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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. "
I can see evolution breeding stronger polar bears capable of swimming to your house to eat you. i for one welcome our polar bear overlords.
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.
As a geologist, I know that the areas I work in here in southcentral Alaska were covered by an ice sheet 1,000 feet thick just 9,000 years ago, but 65 million or so years ago it was hot and humid, and there were many more active volcaloes than there are now. I suspect that there were few, if any, humans around in an industrial culture 65 million years ago.
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.
Finally, in another article I read, (CONSERVATIONISTS FILE LAWSUIT) I have to ask exactly what, other than fund-raising, will this lawsuit remedy?
Alaska Volcano Getting Stinky, May Erupt
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.
"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."
So that means the bears that do survive will be better swimmers than previous. Evolution wins again!
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Ice melting is not the real problem here. The bears are simply swimming in the wrong direction because the change in position of the Magnetic North Pole combined with the accumulation of too many Leap Seconds has screwed up the BearSUV's latest Navigation Package. Fix the SUV software, sell more BearSUVs with good software to bears, and forget that "global warming" mumbo jumbo.
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
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.
This is a win-win situation. Without polar bears we can go ahead and drill for oil without the risk of harming them. There might be a surplus of seals since the bears won't be around to eat them so go ahead and hunt them too.
I was kind of hoping the article had some photos of the drowning polar bears?
Baby seals are cautiously optimistic.
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
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.
How are the polar bears handling the polar ice cap melting on Mars? Must be the Mars rovers...
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...
Perhaps they will have a theory that polar bears have a natural cycle of extinction and re-evolution every few hundred years.
Cue the 'I'm more cynical than you' comments, more like.
'evolution in action' 'they need SUVs'
More like 'I'm feeling mighty cosy and safe here in one of the richest countries in the world'.
Unfortunately, kiddo, there's no gaurantee that will protect you.
Also, a thought. People talk about there being a lack of evidence for climate change. What we're doing at the moment is conducting a global experiment in how hard we can push the climate without it changing. Guess what happens if we cock up?
So when people talk about making a change in our lifestyle, they're talking about keeping the Earth as consistant as possible, because no one has a bloody clue what the climate might do. If you think about it, you'll realise that reducing CO2 emmisions is actually a conservative approach.
Not extinction and re-evolution, but swings in population levels can be quite severe even in 'undisturbed' nature.
Like another poster mentioned, unless this gets much, much worse natural selection will simply start choosing bears better at swimming, or that find an alternate method for moving.
I don't read AC A human right
"Fossil Duels". Best. Video game name. Ever.
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.
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_
Not extinction and re-evolution, but swings in population levels can be quite severe even in 'undisturbed' nature.
Like another poster mentioned, unless this gets much, much worse natural selection will simply start choosing bears better at swimming, or that find an alternate method for moving.
Interesting thing about evolution: it's not a perfect upwards slope. Indeed, in many ways biodiversity has been on a downwards slope for long before humans came onto the scene. Furthermore, consider that introducing a new way for animals to die doesn't happen in a vacuum; this is one of many examples of shrinking habitats and increasingly hostile situations that animals in the world (including humans, but we're good at changing our immediate environment to offset the overall environment) are finding themselves in.
To go back to what I was nudging towards initially, though: 'natural selection' is not another name for 'all-powerful god', that is to say, just because a new method is needed doesn't mean that this 'natural selection' thing will magically provide it; natural selection is just trimming combined with chaos, there are severe limits to what it can do, and I can't think of many methods that the bears could use other than swimming (I do realize that you said "unless this gets much, much worse", but really, there aren't that many alternate methods of moving, it's not like they'll suddenly develop wings). And anyways, I would think that after so much time, Polar Bears as a species would be pretty damn good at swimming. I doubt it's merely the few weaker ones that are drowning. The article notes that ALL the bears are being forced to swim further from the shore, and some of the deaths noted were from storms that arose; so whether they're good swimmers or not isn't even going to make that much of a difference, it's an extra bonus to the death rate period.
