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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. "
Everytime there is an article about global warming there will be an army of sceptics who say that global warming has not been scientifically proven and that trying to do anything about it is a wast of money and bad for the economy.
This bothers me a great deal. Although it may not be possiple to _prove_ without a hair of a doubt that global warming is occurring, there are way too many signs saying our climate is changing drastically.
We know this and we know that CO2 and other greenhouse gases have a strong influence on our climate. Looks like reason enough to strive for a change to me. Because of the upcoming shortage of fossil duels, reducing fuel depency also makes sense ecologically. And no, without significant increases in nuclear power usage, the hydrogen economy is not it.
The same thing has been happening for ever.
Agreed. But the question is, is it our fault this time? People die all the time. But that doesn't mean I can get away with murder.
There is no shortage of fossile fuels. The oil resources are humoungous but a lot of it is too expensive to be counted in the oil reserves (yep, there is a big difference between resources and reserves here. This is also the reason the oil companies have been able to tell that the oil reserves have stayed at "enough for 35 years" for 35 years despite no new significant oil resources have been found for a long time now), but the demand for it will only trigger the prices so that it becomes economically viable.
The known oil resources are expected to last for 150 years with the current pace of burning. When this runs out, we still have coal for a 1000 years or so. We will have to stop using fossile fuels for other reasons. For environmental reasons.
1) could we please have a proper discourse about probability distributions? having the ice recede 200 miles further north than the average means nothing without a given variance. and even then they would have to name the period of observation to get any meaning out of it. obviously giving all that information won't go so well for an article, but giving just scraps of information isn't all that hot either
2) global warming is not a threat to nature! nature has dealt with catastrophic climated changes in the past and it will deal with them in the future. the threat of global warming is to us humans and the the status quo of nature, but there's no doubt in my mind that the ecosystems will adapt to a warming planet - as they have to countless ice ages, meteor hits, etc. although i would find it a shame to see ice bears going extinct due to human interference in world climate, we _can_ not take responsibility of _nature_ on this scale; what if a warmer climate brought forth an even more beautiful creature than the ice bear? wouldn't we make _that_ extinct by preventing global warming as well?
note, i'm not advocating to do nothing, nor am i lacking sympathy for the ice bears. but in my mind, global warming is first and formost a danger to the status quo and to _our_ survival. if the planet heats up drastically other species will replace the current ones and the cycle of life will turn on; with the difference of us being dragged down by the environmental changes...
jethr0
Even if you don't give a damn about the bears further changes such as these signal problems for us. Our civilizations depend upon stable food supplied, stable ocean levels, predictable tides, seasons, and weather, all of which may likely be thrown off drastically by global warming. Most of humankind lives within a few miles of sea level. As polar ice retreats oceal levels rise. As temperatures rise so do the frequency of powerful storms such as Katrina. Similarly rising temperatures herald more unpredictable seasons and thus crop losses. Changes in weathere patterns seem likely to doom some areas to overly warm weather (e.g. Africa) and some areas to much colder weather (e.g Europe).
It is one thing to be sanguine about the loss of polar bears to natrual selection. The loss of human populations, that's another thing.
It astonishes me the blind naiviety of these Republicans who insist they aren't convinced that Global warming is happening. Every year we get another story or two like this and they still have their hands over their ears going "LA LA LA - I CAN'T HEAR YOU." Even more naive is the notion that it can't affect us or that we can buy our way out of any issues it causes.
The house has smoke all thru the ground floor - the ceiling is burning two stories up out of sight and all Republicans can say is "Well, we're not convinced this smoke is our house. And we're not convinced that there hasn't been smoke here before and that this is natural geology - and we're not convinced the fire will spread to the ground floor if the building is on fire.
idiots - naive, blind, idiots
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ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
I have to say this, because every time something like this comes up, there are a bunch of posts saying, "It's natural, it's evolution, new species will develop, nature will repair itself, bla bla bla". I just want to point out a fucking obvious fact that people seem to forget. Yes, nature will sort it out. Somewhere during the next several million years. You, your grandkids, and the whole human race probably won't be around to see it. Evolution works on geological time scales. Try and wrap your head around it. Save those species now, because from our point of view they will never be replaced.
As far as the seals and the bears up north go, it wouldn't take too much to apply the same concept, minus the million dollar boats, and build some platforms (artificial bergs) up the coast for them to use. For the distances they're swiming placing one every 10 miles or so should be plenty, and would give a boost to the fishing in the area as well.
