Healthy polar bear starves to death in Norway; probably first of many

The situation might be improving- a very short Arctic summer...let's hope it's in time:

“The Arctic ice extent is showing a remarkable recovery from the great oscillations of 2012,” says Guimaraes. “Compare with the previous years listed there, you’ll see that 2004 is the year that is closest to 2013 in terms of average temps during the summer.”



“Normally the high Arctic has about 90 days above freezing. This year there was less than half that,” says Steven Goddard website.


http://www.climatedepot.com/2013/08...zing-this-year-there-was-less-than-half-that/

Gregg said:

The situation might be improving- a very short Arctic summer...let's hope it's in time:

“The Arctic ice extent is showing a remarkable recovery from the great oscillations of 2012,” says Guimaraes. “Compare with the previous years listed there, you’ll see that 2004 is the year that is closest to 2013 in terms of average temps during the summer.”



“Normally the high Arctic has about 90 days above freezing. This year there was less than half that,” says Steven Goddard website.


http://www.climatedepot.com/2013/08...zing-this-year-there-was-less-than-half-that/

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Admittedly, I know nothing about the cite you linked to, Climate Depot. I did notice, however, that of the "related articles" , as well as a few others linked to that page, almost every single has a title "debunking" global warming in rather mocking tones. What that means, if anything, I can't say for sure.

Just in case anyone needs extra incentive to care...

Gregg said:

The situation might be improving- a very short Arctic summer

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We here at 61 degrees north latitude have experienced a record number of consecutive days with highs above 70F, and probably (I'm not sure) the warmest June and July weather in recorded history. 400 miles north, near the Arctic Circle, Fairbanks, Alaska, has set by a big margin the longest stretch of consecutive days with highs about 80F, and it's continuing even as we speak.

The coastal villages of northern Alaska have been denuded of winter shore sea ice for a number of years now, and erosion has become a huge problem. Stay tuned for what happens up there this coming winter.

Oh, and by the way, lots of snow does not equate to lots of ice. In fact, quite the opposite. Unusually snowy winters mean the air is unusually warm, and can carry much more moisture. 2011-2012 was the snowiest winter on record in our region.

caw

I believe The Polar Bear is going to be the next large land animal that will die at the hands of humans. He will join the ranks of:

-- The Saber Tooth Tiger
-- The Wooly Mammoth


He is languishing in good company with

-- The Elephant
-- The Buffalo
-- The Great Panda
-- The Rhinoceros


The thing is, the bigger an animal is (the larger his body mass) the more energy (ie, food) he needs to survive, and even more so to procreate. So even a slight decline in available energy (food) can mean a very sharp, rapid, and noticeable decline in the particularly large creatures of our ecosystem. It's sort of an extra tragic example of "The bigger they are, the harder they fall." And it's an even more tragic example of "Once you reach the top there's no place left to go but down," and in this instance "the top" means the top of the food chain --a staggering height from which it is easy to be shaken only if the lower levels of that pyramid (a region-specific pyramid composed of the local community of predators and prey, flora and fauna) all start quivering from mutual weakness under the onslaught. This particular weakness is an energy deficiency brought on by the onslaught of human activity. And we if humans are anything we are energy hogs extraordinaire. And isn't our endless quest for energy at the heart of how we're fucking up this whole planet to begin with? Hunting for hides and tusks and horns aside, energy is also a serious matter when it comes to the survival of these exceptionally large land animals.

One way of looking at all of this is that we're causing a gross imbalance in the environment of the sort that circles right straight back around again to our disproportionate usage of energy. Disney's Rafiki of Lion King fame might say that the circle of life is being interfered with. Yoda might say that the Force is out of balance. Either way, our energy endeavors are stealing energy (food) from all the other inhabitants of our world.


There's another animal not listed above because he isn't a land animal:

-- The Sperm Whale (and most of his other whale cousins too)

I didn't initially include him because the dynamics of energy in an aquatic environment are somewhat different from a land environment. Regardless of that he will still get mention here.

The Sperm Whale was ALMOST hunted to extinction because we liked to burn his oil in lamps, and then we liked to use his oil in expensive perfumes. And he --just like the Elephant and the Buffalo et al-- is a very physically large animal, in need of a great deal of energy (food). We're positively killing the oceans! I don't know how much longer his kind can last.

Shees! We humans are even stealing energy away from each other! Stealing food. Stealing oil. Fighting wars over it all with scorched earth policies where we burn each others' crops and set fire to each others oil and gas wells.

How much energy does ONE human being "need" to survive from day to day? Do you have an amount in mind? And after you've calculated that amount, how much over and above that amount do we each consume from day to day?