Hmm, in some ways I'm sortof making a straw man out of your argument. But really now, just think about it for a moment. As you mentioned, population levels can swing quite dramatically in rather 'natural' situations, yes. Now say that one of those swings happens for some random reason, combined with the problems noted in the article. It's not that hard to imagine entire populations of polar bears dipping dangerously low. The article mentions increases in the rate of cannibalism due to the lack of food sources, so for many populations there may be a tipping point that would create a downward spiral. Consider also that this is just one of many examples of the effect of humans on the environment that hurts wild populations, so I might agree with you if this was all that was going on in the world (ie. if the only thing that polar bears had to deal with was having to swim further), but it's the combination of many harmful factors that puts species at risk.
Plus, just from an empathic perspective, I'm not exactly going "hurrah! animals are dieing!". I'd rather they, umm, not die when they shouldn't be.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
Oh man, Stephen Colbert's gonna be pleased with this!
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
Don't worry they'll have several million years to adapt to the new conditions once the environment has become uninhabbitable to humans ...
James P. Barrett
The point of environmentalism is to protect the human race from suffering and devastation due to the way we interact with the rest of the environment.
;) I could give a shit. I don't want to die, however.
The point of environmentalism is not to "protect the planet" because animals are cute or because somebody particularly cares, on a moral level, if we pollute or if we exhaust our finite resources per se.
It is completely irrelevant if on geological timescales the earth will cool down again, if it means the human race is nearly or completely extinct by the time it does.
People who say "it is irrelevant because the Earth will heal" are the worst kind of tree-hugging hippies
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...
No discussion of polar bears is complete without mentioning Churchill, Manitoba, The Polar Bear Capital of The World. I visited at the end of October and had the chance to go out on a "Tundra Buggy" tour. It was quite exotic.. we saw 3 polar bear. There's also a guy who lives out on the tundra for a few months a year in a huge tundra buggy with satellite internet access.. He has a site: http://www.polarbearcam.com/
The buggies are amazing.. probably about 4-5 feet off the ground, HUGE tires, furnace inside to keep warm.. we ate dinner on board as well, with the bears just outside. Our tour guide was VERY professional and knowledgeable, we were quite impressed. It turned out he had also lived in Africa for many years and given tours there, etc etc..
Here's some fun facts about polar bear off the top of my head:
Their skin is actually black to absorb the sunlight (it's amazing how well adapted they are). The fur is really transparent but looks white in the same way a cloud looks white because of all of the water droplets.
They have suction cups on their paws to keep from slipping on the ice.
Churchill has had, I believe, only 2 or 3 fatalities in the past 30 years. One was a few weeks before I got there as a drunk wandered out of the town limits.
They are very careful about bear up there, for obvious reasons. Every night they fire off shotguns to keep the bears away. People living on the outskirts of town always have rifles in their houses just in case - they also put out traps.. basically boards with nails going through them.. to keep the bears away.
If a bear comes into town they will stun it and carry it away with a helicopter! We actually saw this happening! They move it further north IIRC... but if the bear comes back 2 more times, they put it into the "polar bear jail" which is in town (no tourists allowed sadly). They only water the bear in the jail, and do not feed it, otherwise the bear may view it as a rewarding experience.
I was surprised how nice everything was up there.. beautifully decorated hotels, at least on the insides. Food is expensive though and their economy is pretty much dependent on the bears, although they do export grain to Europe. The train takes 2 days from Winnipeg and is quite a slow ride, sometimes traveling at only 10 miles per hour. (They run 2 engines just in case one breaks down.)
I remember lots more about the bears and Churchill if anyone is interested.. just ask!
Oh - there was far less ice compared to previous years when I was up there. Everyone I asked said they weren't sure if it was global warming or just a temporary cycle. You can check the sea ice information for the Hudson Bay at the Canadian Ice Service site.
from the article:
The researchers were startled to find bears having to swim up to 60 miles across open sea to find food.
