ak in the news, and polar bears

Sorry, I dropped the ball a bit for an exciting weekend away involving a truck, a 400-mile dirt highway, and big herds of caribou.
Here's some news clippings.
The News-Miner's RA Dillon wrote an update of climate legislation in DC.
The Arctic Sounder had a story on coastal erosion (and some amazing pictures of the whales caught this fall).
And Rachel D'Oro's story on walruses (walri?) showed up in the Sydney Morning Herald.
The big news today is from Gov. Palin, who's still urging the feds not to list polar bears as threatened under the Endangered Species Act despite recent USGS estimates that shrinking sea ice could do in two thirds of the world's polar bears in 50 years.
In a letter sent Monday to Interior Secretary Kempthorne, Palin wrote there wasn't enough evidence showing that the polar bear would be endangered "throughout all or significant portions of its range within the the foreseeable future," or showing that the bear populations weren't being well-managed already.
She didn't mention impacts on resource development, but argued the "listing of a currently healthy species based entirely on highly speculative and uncertain climate and ice modeling and equally uncertain and speculative modeling of possible impacts on a species would be unprecedented." The floodgates would be open to thousands of listing petitions, she wrote.
Palin said the state shared the feds' concern over the bears, and she asked for an extended comment period to sort things out.
This is a complicated topic. I wrote about it back in early April and again in mid April. Dan Joling did a story in late April.
Here's one summary.