it that would justify suspending him? It’s beginning to look like another example of an attempt to intimidate any scientist doing work related directly or even indirectly to climate change.

Like · Reply · Subscribe · August 3 at 10:34am

Bart Laws · Top Commenter · Assistant Professor at Brown University

This is quite mysterious. What exactly is the issue with the study again? Somehow I completely missed that. Are they alleging financial fraud, or scientific misconduct, or what?

Like · Reply · Subscribe · August 3 at 10:46am

Rob Honeycutt · Top Commenter

I think they’re trying to build a case that Monnett awarded the research money to scientists who would agree with his own conclusions about polar bears (which would be hard to do if the whole process was transparent as Ruch states). The REAL reason, I would suspect, is any published data on polar bears is going to significantly hinder any oil industry plans to drill in the Arctic sea. So, BOEM is essentially still in bed with the oil industry even though the administration was supposed to have fixed this problem after the BP disaster.

Like · Reply · August 3 at 2:09pm

laska1818 (signed in using Yahoo)

Is this about drilling holes in the Artic?

Like · Reply · Subscribe · August 3 at 1:37pm

OK, technically, the exclusive I have is an internal email from the head of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement that was sent to his entire staff on Friday about the actions being taken against polar bear researcher Charles Monnett.  I will repost that below, but the bottom line is that the decision to place him on administrative leave “had nothing to do with his scientific work , or anything relating to a five-year old journal article” on polar bears.

This whole story is Kafkaesque.  Let’s take it from the beginning.  Here’s the lede from NYT blogger Andy Revkin:

There’s been a rush to all manner of judgments over the strange case of Charles Monnett, the biologist for the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement who provided a powerful talking point for climate campaigners, including former Vice President Al Gore, with his description of several drowned polar bears spotted during an aerial marine-mammals survey in 2004 — an observation enshrined in a short paper published in Polar Biology in 2006.

Hmm, I guess that isn’t really the beginning, since Monnett’s work didn’t provide a talking point, powerful or otherwise, for Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth.

The fact is that the scientific  community had already come to the conclusion that  the polar bear would not survive an ice-free arctic.  The 2004 Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, by leading scientists from the eight Arctic nations, including the United States, summarized the state of scientific understanding:

Changes in the extent and type of sea ice affect the distribution and foraging success of polar bears (Ferguson et al., 2000a,b; Mauritzen et al., 2001; Stirling et al., 1993). The earliest impacts of warming will occur at their southern limits of distribution, such as at James and Hudson Bays; and this has already been documented by Stirling et al. (1999)….

The survival of polar bears as a species is difficult to envisage under conditions of zero summer sea-ice cover.

In short, there was a broad scientific understanding by the leading experts on the Arctic that unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gases would be catastrophic if not fatal to polar bears — back in 2004.

You can read the 1999 paper, Stirling et al., “Long-term Trends in the Population Ecology of Polar Bears in Western Hudson Bay in Relation to Climatic Changem” here.  It concluded:

From 1981 through 1998, the condition of adult male and female polar bears has declined significantly in western Hudson Bay, as have natality and the proportion of yearling cubs caught during the open water period that were independent at the time of capture. Over this same period, the breakup of the sea ice on western Hudson Bay has been occurring earlier. There was a significant positive relationship between the time of breakup and the condition of adult females (i.e., the earlier the breakup, the poorer the condition of the bears). The trend toward earlier breakup was also correlated with rising spring air temperatures over the study area from 1950 to 1990. We suggest that the proximate cause of the decline in physical and reproductive parameters of polar bears in western Hudson Bay over the last 19 years has been a trend toward earlier breakup, which has caused the bears to come ashore in progressively poorer condition. The ultimate factor responsible for the earlier breakup in western Hudson Bay appears to be a long-term warming trend in April–June atmospheric temperatures.

In short, warming leads to earlier breakup of sea ice, and that is bad news for polar bears.

What Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, said about the subject is:

Right now, the Arctic ice cap acts like a giant mirror, all the sun’s rays bounce off, more than 90%.  It keeps the Earth cooler, but as it melts, and the open ocean receives that sun’s energy instead, more than 90% is absorbed, so there is a faster buildup of heat here, at the North Pole, in the Arctic Ocean, and the Arctic generally than anywhere else on the planet.