Another interesting article about the people in Nunavut having to escape the heat by snorkeling. . . in the Arctic Ocean.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/story/2013/08/13/north-weather-heat.html

Now there is this (yes, reported by a conservative website):

"Don’t worry, kids. Santa’s home isn’t really under water. The Associated Press just released an inaccurate photo. The news organization is catching some heat after publishing a photo supposedly showing a large lake forming at the North Pole due to global warming. But the AP issued a formal retraction of the photo, admitting that the “lake” was a naturally formed small melt-pond that isn’t even at the North Pole. While the camera is supposed to be monitoring the North Pole, it had drifted hundreds of miles south."
The AP‘s retraction reads:

Gregg said:

Now there is this (yes, reported by a conservative website):

In fact, the water accumulates in this way every summer. In addition, the images do not necessarily show conditions at the North Pole, because the weather buoy carrying the camera used by the North Pole Environmental Observatory has drifted hundreds of milesfrom its original position, which was a few dozen miles from the North Pole.”
[/INDENT]

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I am not sure what comfort, if any, to take from this story, particularly as the radius of the artic circle is 1,580 miles.

Plot Device said:

I believe The Polar Bear is going to be the next large land animal that will die at the hands of humans. He will join the ranks of:

-- The Saber Tooth Tiger
-- The Wooly Mammoth


He is languishing in good company with

-- The Elephant
-- The Buffalo
-- The Great Panda
-- The Rhinoceros

Click to expand...

Humans actually wiped out a number of large land mammals (through habitat encroachment or overhunting or both) since the end of the last ice age:

The quagga
The thylacine
The Caspian tiger
The Bali and Javan tigers
The bluebuck
The native North America horses
The Zanzibar leopard
The Caribbean monk seal
The Stellar's sea cow
The Atlas bear (Africa's only native bear in historic times)
The western black rhino (quite recently lost)

Sadly, the list goes on and on. And it's not confined to just large mammals either, though they're certainly the most vulnerable overall

I'm not sure the polar bear is going to be the next one, as there are some that are even closer to extinction. But things aren't looking good, unless there's at least a few places where they'll be able to get the food they need, or unless they can adapt somehow. Even if we have a few colder than average winters and a temporary reprieve in ice pack melting, I'm afraid the long-term trend will be the same.

Sadly, it may be easier for animals to adapt to radioactivity than it is to the habitat loss we cause with our activities.

Polar bear populations are actually doing quite well. Conservative estimates are around 20,000 - 25,000, although according to the IUCN's (International Union for Conservation of Nature) numbers, there may be as many as 32,000. (See also here) There's been an increase of at least 2,500-5,000 bears since 2001 (i.e. this increase happening after the massive El Nino that sent world temperatures soaring in 1998).

There are more polar bears now than at any other documented time. With some claims that the population was as low as 5,000 50 years ago.

That's not even counting several of the polar bear regions (of which there are 19), like the Chuckchi region, which is listed offically as 0, but even the doom and gloom of this article gives an estimate of 1,700 (although here is some insight into the health of the Chuckchi polar bears).

And there are 6 other regions with no official numbers, which means even the generous 32,000 estimate may be far below the reality. On top of this, many official counts are several years old anyways. The one for the Baffin Bay population has not been done in 17 years.

Meanwhile, because of the healthy bear populations, the Canadian government has been increasing the quotas for polar bear hunting. According to the Inuit in Nunuvat, the polar bears are even becoming a "nuisance" more so than at any other recent time. As populations continue to grow, some are forced into areas where food is more scarce, and these are the ones we point at as examples of looming extinction.

As a contrast to the OP's link, here's a happy one telling us why we should be happy about the current trends of the polar bear population.

If you take 1950 as the start of the spike of recent global warming, and the polar bear population has been increasing steadily that entire time, there is no tangible evidence that the polar bear populations have been influenced to a great degree by climate change.

To achieve such evidence, you'd need to define a baseline for what the population should be now if accounting for no climate change during that entire time. And then compare the two growth charts. But obviously that's impossible. So people can claim anything they want for the demise of the species, even while it's been growing the entire time.

The decline had always chiefly been caused by hunting, though colder temperatures also reduced populations. The colder it gets, the less life there is anywhere. The most absurd thing about it all is that global warming actually helps polar bears. I dare say it's been a fake issue the entire time.

According to this study, polar bears survived over 1000 years (from about 8,000-6,500 years ago) of there being no arctic ice in the summers. Not to mention, even if the claims of warmer weather do eventually change the arctic landscape completely, a polar bear would need to store up less energy to survive the coldest months, and there have always been additional sources of food which they've survived upon. And these plants and animals will theoritically become more numerous as they spread further north in a warmer world.

