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Polar Bears Drowning As Globe Warms
An anonymous reader writes "The Times Online is reporting on disturbing findings from the arctic. Polar bears appear to be drowning when they attempt long sea crossings as a result of receding summer ice." From the article: "New evidence from field researchers working for the World Wildlife Fund in Yakutia, on the northeast coast of Russia, has also shown the region's first evidence of cannibalism among bears competing for food supplies ... As the ice pack retreats north in the summer between June and October, the bears must travel between ice floes to continue hunting in areas such as the shallow water of the continental shelf off the Alaskan coast -- one of the most food-rich areas in the Arctic. However, last summer the ice cap receded about 200 miles further north than the average of two decades ago, forcing the bears to undertake far longer voyages between floes. "
The polar bears seem incredibly adapated to living on ice -- the article says they live their whole lives on ice. Their natural range is circumpolar (http://www.solcomhouse.com/polarbears.htm ). I know their feet, fur and sense of smell are all optimized for living in ice. I'm sure there are more things.
i stribution.jpg
It seems that the next time the earth gets warm, for whatever reason, the polar bears are going to die off in droves.
The same is true for camels: they've got special eyes, feet, a way to store water and energy for long periods, etc. If there is ever a mass greening of the earth, wild camels will have a hard time.
More general animals, like brown bears ("grizzly" bears) have it differently: their problem is that they are adapted to living in Eurasia and North America, so they come into conflict with humans in nearly all the areas they'd like to be. Here's their range (it would all of North America and Europe, but for humans):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Ursus_arctos_d
If you look, you'll see brown bears live all over Alaska. That's where that bear-maniac Treadwell got mauled by them. There's now a movie about it, and it uses his amazing bear footage:
http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/10725/
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
There's more data than that, but the darling of the global warming scare maniacs is the CO2 level claimed to supposedly have been 280-290 ppm in the preindustrial. The problem is - this is bollocks. The "scientists" in question have falsified the data and this single lie has been repeated over and over in the same publications, trying to create impression of many independent original sources, whereas in reality there was just one: http://www.john-daly.com/zjiceco2.htm "The problem with Siple data (and with other shallow cores) is that the CO2 concentration found in pre-industrial ice from a depth of 68 meters (i.e. above the depth of clathrate formation) was "too high". This ice was deposited in 1890 AD, and the CO2 concentration was 328 ppmv, not about 290 ppmv, as needed by man-made warming hypothesis. The CO2 atmospheric concentration of about 328 ppmv was measured at Mauna Loa, Hawaii as later as in 1973[8], i.e. 83 years after the ice was deposited at Siple. An ad hoc assumption, not supported by any factual evidence[3, 9], solved the problem: the average age of air was arbitrary decreed to be exactly 83 years younger than the ice in which it was trapped. The "corrected" ice data were then smoothly aligned with the Mauna Loa record (Figure 1 B) , and reproduced in countless publications as a famous "Siple curve". Only thirteen years later, in 1993, glaciologists attempted to prove experimentally the "age assumption"[10], but they failed[9]."
Python is nice quick and flexible... but it provides so much rope a monkey would hang the whole ecosystem with it. -- in