That’s not good for creatures like polar bears, who depend on the ice.  They’re now, actually, looking for other ecological niches.  It is sad what’s going on in the Arctic eco-system.  But what does it mean to us to look at a vast expanse of open water at the top of our world, that used to be covered by ice.  We ought to care a lot, because it has planetary effects.

Hard to argue with that.

Now I was told Monnett’s work was mentioned in Gore’s book.  I missed it the first time I looked for it, but here it is:

The melting of the ice represents bad news for creatures like polar bears.  A new scientific study shows that, for the first time, polar bears have been drowning in significant numbers.  Such deaths have been rare in the past.  But now, these bears find they have to swim much longer distances from floe to floe.  In some places, the edge of the ice is 30 to 40 miles from the shore.

Okay, 3 sentences in a massive book.  I’m sure it moved millions dozens of people to call their Congressmen and demand a climate bill.   But I digress.

Now it bears mentioning that Monnett’s work hasn’t actually been challenged by anyone.  But, in any case, the notion that this one paper was driving the public debate or integral to the climate debate is without basis in fact.

Back to our story, via Revkin:

What’s clear is that Monnett has been under investigation since at least last February by the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Interior, and that he was placed on administrative leave with pay on July 18.

The investigation, according to documents posted by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a group defending whistleblowers, appears to center at least partly on his work on drowning polar bears. With the help of the group, he’s filed a complaint with the Interior Department.

Given the climate focus, the case has quickly been spun via the Instanet in various directions, with professional and amateur climate contrarians gloating about bad science even as Monnett’s defenders charge that he’s the victim of a “witch hunt” by an agency unhappy with research that could impede Arctic energy extraction.

So here is where it gets doubly Kafkaesque.

First, Monnett was not placed on leave because of anything to do with his scientific work on polar bears.  I was forwarded an internal email from Michael Bromwich, the head of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement to his staff on Friday.  His office confirmed to me its authenticity.  Here are the two, relevant  opening paragraphs

From: Bromwich, Michael R

Sent: Friday, July 29, 2011 10:07 AM
To: OMM AK/Staff
Subject:

Dear Colleagues,

I wanted to send you a brief note of explanation and support. I regret very much the negative publicity over the past 24 hours that has resulted from one of your colleagues being placed on administrative leave in connection with an investigation by the Office of Inspector General.

We are limited in what we can say about a pending investigation, but I can assure you that the decision had nothing to do with his scientific work, or anything relating to a five-year old journal article, as advocacy groups and the news media have incorrectly speculated. Nor is this a “witch hunt” to suppress the work of our many scientists and discourage them from speaking the truth. Quite the contrary. In this case, it was the result of new information on a separate subject brought to our attention very recently.

Now there is  a certain coyness here, in that Bromwich  is only talking about the administrative leave and not the IG investigation.   Revkin cites a statement by Melissa Schwartz, BOEMRE’s deputy chief of staff and communications director, “The agency placed Mr. Monnett on administrative leave for reasons having nothing to do with scientific integrity, his 2006 journal article, or issues related to permitting, as has been alleged. Any suggestions or speculation to the contrary are wrong.”  Revkin writes:

Her statement doesn’t mesh well with the transcript of one of the investigative interviews conducted with Monnett in February — which goes through page after page of questioning on swimming and dead polar bears and statistics.

But it is so definitive that it clearly indicates to me that any interpretations of what’s going on here are premature.

I would agree with that.  It is hard to interpret what is going on, which is why I waited a day to post on this, to confirm the email and talk to some leading experts.

Still, if the BOERE director had any reason to believe that Bromwich had done something actionably wrong in his scientific work, he presumably would have acted long before this month.

As for the IG investigation, two points.  First, it appears the investigation is indeed Kafkaesque.  Here is NRDC’s Senior Scientist, Sylvia Fallon, in her Friday post, “Polar bears don’t drown when there’s ice all over the place“:

I was reading over the transcript of the Interior Department’s Inspector General interrogating arctic scientist, Dr. Charles Monnett, over allegations of ‘scientific misconduct.’  The Inspector General has not said who filed the allegations or even what the allegations are, but Dr. Monnett and his colleague are the ones that first published a report [in 2006] of sighting four drowned polar bears in 2004….Part of the interrogation focused on how Dr. Monnett could have known that no polar bears had been seen dead during the systematic surveys that had been conducted from 1987-2003 prior to his published observation in 2004 when he reported seeing 4 dead polar bears floating in the ocean.  First of all, the survey observers recorded sightings of any marine mammals seen and the lead project manager for that time period informed Dr. Monnett that no one had ever recorded a dead polar bear.  Additionally, Dr. Monnett had another line of evidence to support the likelihood that no polar bears had been observed dead in that area – at least in the early years.  Ice.  “There was a lot of ice out there.”  He says, “You know, bears don’t drown when there’s ice all over the place.”  I can already hear the makings of another song.

