All of us have irrational dislikes, and in the animal kingdom mine is the polar bear. It is an animal that is always hungry, and if it sees you its reaction is immediate and predictable - it will try and kill you. Then it will eat you. In this it differs to most predators, which tend to become aggressive only when cornered, which have more reliable sources of prey, which may have fed recently and which may not have developed a taste for human flesh (and this even goes for lions and tigers).
If there is a more unpleasant animal than the polar bear, it has yet to arrive on a TV screen near me. My prejudice against the bear even extends to its appearance: there is something about its flat forehead and mean little eyes which reminds me of the more meat-headed fans you used to see hanging around South London football grounds in the 1980s.
So I may well have been the only person to feel a small flicker of satisfaction at the photograph in the papers today of a dead polar bear on the arctic island of Svalbard.
Of course it was wrong of me. This bear had apparently been forced south by the absence of sea ice, home to the seals on which the bears feed. It had probably starved to death. Now polar bears starve every year, but in a media environment largely warmist in tone a dead one in the papers can quickly become symptomatic of the damage caused by global warming. Less sea ice equals fewer seals to feed on. Fewer seals equals fewer polar bears. Whilst some bear populations are apparently doing OK, rather more of them aren't. So the plight of the bear is our plight also.
I am not writing an anti-warmist rant here - I have seen myself the denuded slopes of Alpine mountains where glaciers once resided, and I can well believe the world is getting warmer. But if it's true, as the warmists believe, that humans are responsible for the warming, why are they only campaigning for reduced carbon emissions per capita?
The amount of carbon we pump into the atmosphere is dependent on our population size - to put it crudely, total emissions equals the number of people multiplied by the emissions of each person. By all means target individual emissions (although with living standards increasing across China, India and many other parts of the third world, good luck with that), but why the silence about population? As far as I know all predictions suggest that global population will increase for decades to come, and if that happens the chances of reducing emissions overall, even if you could reduce them per capita, must be zero. By then, if the warmists are right, it will be far too late.
So why not attack the problem from the other end? Why not population control? You don't have to adopt the Chinese scorched earth policy - you can do it by example, by encouragement, and in the UK via the tax system and by targeting state benefits more carefully.
We all know the answer to this. It's because population control smacks of eugenics.
But as long as the warmists fail to address population size they'll look like hand-wringers, crying over the decline of the polar bear whilst ignoring the one measure which offers a practical chance of making it less likely to be fatal.
