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. "

Comments

...and here come the sceptics

[Da Fokka]

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.

Re:...and here come the sceptics

[ozmanjusri]

The goal of science is to provide answers, not to make decisions for people.

Science doesn't have a goal. It's a method, not an entity.

The people practicing science have goals, and their goals often include helping to solve social, political and ethical problems.

Re:...and here come the sceptics

[nathanh]

Actually, it's part of a natural cycle of glacial / interglacial periods [noaa.gov]. Pollution is just uh...speeding things up. :) Even if pollution is stopped overnight, the climate will continue to change. Hot, cold, hot, cold, it's recorded in geological records.

Right, but the natural cycle is approximately 100,000 years (as says the NOAA link). It seems that with pollution we've managed to compress that down to just a few 100 years. Over 100,000 years there is time for flora and fauna to adapt to the changing conditions - through evolution, or migration, or whatever. In the space of a few 100 years there's no opportunity for adaption; the flora and fauna simply die.

Consider an analogy. A human life is on average 70 years and if you stab them to death that's just uh... speeding things up. But stabbing someone to death is considered criminal. Speeding up the natural glacial cycle by several orders of magnitude causes more death than a single stabbing yet for some reason it's not considered criminal. Why isn't mass extinction a criminal act?

And it's even worse than that. The real danger is that rainfall distribution will change. Unfortunately rainfall in the Sahara won't suddenly make the desert a fertile ground for crops. The desert simply lacks the nutrients and the surrounding ecosystem of insects and animals to sustain a high volume of life. However a reduction of rainfall in farming regions will lead to failed crops and widespread starvation. You can't just move the farm to where the rainfall occurs; the non-fertile ground can't support the crops, and the fertile ground lacks the necessary rainfall. Over 100,000 years there is time for the non-fertile ground to become fertile. But over a few 100 years? There simply isn't enough time to adapt.

So don't you dare say that this is all fine because it's natural. About 100,000 years is natural. A few 100 years is frightening.

Darwin, anyone?

[User 956]

"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!

win-win

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Bears and seal just need....

[Charcharodon]

Here in California the seal population is exploding since they are protected, and they have gotten to the point of nuisence, well at least to rich people who own boats. The funny thing is the seals like to find a nice new boat, the kind with an easy to reach swim platform and then have a sunbathing party on said boat. They proceed to trash the boat by shitting all over it, tear up the gear with mating/territory fights, and then finally they pack onto it like a bunch of high schoolers in a compact car on a Friday night, sink it with their shear weight.

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.

What about on Mars?

[CCMCornell]

How are the polar bears handling the polar ice cap melting on Mars? Must be the Mars rovers...

Re:Ice Age

[M3rk1n_Muffl3y]

You may find that this is how biodiversity ends. I doubt that there many animals capable of evolving over the space of 100 years.

Re:How long till the skeptics post?

[gronofer]

Perhaps they will have a theory that polar bears have a natural cycle of extinction and re-evolution every few hundred years.

Yes, it might be irreversible...

[vistic]

I guess you missed this slashdot story: Global Warming Past The Point of No Return

""The UK's Independent is running a front page story today on a scientific report claiming that global warming is now unstoppable, after measuring changes in the level of ice in the arctic." From the article: "The greatest fear is that the Arctic has reached a 'tipping point' beyond which nothing can reverse the continual loss of sea ice and with it the massive land glaciers of Greenland, which will raise sea levels dramatically. Satellites monitoring the Arctic have found that the extent of the sea ice this August has reached its lowest monthly point on record, dipping an unprecedented 18.2 per cent below the long-term average."

Re:Ice Age

[Toby The Economist]

> 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.

Re:Ice Age

[Bazzalisk]

Don't worry they'll have several million years to adapt to the new conditions once the environment has become uninhabbitable to humans ...

white bears swim to "find food". Black bears loot

[Cryofan]

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.