Ultimately even if AGW is real and even if human civilization is destroyed by it, a warmer world with more CO2 will mean more food for every person and animal, and all food will even contain more energy than it does now, as plants take in more of the CO2, i.e. like how plants did in the dinosaur era, when they were far more lush, productive and diverse.

Yorkist said:

Gregg, it appears that the journalistic organization in question made a goof, but... how does this relate to the OP, exactly?

My OP was about a polar bear that starved to death, not a melted ice lake in the Arctic.

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Well, you did mention the loss of sea ice as a contributing factor in the death of the Polar Bear.
I guess I don't see a dead bear as news. Here in Wisconsin lots of deer die during harsh winters. That's not news.

Plot Device said:

I believe The Polar Bear is going to be the next large land animal that will die at the hands of humans. He will join the ranks of:

-- The Saber Tooth Tiger
-- The Wooly Mammoth

Click to expand...

Tazmanian tiger
Tasmanian wolf
passenger pigeon
dodo bird
eastern mountain lion

Plot Device said:

He is languishing in good company with

-- The Elephant
-- The Buffalo
-- The Great Panda
-- The Rhinoceros

Click to expand...

Tuna
King Crab

Rain Gnome said:

Ultimately even if AGW is real and even if human civilization is destroyed by it, a warmer world with more CO2 will mean more food for every person

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If "human civilization is destroyed", how does this "mean more food for every person"?

Rain Gnome said:

all food will even contain more energy than it does now, as plants take in more of the CO2, i.e. like how plants did in the dinosaur era, when they were far more lush, productive and diverse.

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Complete nonsense. First, the most nutrionally productive plants (angiosperms, the flowering plants) didn't come along until after the halfway point of the "dinosaur era" (which lasted about 180 million years). There were all kinds of ups and downs in environment during the long time in which dinosaurs inhabited the planet. The era in Earth geological history in which plants were most lush was almost certainly the Pennsylvanian Period, long before dinosaurs came to be, and when the oxygen content of the atmosphere was about 1.5 times what it is today, or has ever been at any other time.

The high point of CO2 content in the atmosphere in geologically recent time was the Eocene maximum, some 40-odd million years ago, and it was not and dry, not exactly a paradise for land-based life.

caw

Not sure what's so wrong about what I said. According to these charts:





(taken from here and here) compared to the rest of earth's history, the entire Mesozoic era was a period of fairly consistent temperature. In fact (minus the drop in the middle), it's the longest consistent period in earth's history, allowing the evolution of dinosaurs and plants to continue the entire time until the sudden extinction.

It can be argued, that the "most nutritionally productive plants" were a product of that beneficial climate, when CO2 did spike upwards before the Cretaceous. Increased CO2 allows the plants to evolve to collect more CO2. And the bulk of that era is recognized as being extremely lush, and the state of the climate and atmosphere has been argued as part of the reason dinosaurs grew to the sizes they did.

I never made a claim that it was the most productive period in history. Even the immensely lush Carboniferous period emerged out of a period when CO2 was immensely high. The mass extinction at the end of the Carboniferous happened when CO2 dropped closest to a modern level. I don't see the complete nonsense here, even if the correlation is entirely accidental and CO2 has no effect on plant life.

The Eocene was so hot because as the continents continued to break apart, volcanic gases and methane were so prevalent, creating a greenhouse gas effect. As the chart above shows, it may've even been the hottest period in earth's history, even while CO2 levels continued to slope downwards over 100 million years to modern levels.

As you said though, the earth's environments have gone up and down for all sorts of reasons (weak atmosphere, moving continents, the earth spitting out gases, glaciation, emergence of new plant-types) to the point where the direct link between CO2 and temperature itself is tenuous, with so many other factors coming into play.

I've seen the temp data in those two charts in a number of presentations, and it always strikes me how obvious it is that across most of the planet's life it has been almost 10 degrees(C) warmer. Even though there have been a couple of periods with temps around today's, those periods are not the norm.

And note that we're not talking piddly fractions of a degree here, as "climate change" proponents do. We're talking 10 degrees (C).

Based on that information, I'd say serious global warming is a harsh reality, it can be expected to return one day, it apparently has zero, zip, nada to do with humans, and regardless of short-term trends, where we should be concentrating our efforts is in understanding how to survive in a substantially warmer environment.

Given that all of the time span of civilization is a dot at the end of the chart, apparently civilization is not the cause of the global warming to come.