Much of the rest of the interrogation centered around whether Dr. Monnett and his colleagues had observed 3 or 4 dead bears.  Seriously.  This took about an entire hour of a two hour interrogation.  Dr. Monnett explained in every way he could possibly think of to the Inspector General that they had observed 4 dead bears, but that only 3 of those bears were in their study area.  That’s why there is mention of 4 bears, but when he does the calculations in the paper he uses the number 3.  Did you get that?  Me too.  But it took the IG and his assistant an entire hour to comprehend that information.

After almost two hours of this type of questioning including a part where Dr. Monnett literally has to give the IG a lesson on fifth grade math (anyone remember cross multiplication?), Dr. Monnett’s council interrupts to ask, “Are we going to get to the allegations of scientific misconduct?  Or, uh, have – is that what we’ve been doing?”  Indeed, the IG’s line of questioning was the basis for the investigation to which Dr. Monnett responds, “(S)cientific misconduct, uh, suggests that we did something deliberately to deceive or to, to change (the information).  Um, I sure don’t see any indication of that in what you’re asking me about.”  To which the IG says, “No, no, no further comment on my part….Like I said, we receive allegations, we investigate.”

Oh, great.   Well, that explains why Dr. Monnett has been placed on leave and had all of his computers and notebooks confiscated.  By the way, there is a new study out that confirms the findings that polar bears are swimming longer distances and surviving less due to the loss of sea ice from different federal scientists in another agency.  I presume the IG will be on his way over to investigate them too.

The transcript itself is indeed that bizarre.  It’s very hard to know what the IG is doing.

Finally, NASA’s Gavin Schmidt e-mailed me his thoughts:

Regardless of the still-mysterious reasons for these actions, there does not appear to have been a proper due process applied. Criminal  investigations and (potentially) retaliatory actions are just not  appropriate ways for dealing with scientific disagreements.

However this turns out, the polar bears remains in as much trouble as ever.

Related Post:

• Bye-Polar Disorder: Judge Upholds ‘Threatened’ Listing for Polar Bear, Leaving It on Road to Extinction
• Will polar bears go extinct by 2030? — Part I

In reality, Dr. Monnett, one of the country’s top Arctic scientists, “is being hounded in a political attempt to impugn his observations on polar bears’ vulnerability to retreating sea ice,” according to a scientific misconduct complaint filed today on his behalf by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) against Interior Department officials. Dr. Monnett, who has monitored bowhead whales in the Arctic since 1984, was the co-author of a seminal paper that recorded polar bears found dead in the open Arctic Ocean, stranded by retreating sea ice and a powerful storm, both symptoms of the region’s rapid warming.

PEER has posted the interview conducted by OIG Special Agents Eric May and Lynn Gibson with Dr. Monnett on February 23, which offers the only public clues to the reasoning behind his persecution. The transcript shows May and Gibson to be primed with skeptical questions about Dr. Monnett’s research observing sea life as a wildlife biologist for the Minerals Management Service. Dr. Monnett points out that many of the questions are “stupid” and “goofy,” evidently composed by someone “deficient in fifth grade math.”

A few months later, the OIG locked down the scientist, spurring a feeding frenzy among climate deniers who somehow don’t realize that the evidence that polar bears are going extinct has only grown starker each year, independent of Dr. Monnett’s work.

Monnett’s wife, scientist Lisa Rotterman, is concerned his persecution will send a “chilling message” at the agency right as it decides whether to open the Arctic to drilling by Shell Oil. “I don’t believe the timing is coincidental,” she told the Associated Press.

As Monnett attempted to explain in the interview, his influential paper included observations made flying over transects of a region of the polar ocean, as such:

Before a storm, 4 swimming polar bears observed / 11 percent of total region surveyed = about 36 expected swimming polar bears over entire region

After the storm, 3 dead floating polar bears observed / 11 percent of total region surveyed = about 27 expected dead floating polar bears over entire region

Thus, over the entire region, the rough estimate for the survival rate of swimming polar bears assuming they were caught in the storm is 9/36 = 25 percent.