You may find that this is how biodiversity ends. I doubt that there many animals capable of evolving over the space of 100 years.
This is not the sig you are looking for...
Maybe we could just use the truths that we know to promote environmental friendliness and leave out the unprovable theories. There are too many factors in the atmosphere to even predict local weather, let alone the cause of global warming.
> The same thing has been happening for ever.
> Its how bio diversity starts.
Not quite.
Ecological change is usually on the order of hundreds of thousands of years.
Evolution is a slow process; it can cope with hundreds of thousands of years.
It doesn't cope with drastic changes on the order of a hundred years.
When *that* happens, species just get wiped out.
The rate of change in their environment is greater than the rate of change in their genome and so they find themselves trying to behave in a way entirely unsuited to their new environment.
Examples of this are swimming sixty miles in open water in storms, or trying to eat bamboo when there's none left because it doesn't grow any more, or laying eggs which only hatch when it gets hotter than 28.5C but it never gets that warm any more, etc.
Nothing to do with communism or Islamic terror. The Phenomenon may well lead Slashdotters to the conclusion that polar bears are Windows-operated, and their drowning is simply due to the fact that longer swims increase the risiko of getting a BSOD before reaching the shore. A team of slashdotters may be sent to do some on-site assistance and format all bears, to then install linux. Or BSD. OpenBSD to be sure no hunters can hack into the bears?
As a geologist, [...] That ice sheet was one of many recent glaciations. Are humans contributing to "global warming'? Perhaps. Is that contribution significant compared to natural process? I am skeptical.
As a geologist, you aren't particularly qualified to make judgements about cause and effect in climate models.
In any case, it is unnecessary to prove conclusively that human activity is causing global warming in order to justify taking steps; reducing CO2 emissions is sensible and economically beneficial public policy.
And where was current Alaska back then? Continental drift is a few cm per year, so it could have been several 1000 km away from where it is now.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
Evolution? Gasp! You mean intelligently redesigned, right?
Let me explain my point just a bit more clearly for you. Animals do adapt but that takes time. If their environment changes faster than they can adapt and a large part of population is lost, then that may result in their survival becoming unsustainable. This could be due to inbreeding which will result in a weaker species. Please read up more on extinction if you are going to be arguing points like this in future. BTW, I do not remember saying anything about bears growing flippers.
This is not the sig you are looking for...
Massive reverse-osmosis water purification plants on the African coast, to terraform our own planet?
In all seriousness, are we willing to accept phenomenal loss of human life in Pakistan, Indonesia, and the US gulf coast, because we don't want to pollute in the name of saving life?
Do we roll back the clock to simpler, agrarian times, and excuse ourselves from feeling any guilt, or roll the clock forward to cleaner technologies?
I do realize this. The question is, what political leadership has sufficient moral authority to champion the cause? The problem with the Republocrats is that they're obviously in the pocket of Big B'iness. The problem with the Demmicans, at least as far as Red State America is concerned, is that their power base consists of societal elements at least as dangerous as global warming itseslf.
Thus, the existing political order is about as helpful as the tacit global experiment underway to which you allude. Running your question through the Inspector Fowler Paraphraser: "Our cock-up, our arse". A less than erotic realization.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
As a geologist, you aren't particularly qualified to make judgements about cause and effect in climate models.
Just curious. What sort of background exactly do you think a paleoclimatologist should have?
I wouldn't even care if your middle name would be Einstein or Nobel.
Everyone who can clash at least 2 braincells randomly together can figure out:
1) we're are speeding up the climate changes.
2) polar bears are dying because if it right now
3) we're going to die because of it sooner than we should
Who gives a shiny damn ass about what degree someone got from where if we're going to extinct ?
Maybe cutting back on some CO2 emissions and replacing the tech we use today with something more economical could give your grandchild a f*cking chance to see the f*cking sun ? Gee i thought someone would teach you people something useful at universities but it seems like planning more than 1 tiny year forward didn't fit into your schoolplan.
I don't know about you dudes, but i want to teach my grandson how to shoot a bow and teach what animals live in the forest after 50 years from now, not be some damn Waterworld hero who drinks his own
The whole f*cking planet is going down and you dudes fight about some damn uni degree...
ps. people that really attended the lessons at uni, remember that we have no freaking idea what the planet can look like after 25 years from now.
