One of my favorite jokes of all time goes something like this:

A polar bear cub walks into… One of my favorite jokes of all time goes something like this:

A polar bear cub walks into his kitchen, where his mother is preparing supper. “Mom,” he asks her, “am I really a polar bear?”

“Well, of course you are, Sweetie,” she replies. “Look at your white fur. You’re a polar bear.”

Satisfied, the cub walks back into the other room, only to return to the kitchen five minutes later. “Mom,” he says, “are you sure that I’m a polar bear?”

“Yes,” she says, annoyed. “Look at your big, sharp teeth. You’re a polar bear.”

Another five minutes go by, and the cub comes back. “Mom, are you absolutely positive that I am a polar bear?”

Fed up, his mother yells at him. “Listen – you live in the Arctic Circle. Both your parents are polar bears. You eat seals for dinner. I promise you, you are a polar bear! But why do ask?”

To this, the polar bear cub replies, “Because I’m friggin’ freezing!”

But here’s the real-life punch line: According to many environmental scientists, our fuzzy friends up there may not have to worry about being cold for too much longer. Reuters reported Monday that United States officials have pushed back their deadline to decide whether polar bears should be put on the Endangered Species List.

If they are, it would mark the first time that global warming was a factor in adding an animal to the list. Dale Hall, the head of the Fish and Wildlife Service, announced that the reanalysis of the collected data could take up to a month to complete.

As should have been expected, environmentalists around the world have strapped up their Birkenstocks and taken to the streets. Greenpeace, the National Resources Defense Council and the Center for Biological Diversity have all threatened legal action. They all believe that the Bush Administration is delaying the inevitable, as this decision would force the government to acknowledge the dangers of human-caused climate change. According to them, the longer we wait to declare polar bears as endangered, the closer they get to complete extinction.

Supposedly, some of those tree-huggers have kept their noses clean long enough to acquire gainful employment – as federal researchers. They “MacGyvered”-up some ridiculous report last September for the U.S. Geological Survey that claims that polar bears could disappear from areas in the Arctic Circle, including the northern coast of Alaska, where the sea ice is melting too rapidly.

Even more, if the current pace is kept, two-thirds of the world’s polar bear population could be dead by the year 2050.

According to those scientists who weren’t too busy searching online for tickets to the sold-out Led Zeppelin tour, polar bears need the sea ice to catch their prey. If all the ice melts, the bears will be forced to hunt on land, where the animals are much less efficient.

This is one of the parts that boggles me. When’s the last time you’ve seen bears on the ice? Can they even skate? Last time I saw bears on ice, they were falling all over themselves like pathetic animals. Oh, wait – that was just the Boston Bruins hockey team.

I’m all for helping the less fortunate, but let’s think about this for a second. In 2050, I’ll be turning 64, way past my athletic peak. And with the sex, drugs and rocky road lifestyle I plan on living in the future, my body itself will be at least 75-80 years old by then.

Now, under those conditions, how would I ever be able to protect myself from a wild polar bear? And, think about the children. Imagine putting a newborn baby in a room with twelve hungry polar bears. What do you think would happen then? They wouldn’t nurture it to grow up into a man – that only happens in the second greatest Disney movie of all time.

The funny thing about this debate is that the conservatives could shut up a lot of critics by embracing another scientific theory they refuse to acknowledge. Maybe global warming is just a really intense version of Darwinism. If “survival of the fittest” really rings true, maybe the fact that humans can live longer in an ecosystem destroyed by humans is a basic evolutionary advantage. The real question is, if the polar bears discovered a way to cut up fish that caused massive numbers human deaths, would they do it? I think we all know the answer to that one.

Here’s the deal: Global warming, whether you choose to believe in it or not, is here to stay. If Lindsay Lohan has taught us anything at all, other than the dangers of driving in Hollywood, it’s that nobody learns from his mistakes. It might be 70 degrees in January, but we still love our SUVs. We’re not going to stop global warming, so why not embrace it? Greenhouse gasses are killing polar bears. Why not skip the middleman and just build cars that run on polar bears? Not only would this reduce our dependence on foreign oil, we’d finally have an excuse to make that trip to Canada that we were always too busy for.

And, when we run out of polar bears and don’t have energy to heat our homes, everybody will just go out and buy a shiny, white fur coat! There is nothing, and I mean nothing, wrong with this idea.

If you take a serious issue and turn it into a joke, it’ll eventually go away, right?

E-mail Sam at [email protected]. Because he’s friggin’ freezing.