The interview descends into farce as May reveals that he was incapable of understanding the very basic math behind the study:

ERIC MAY: Did they comment at all about any of the stats?
CHARLES MONNETT: Uh, there’s no stats in there.
ERIC MAY: Well, calculations, for, for example, the 25 percent survival rate.
CHARLES MONNETT: Oh, well, that’s just a mindless thing. That’s in the discussion. Um, that is not a statistic. Um, that’s a ratio estimator. It’s a, it’s a fifth grade procedure. Do you have kids?
ERIC MAY: No.
CHARLES MONNETT: Okay, well, if you had kids, you would know that in about fifth grade, they start doing a thing called cross multiplication. “X” is to “Y” as, you know, “N” is to “M.” And you can – there’s, there’s a little procedure you use to compare the proportions. And so that’s a, um, simply a calculation. It’s not a statistic.

May then tried to argue that there were actually 63 polar bears, because 4 live polar bears + 3 dead polar bears / 11% = 63. Dr. Monnett quickly grew frustrated at the innumeracy and illogic of this calculation:

CHARLES MONNETT: And so I, I don’t even still follow what they did to get the 60 percent. That, that’s –
ERIC MAY: The 63 percent.
CHARLES MONNETT: Yeah, that’s just goofy. [...]

ERIC MAY: Okay, and we’ll – let me, let – “of bears before the storm, then the total number of bears after the storm is 63,” and that’s where I came up with the sixty –
CHARLES MONNETT: That’s just stupid. I – did you do that?
ERIC MAY: No.
CHARLES MONNETT: That is stupid. …

CHARLES MONNETT: Somebody is deficient in fifth grade math.
ERIC MAY: (Laughing)
CHARLES MONNETT: Seriously. I mean, give me a break.

May also pressed Dr. Monnett on why, in his paper, he claimed that 2004 was the first time his project had observed dead floating polar bears. The project didn’t have any means to automatically log dead polar bears into its system for much of its existence, and May expressed skepticism that Dr. Monnett could simply ask his predecessor. Steve Treacy, to remember if he had seen any. As the New York Times reports, Dr. Treacy supports Dr. Monnett’s contention that the sight of the bloated body of a floating polar bear in open ocean was sufficiently notable to have been recorded:

In an interview, Dr. Treacy said that when he was in charge of the surveys on Alaska’s North Slope, “We recorded all the polar bears we saw. If there were dead ones, we would have noted that as such.” He added, “I don’t remember anything in the way of dead polar bears.”

Dr. Monnett has spent years being persecuted and harassed by the management of the Mineral Management Service during the Bush administration, and now during the Obama administration. If anything’s changed for Dr. Monnett since Barack Obama became president, it seems it’s been for the worse.

“My management have been trying to kill this study for a while, ever since really the polar bear thing came out,” he said in the interview. “That was when they realized that it’s dangerous to take data like this, because if there are changes and, you know, God forbid something that has anything to do with the climate change debate.”

“They don’t want any impediment to what they view as their mission, which is drill wells up there, and, put areas into production.”

The Fish and Wildlife Service determined Monday that whitebark pine, a tree found atop mountains across the American West, faces an “imminent” risk of extinction because of factors including climate change. The decision is significant because it marks the first time the federal government has identified climate change as one of the driving factors for why a broad-ranging tree species could disappear. The Canadian government has already declared whitebark pine to be endangered throughout its entire range; a recent study found that 80 percent of whitebark pine forests in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem are dead or dying. The Natural Resources Defense Council asked the Fish and Wildlife Service to place the tree on the endangered species list. In its determination, the agency said that it found a listing was “warranted but precluded,” meaning the pine deserved federal protection but the government could not afford it.

There are now 265 candidate species waiting for protection — or until their extinction eliminates the urgency.

The whitebark pine has been in decline for decades. Protection requested over 10 years ago, in February 1991, was rejected in 1994. Since then, the collapse of the species, which sustains the entire ecosystem from nutcrackers to grizzlies, has been “dramatic and catastrophic.”

Our ability to be responsible stewards of the planet is likely to get even worse, thanks to the Tea Party. “This month, the House Appropriations Interior Subcommittee voted to eliminate any funds for listing species under the Endangered Species Act as part of the 2012 budget,” the Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin notes.

The polar bear, elkhorn coral, and staghorn coral are all species listed as threatened because of global warming, but with the caveat that no action be taken to fight greenhouse pollution.