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
Yes! Time for some good old baby seal clubbing!
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=121505Ed irector)p e=topNews&storyID=2005-12-18T102039Z_01_FLE836834_ RTRUKOC_0_US-IRAN-ISRAEL.xml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_van_Gogh_(film_
http://www.jihadwatch.org/
http://today.reuters.com/News/newsArticle.aspx?ty
Anyone who can still deny the threat that Islam presents to the freedoms we hold dear in the West is just not paying attention, or they're just afraid of ending up like Theo Van Gogh.
Gee, look at that - get a couple of ground weather station in the artic, look at the local surface temperature and conclude that there is no global warming effect. If only one of those scientists who spend every day studying this had actually had such a good idea. But just the someone might wonder - what is the connection between the ground temperature at these places and the extent of sea ice? Well, it seems that sea ice has been decreasing over the last 40 years: see http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/286/544 6/1934 [science] But, by looking at those two temperature time series you probably wouldnt guesss it.
The primary claim here is that polar bears are dying because artic sea ice is retreating to a greater than normal extent. This tallies with predictions that climate change science makes.
And how long will it be till the enviro-wackos like yourself tell us to quit doing anything and just die, so the earth will go back to its old self? The earth has been warming LONGER than we've even been on this planet you idiot. Typical response from someone who was probably schooled in a government school.
Four dead polar bears in the open ocean. Therefore they died because they drowned. Therefore its because the Arctic has warmed recently. Therefore the warming is caused by "Global Warming" caused by human fossil fuel use.
... Bueller.
You left out a few things in your attempt tp recruit Fox News viewers: Tree ring samples from around the planet indicate longer growing seasons and warmer growing seasons in the last 150 years, the fact that the AVERAGE temperature across the Artic is increasing at twice the rate of the rest of the planet, that glaciers on mountains across the planet are in retreat, and that sea temperatures from Antartica to the Arctic are rising. Strangely, all of these phenomena are almost perfectly correlated with the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. Saying that we should do nothing because we might not be the cause of the warming is like saying you shouldn't turn the heater down in the summer because it isn't your heater causing it to be hot.
But wait, the Arctic from 70-90 is still not as warm as the 1930s
Whoa buddy! Talk about wild extrapolation. You have two points of data and you think that invalidates every thing else? I know you're not that stupid, so you must be intellectually dishonest (a new, unexplored frontier for conservatives). You do know that global warming doesn't mean that every single measurement point on the Earth will show an increase in temperature don't you? You know that some places will get colder as the climate changes, right? Tell me you haven't been sleeping through class. Bueller
Since the poster child for linking climate change with carbon dioxide use has been shown to be a product of bad statistics
Actually, your pet theory has been shot down. Sorry. Next.
Therefore, hence, or in conclusion: I call bullshit.
You can call bullshit all you like if it makes you feel better, but it doesn't make you right. Don't you have a Target store to protest or something?
Four dead polar bears in the open ocean. Therefore they died because they drowned. Therefore its because the Arctic has warmed recently. Therefore the warming is caused by "Global Warming" caused by human fossil fuel use
Classic straw man. Good try, but intellectually dishonest. New territory for conservatives I must admit.
Arguing that the current warming is a natural cycle, and therefor we should do nothing, is no different than suggesting that one should not turn off the heater in the summertime because it is natural processes are responsible for the increasing temperature.
But wait, the Arctic from 70-90 is still not as warm as the 1930s, as can be seen from long station records all across the high Arctic (for example Nuuk or Ostrov Dikson ) This was well before large increases in carbon dioxide.
Two problems with your reasoning: 1) Carbon dioxide has been increasing for about 150 years now. Last I checked, the 1930's was only 70 years ago. That's an 80-year margin of error there. Better check your math. 2) When the climate changes, it doesn't change everywhere in lockstep. Some places will get colder, and some will get warmer. Talk about wild extrapolation. You are asking us to believe that temperature data from two isoloated stations should contradict the overall trend from hundreds of thousands of stations across the entire planet over hundreds of years.
Since the poster child for linking climate change with carbon dioxide use has been shown to be a product of bad statistics
Hate to tell you buddy, but your pet theory was shot down about 5 years ago. Take a read at a real scientific paper here: http://www.nap.edu/books/0309068916/html/. Not only that, but do you know anything about Venus? Do you know why it's so hot there? You do know that carbon dioxide is fairly opaque to infrared, and that's how it insulates, right? I assume you are not trying to call into question basic laws of chemistry and physics while at the same time accusing others of wild extrapolations are you?