It's also obvious that even a world-wide totalitarian regime dedicated to stopping "climate change" would not be able to keep the temps down in the current, historically anomalous range we have the pleasure of experiencing today.

Personally, I'd go for the Antarctic real estate boom. Get in before the crowds, you know?

Rain Gnome said:

The decline had always chiefly been caused by hunting, though colder temperatures also reduced populations. The colder it gets, the less life there is anywhere. The most absurd thing about it all is that global warming actually helps polar bears. I dare say it's been a fake issue the entire time.

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Actually, I think this looks only at a portion of the issue in order to paint a prettier picture of the whole. Past climate changes are not like this one. Humans were not as dominant a force as back then. Comparing the two is dangerous. Where there was a place and/or food source for ice bears to survive long ice-free periods in the past isn't necessarily there still here now. Also, 'cold = less life' is not universal. Cold sea waters are usually highly nutricous, and often far more lively then tropical waters (not counting coral reefs, they're a special habitat.)

Not to mention, even if the claims of warmer weather do eventually change the arctic landscape completely, a polar bear would need to store up less energy to survive the coldest months, and there have always been additional sources of food which they've survived upon. And these plants and animals will theoritically become more numerous as they spread further north in a warmer world.

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Eh. No.

It's not the cold they store energy for like, say the black bear does. (And while pregnant females do hibernate to give birth) It's the long period without ice they fatten up for, they fast during summer. And they need the rich blubber of marine mammals, terrestial foods may be additional but will not necessarily suffice for a full ice bear diet. There is to my knowledge no indication that any plant/animal that may become more numerous due to global warming are the ones an ice bear can live on. IMO it's just wishful thinking that they will.

Also, this completely ignores the realities of increased human-bear conflict where the bear can only be the loser. Higher bear numbers isn't going to do the species any good if all those bears become trapped on land if the ice sheets they depend on no longer form. Land is where people are, and practically no one wants hungry ice bears roaming their porch. Inbreeding with gizzlies will also be more likely if ice bears become land animals. And considering ice bears actually have only one natural predator, which is other ice bears, getting them land-locked is going to put even lots more pressure on the females to get their cubs to adulthood than it already does.

The climate change alone will not push the ice bear over the edge, but it is IMO a mistake to think it will do them any good in the long run.

Don said:

I've seen the temp data in those two charts in a number of presentations, and it always strikes me how obvious it is that across most of the planet's life it has been almost 10 degrees(C) warmer. Even though there have been a couple of periods with temps around today's, those periods are not the norm.

And note that we're not talking piddly fractions of a degree here, as "climate change" proponents do. We're talking 10 degrees (C).

Based on that information, I'd say serious global warming is a harsh reality, it can be expected to return one day, it apparently has zero, zip, nada to do with humans, and regardless of short-term trends, where we should be concentrating our efforts is in understanding how to survive in a substantially warmer environment.

Given that all of the time span of civilization is a dot at the end of the chart, apparently civilization is not the cause of the global warming to come.

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Sorry, that's a non sequitur.

Just because people weren't around to cause previous climate shifts, does not mean that we are incapable of influencing a climate shift. Besides, I've read studies that suggest that humans and their campfires may have ended the last ice age and as we burn more wood, coal, petroleum it's simply accelerating the process.

Simplest carbon sink, plant trees. Not only are they carbon based life forms and pull CO2 out of the air, they provide shade to reduce solar gain in your house reducing use of energy for air conditioning.

GeorgeK said:

Besides, I've read studies that suggest that humans and their campfires may have ended the last ice age and as we burn more wood, coal, petroleum it's simply accelerating the process.

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Wouldn't there be many, many more campfires before the ice age ever started? Using that logic, the ice age couldn't even start because of the effects of campfires. Plus, isn't it possible that just one year of naturally burning forests during the ice age released more CO2 into the air than the entire 100,000 years of scattered campfires?

Don said:

Based on that information, I'd say serious global warming is a harsh reality, it can be expected to return one day, it apparently has zero, zip, nada to do with humans, and regardless of short-term trends, where we should be concentrating our efforts is in understanding how to survive in a substantially warmer environment.

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There is overwhelming evidence that the climate change we are now seeing is happening at an unprecedented rate and that human activity is exactly what is driving it.

You appear to have bought into the second generation of climate change deniers, who no longer deny it is happening but now simply claim that human activity has nothing to do with it. (Which is utter nonsense and ignores the research and reams of data.)

The second part of the denier agenda is that there's nothing we can do about it anyway, even if it was a man made phenomenon, so there's no point in even trying to deal with the problem.

Basically the same line that Chevron and BP are pushing.