It takes a polar bear

Forget about the images of a flooded New Orleans, or a computer generated image of Manhattan under water. Forget about the images of smoke stacks and polluted skies. Forget about the images of dry, cracked land making it impossilbe to grow crops.

Enter the polar bear - or rather polar bear hunters. Saturday's NY Times featured polar bear hunting as the latest casualty of global warming. Aging boomers will have little time to live out their fantasies of game hunting in the Arctic because the polar bears may be gone soon - no bears, no hunting. It is an interesting angle on the whole climate change thing - let's reduce carbon emissions in an attempt to curb the effects of global warming to save the polar bear habitat so rich gamers can continue to hunt them.

If only the seal-pup advocates would take on a similar stance. Maybe former Beatle, Paul McCartney's new cause to stop seal culling could also send the message to save the seal habitat - after all, if the whole ecosystem the seals depend on goes away, there will be no seals to fight for.

Can a furry polar bear and a cute seal pup help the global warming cause? It might be more appealing on a magazine cover (Time) than Al Gore's giant face (a-la Wired magazine) - but will it be effective in getting people to act?