Typical racist media! Polar bears--WHITE bears--swim to FIND FOOD. But you KNOW that if that had been BLACK bears instead of white bears, this article would have called it LOOTING.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
...Global Warming Skeptic Bingo!
I forget what 8 was for.
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
Another good example of how the non-scientists at Time can mangle a study to their own views. Anyone care to get the actual study and review it instead? Good clue how they have missed the issues again - read this slowly, "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." When can we get the global warming issue out of the political MSM and back to the scientists?
I know this was a joke, but you *are* aware that Polar Bears are actually black right?
Black with white (dense) hollow hair, that acts similar to millions of small fiber optic pieces to channel light down to the black skin, where it is more efficiently used.
So, more accurately think of an old black man with white hair. I know a few of those, and they are pretty cool!
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order- Ed Howdershelt Via Tass
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.
Actually, the effects of the depletion of the ozone layer and global warming on each other is pretty circular- UVB destroys small phytoplankton in the Antarctic. This contributes to global warming [see HERE], as well as a collapse in the polar and sub-polar oceanic food supply. I also hope you appreciate that global warming helps to slow the repair of the ozone layer by raising the temperature of the stratosphere. Just because you haven't been taught something, it doesn't mean it's wrong. And yes, the UVB is absorbed no matter *where* it's absorbed, but to be honest I'd rather it were absorbed higher up, and not by the micro-organisms that help to keep our climate stable. In any case, the ozone disappearing and reappearing *is* cyclical, but most recent science takes it for granted that CFCs and our activities on earth are seriously affecting that pattern.
It's brilliant people like you who think that the entire science of climate change study is based on (Paper A) or (Paper B). There are tens of thousands of studies, using hundreds of cores across dozens of timescales from dozens of locations, in addition to many other complete lines of study apart from cores. What an extreme bit of ignorance of the science to pretend that there's only one relevant study of all that has been done - how creationist of you.
Believe it or not, Jaworosky is in the extreme minority in the scientific community (just like those who deny evolution are in the biological community). Those who pick on a single piece of data and claim that it tears down an entire science practice the lowest form of scientific inquiry. Jaworsky actually claims the ridiculous notion that he can prove that the world is getting colder, despite even direct *thermometer* measurements to the contrary and the huge amount of glacial retreat. Jaworosky's theories were not published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. The were published in a magazine run by Lyndon LaRouche. I.e., his claims are a bunch of garbage that wouldn't stand up to peer review, because otherwise he'd have done it.
The reality is that even if you don't want to compare CO2 levels to those 100 years ago, you can compare them to CO2 from 200, 400, etc years ago. Modern CO2 is the highest it's been in several hundred thousand years, and it went that way from low CO2 levels in a hundred (or even if you believe Jaworowsky) a couple hundred years. Even the most rudimentary glance at Vostok data makes it painfully obvious that CO2 levels are extremely tied to temperature (which is obvious from the properties of CO2). And it's obvious that this would be the case - the amount of CO2 that we pump out easily outpaces all animal life on earth and volcanic activity, and expecting that plants can arbitrarily keep up is silly (most plants are not limited by CO2 - they're limited by various nutrients. There are huge oceanic dead zones because of, for example, iron deficiency.)
Man on crucifix terrorizes church, demands they eat his flesh and blood. Details at 11.
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.
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?
There are SUV driving slashdotters? I would've expected they were already driving gokarts powered by their own sense of self-satisfaction.
Even to proponents of punctuated equilibrium, "geologically instantaneous" is not 100 years. Gould and Eldredge, who came up with the concept, say "for small populations speciating away from a central mass in tens or hundreds of thousands of years, will translate in almost every geological circumstance as a punctuation on a bedding plane, not gradual change" Original paper here In world beset by global warming, the bears are not going to have time to evolve floaties.
of course, biting monkeys is not to everyone's taste - Konrad Lorenz
"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!
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.