A lawsuit has been filed over the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's decision not to provide wolverines with Endangered Species Act protection/USFWS
Whether climate change is adversely impacting wolverines, something the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service believes is uncertain, is being challenged by a coalition of conservation groups that is suing the agency to provide Endangered Species Act protection to the small carnivores.
Earlier this year Noreen Walsh, director of the agency's Mountain-Prairie Region, which includes Wyoming and Montana, decided there wasn't enough evidence to demonstrate climate change was adversely affecting the species, according to a story in the Los Angeles Times. That development led other biologists outside Fish and Wildlife to speculate that politics, not science, had forced that decision.
On Monday eight conservation groups announced they would challenge that decision in court.
Back in February 2013 the Fish and Wildlife Service proposed to list the wolverine as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act after the agency's biologists concluded global warming was reducing the deep spring snowpack pregnant females require for denning.
But, according to the conservation groups, "after state wildlife managers in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming objected, arguing that computer models about climate change impact are too uncertain to justify the proposed listing," Ms. Walsh ordered her agency to withdraw the listing. The reversal came despite confirmation by a panel of outside experts that deep snow is crucial to the ability of wolverines to reproduce successfully, the groups said.
'The wolverine is a famously tough creature that doesn't back down from anything, but even the wolverine can't overcome a changing climate by itself,' said Earthjustice attorney Adrienne Maxwell in a release. 'To survive, the wolverine needs the protections that only the Endangered Species Act can provide.'
The groups behind the lawsuit are the Center for Biological Diversity, Conservation Northwest, Friends of the Clearwater, Greater Yellowstone Coalition, Idaho Conservation League, Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance, Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center, and Rocky Mountain Wild.
Wolverines have been spotted in Denali National Park, Yosemite National Park, Yellowstone National Park, Grand Teton National Park, Glacier National Park, and North Cascades National Park, among others. It's difficult to say just how many wolverines are wandering around the parks. Their extensive travels, sneaky scavenger-like maneuvering, and solo dwelling make it difficult for researchers to closely monitor their patterns.
In their lawsuit (attached), the groups maintain that "the best available scientific information" predicts that snowfields that wolverines rely upon will shrink by nearly a third by 2045 due to climate warming, and by more than 60 percent by 2085.
"This threat of habitat loss associated with climate change is compounded by other threats facing the wolverine population in the lower-48 states, including highly isolated and fragmented habitat, extremely low population numbers, recreational wolverine trapping in Montana and incidental trapping elsewhere, and disturbance from winter recreation activities that has been demonstrated to disrupt wolverine reproductive denning," the lawsuit states.
Against this data, the lawsuit added, "FWS did not identify any new scientific information that cast doubt on the previous conclusions of the agency's own expert biologists. Nor did FWS identify any existing scientific information that the agency's biologists had overlooked. Instead, FWS attempted to apply a new interpretation of the existing scientific record in an effort to justify a refusal to afford the wolverine any protections under the ESA. In so doing, FWS disregarded the best available scientific information and the recommendations of its own scientists, made numerous analytical errors, and ultimately violated the ESA."
At the Center for Biological Diversity, endangered species director Noah Greenwald said Ms. Walsh's decision is "yet another unfortunate example of politics entering into what should be a purely scientific decision. All of the science and the agency's own scientists say the wolverine is severely endangered by loss of spring snowpack caused by climate change, yet the agency denied protection anyway.'
"The best available science shows climate change will significantly reduce available wolverine habitat over the next century, and imperil the species,' said Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance's Siva Sundaresan. 'As an agency responsible for protecting our wildlife, FWS should not ignore science and should make their decisions based on facts and data.'
"One of the most important things that we can do to get wolverines on the road to recovery in the face of a warming climate is to get them back on the ground in mountain ranges where they once lived,' said Megan Mueller, senior conservation biologist with Rocky Mountain Wild. 'We are disappointed by the Service's decision not to list wolverines under the Endangered Species Act as protections would have helped to facilitate such efforts in Colorado and beyond.'
'The remote, rugged, and snowy North Cascades are ideal wolverine habitat,' said Dave Werntz, Science and Conservation Director with Conservation Northwest. 'Protection under the Endangered Species Act will help wolverine survive a warming climate, shrinking snowpack, and increasingly fragmented habitat.'
Comments
Beach, you're taking things a bit out of context by ignoring the link that explained the increase in Antarctic sea ice. Here's part of it:
You can find the entire explanation, as I noted previously, here:
http://nsidc.org/icelights/2014/01/31/why-is-there-so-much-antarctic-sea...
So Artic ice retreating is signficant but Antarctic ice expanding isn't?
Read the entire paper, Eric. A warming climate is driving the melting of the Arctic ice sheet, which is driving, in part, the growth of the Antarctic ice sheet. But, eventually...
Sounds like a convenient excuse to me.
In other words, they really don't have a clue. Maybe its the expanding Antarctic ice that is warming the Northern Atlantic.
The population of the southern hemisphere is a mere 10% of the human race - 800,000,000 to be exact. Most of the pollution, and industrialization is in the northern hemisphere.
Folks:
Ice dynamics are limited by 2 large factors: cold and H2O. Put simply, there's relatively abundant moisture in the Arctic, and mean annual temperatures are only somewhat below 0c. Thus the Arctic ice is mostly limited by cold: as it warms, ice melts. Antarctica is a desert with little evaporation & precipitation, but so cold that even with warming much of the continent is well below freezing. To the extent that global change / warming changes winds and increases moisture, because moisture is more limiting, the combination of increased temperature and increased moisture produces increased ice.
At a different spatial & temporal scale: Buffalo (& SLC) get lake effect snow while it is still warm enough that the upwind lakes are not frozen over. As the winter gets colder, they don't get more snow, they get less snow: the moisture becomes more limiting than the temperature. If you warmed a large region around Buffalo and the lake didn't freeze over as long, they'd get more snow in the winter, not less.
The same thing is true with tree rings: ring width (tree growth rate) can be limited by growing season temperature & length or by moisture, depending on where the tree is. If I want a tree ring signal of rainfall variation across years and drought, I need to use records from old trees on desert mountains, where their growth is primarily limited by moisture, not growing season length. If you are trying to reconstruct / crosswalk temperature variation, you need to select trees from areas where growing season is more limiting than water availability, so the tree ring signal primarily reflects temperature variation. In both cases we need to test the most recent rings against historic weather data to demonstrate what the ring width signal is. And if we can get the funding, we should use additional biophysical signals such as variation in stable isotopes across the rings. [I also have to deal with reduced needle area of conifers in years following a dry year due to needle drop and thus photosynthetic area limiting growth rate; good scientists are careful to test for spurious effects so we don't mislead ourselves.]
If even basic understanding of Liebig's law of the minimum is a convenient excuse, so be it.