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posted by Fnord666 on Friday November 24 2017, @06:55PM   Printer-friendly
from the beary-important-news dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A boatload of tourists in the far eastern Russian Arctic thought they were seeing clumps of ice on the shore, before the jaw-dropping realisation that some 200 polar bears were roaming on the mountain slope.

"It was a completely unique situation," said Alexander Gruzdev, director of the Wrangel Island nature reserve where the encounter in September happened. "We were all gobsmacked, to be honest."

The bears had come to feast on the carcass of a bowhead whale that washed ashore, later resting around the food source. The crowd included many families, including two mothers trailed by a rare four cubs each, Gruzdev told AFP.

Climate change means ice, where polar bears are most at home, is melting earlier in the year and so polar bears have to spend longer on land, scientists say.

This might wow tourists but means the bears, more crammed together on coasts and islands, will eventually face greater competition for the little food there is on land.

Locals are also at risk from hungry animals venturing into villages.

Wrangel Island, off the coast of Russia's Chukotka in the northeast, is where polar bears rest after ice melts in early-August until November, when they can leave land to hunt for seals.

It is also considered the birthing centre for the species, with the highest density of maternity dens in the entire Arctic, Gruzdev said.

"A whale is a real gift for them," he said. "An adult whale is several tens of tonnes" that many bears can feed on for several months.

Studies have shown that, compared with 20 years ago, polar bears now spend on average a month longer on Wrangel Island because "ice is melting earlier and the ice-free period is longer," said Eric Regehr, from the University of Washington, the lead American scientist on the US-Russian collaborative study of Wrangel Island polar bears.

Changing ice conditions could also be responsible for the increasing number of bears flocking there, Regehr said.

This autumn, the number of bears observed was 589, far exceeding previous estimates of 200-300, he said, calling it "anomalously high".

[...] "We cannot stop climate change, but we can sort out the situation on the shore and make life easier for the bears," he said, referring to measures such as bear patrols to minimise conflict with humans.

"With changes in nature, that has to be attended to."


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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday November 25 2017, @02:12PM (2 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday November 25 2017, @02:12PM (#601378) Journal
    What is the point of that post? You still have the large error before 1850 which has been completely glossed over. You still have the large biases today towards playing up global warming which may be in large part caused by those multi-decadal variations. What you don't have is a demonstration that justifies restructuring our societies at a global level to deal with global warming at the cost of greater poverty of its people.

    I agree that there is global warming today. I don't agree that we have evidence that we need to do enormously costly things about it right now.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 25 2017, @02:28PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 25 2017, @02:28PM (#601384)

    Well then your scientific literacy is still bad, and your approach to the topic is incredibly biased. Sounds more like you got called out, can't refute the massive evidence just cited, so you're turning tail like a little bitch but snarling back a last word. Sad.

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday November 25 2017, @04:13PM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday November 25 2017, @04:13PM (#601417) Journal

      Sounds more like you got called out,

      Not much point to it. Once again, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Not fallacies as far as the eye can see. I don't mind being called out. If there's someone out there with serious evidence, feel free to share. But I do mind being called out by bullshit.

      Even basic stuff is hard to get right. But it doesn't help, for example, to pull out a graph as OriginalOwner did, without understanding the problems of the graph or the glaring biases it has (such as not mention errors in those estimates). xkcd is usually pretty good, but that was some fail there.

      Nor do we even know that global warming is bad for polar bears. Just look at the premise of the story. A massive number of polar bears are found and this is support for the claim that the polar bears are under stress because they're allegedly spending more time on land than sea where they hypothetically are more at home. This whole story is presented out of context.

      Maybe polar bears are even more at home on land than ice (particularly, when there's a large whale carcass to be eaten)? Maybe there's a population surge of polar bears because there's been a number of good years? It's all spun as bad for the bear. This is classic confirmation bias at work.