Therefore, hence, or in conclusion: I call bullshit.
What is wrong with you people? This isn't crazy hippies crying about killing the poor flowers somewhere. This is a near perfect consensus of scientists across dozens of different disciplines on a global scale. They are trying to sound every alarm at their disposal and we are ignoring them. Instead of taking their word about their fields of expertise, we have people with no trainng at all (most with no college at all) questioning the conclusions of people who have spent their entire lives studying this stuff. The sad thing is that, if they are right, in 50 years the Republican Party is going to be having hearings on why our scientific community failed us, and they will be telling us how they were trying to save us all these years and it was the evil liberals that stopped them.
Of course this message has been brought to you by Exxon Mobil, the Bush Administration, the Republican Party, the Freemasons, the Illuminati and all stations to Satan.
I don't think most of us imagine anything so grand. Just uneducated, dishonest conservatives who see global climate change as a threat to their monied way of life, and who are willing to risk making a world of Katrina-like events commonplace to protect that way of life. Simple as that.
This is kind of a debateable point. When you're talking about an animal that is, normally, covered entirely in fur, it's fairly standard to refer to it as its fur color, not its skin color. (For instance, I would say my dog is tan & white, not pink & brown. Unless you shaved her. In which case she'd probably get upset with you.) I guess it would be more correct to say that polar bears have white fur & black skin. (Although I thought it was more brown... Or was that artic foxes?)
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
1) The sun has had more sunspot activity, longer duration, higher degree of spin off, and more force in the spin off, than any time in our recorded history starting circa 1986. On top of this the activity is increasing. Could it have Some effect on the temperature of the Earth? I mean, it's only a few billion nuclear bombs reaching our upper atmosphere. Could the constant higher level of bombardment cause holes in the atmosphere? It depends upon whether you believe that nuclear material can cause "burning" of atmosphere or not. We have always worried about it "in theory".
2) The sun is scheduled to go super nova, last I checked, in about a mere 10,000 years. Go figure. We suddenly have large changes in the spin off now...
3) If you got to www.co2science.com you can get some expert opinions, from people who actually work in the field, rather than some computer program calculations based upon statistics and path plotting. I am not saying that pathing models are not useful, but they tend to be highly inaccurate, remember the sun rotating around the earth was accepted for a long time due to pathing predictions. heh.
I am not denying changes, they are measurable. But they may be part of some other effects, and we have not been recording information for long enough period to determine what is happening. We go by 10,0000 year blocks of time for measuring changes in the past, because we have to. That does not mean the changes were not sudden, just that our tools are limited to detect that aspect.
After spending many decades in science, both applied and theoretical, I think it is pretty arrogant to think we matter in the scheme of things. Since the advent of printed matter humans have claimed we are destroying ourselves and our world. It hasn't happened, yet our arrogance of our "power" continues.
"seriously-do-you-need-more-proof?"
As much as I am starting to dislike the editorial filter that Slashdot has and Digg avoids, let me just say in response:
Proof of warming does not equate to proof Kyoto is a good idea.
Even the planners agree that all countries participating for a century would do almost nothing for the projected warming. Recently, the non-Kyoto-signer US has had higher economic growth and greater improvements on GHGs than the Kyoto signers of the EU. Do you need any more proof that it's the wrong approach?
Perhaps instead of a half-ass non-solution, we should fund more research for true, viable alternatives. I want bettery batteries, solar, and fusion to all be so cheap that any GHG emitting methods of energy generation and storage aren't used because of their economic cost.
Arbitrarily trying to limit carbon emissions, when billions of people who embrace modernity need energy and don't have alternatives, is a bad idea. Here is a good article by Bjorn Lomborg on the The relative unimportance of global warming, with better policy suggestions.
Robo-Blogs of the world: UNITE!
Q: What's a fur seals favourite drink?
A: Canadian Club on the Rocks!!
I've heard this before and I think it's likely a myth for some basic physics reasons. Polar bears appear white. That means they reflect most of the light that hits them. Now its conceivable that the hairs work only in certain directions, but if a polar bear looks mostly white at all angles, I am pretty sure that it is impossible the polar bear to be simultaneously absorbing any large percentage of the light. You can't get the best of both worlds, either you are white and camouflaged (with the snow) or black and use the sun to heat yourself.