by John Goetz
OK, I know the catchy headline and picture of Hannibal Lecter got you worrying a little about that neighbor of yours who is stocking up on fava beans and chianti. But the headline is misleading, as is this one posted yesterday (September 23) at cnn.com:
Polar bears resort to cannibalism as Arctic ice shrinks
By Marsha Walton, CNN
I was looking for a good, sensational read. I really thought the article would be about the many ways in which global warming was causing cannibalism amongst polar bears in the arctic. I searched for the heart-wrenching stories about how increasing temperatures forced mom to bop pops on the head when he was not looking and toss daddy-kibble to the kids to keep them from starving to death. Instead, the story began as follows:
Summer is over in the northern hemisphere, but it’s been another chilling season for researchers who study Arctic sea ice.
“It’s definitely a bad report. We did pick up little bit from last year, but this is over 30 percent below what used to be normal,” said Walt Meier, a research scientist with the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.
This past summer, the Arctic sea ice dwindled to its second lowest level. Arctic sea ice is usually 1 to 3 meters, or as much as 9 feet thick. It grows during autumn and winter and shrinks in the spring and summer.
Scientists have monitored sea ice conditions for about 50 years with the help of satellites. Changes in the past decade have been alarming to climate researchers and oceanographers.
“It is the second lowest on record. … If anything, it is reinforcing the long-term trend. We are still losing the ice cover at a rate of 10 percent per decade now, and that is quite an increase from five years ago,” Meier said. “We are still heading toward an ice cover that is going to melt completely in the summertime in the Arctic.”
Huh? This was not at all what I expected. Where was the blood and gore?
Then I noticed something in the upper left part of the page. Those rascals at CNN got me again!
It was a CNN Planet in Peril story! Sensationalist journalism at its best, but without all the fact-checking of the National Enquirer.
So did the story ever mention polar bear cannibalism? You betcha, right near the end:
“The Arctic sea ice melt is a disaster for the polar bears,” according to Kassie Siegel, staff attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity. “They are dependent on the Arctic sea ice for all of their essential behaviors, and as the ice melts and global warming transforms the Arctic, polar bears are starving, drowning, even resorting to cannibalism because they don’t have access to their usual food sources.”
Scientists have noticed increasing reports of starving Arctic polar bears attacking and feeding on one another in recent years. In one documented 2004 incident in northern Alaska, a male bear broke into a female’s den and killed her.
Hey, what was news in 2004 is still headline-worthy today, right?
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Maybe the big guy was rebuffed by the female polar bear….hardly a case for global warming….*sheeez*
Yet another example of advocacy journalism. Once the purview of the supermarket tabloids, it’s gone mainstream in a big way; in this case, to further the cause of environmental activism. Since this year’s melt did not break last year’s record, they threw in a bit to shock, which only works for the uninformed, since cannabalism is rather common in the natural world. It’s only mankind’s ethical concerns that proscribe such practices within our species; we like to think that we would never stoop to such behaviour. Well, here’s news for CNN — it’s not just polar bears that engage in cannabalism. Other bears engage in that practice. Mother bears in these other species also are quite protective of their cubs, lest the male bear get their claws on their cubs, an easy and tempting target for a quick meal under any circumstances.
““It’s definitely a bad report. We did pick up little bit from last year, but this is over 30 percent below what used to be normal,” said Walt Meier, a research scientist with the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.
This past summer, the Arctic sea ice dwindled to its second lowest level. ”
Funny how they do not mention that their “normal” is the arbitrary base period of 1979 -2000.
Sorry, “Tom in Tom in Florida” is just a mistype, thank god there are not two of me.
Snowfalcon brings up a good point. The polar bear is a rather recent variation in the ursine family – roughly 100,000 to 250,000 years ago.
However, the range of the divergence date from the brown (grizzly) bear indicates the transition of the polar bear could have initially began during the Riss glacial which would mean polar bears survived the Riss-Würm interglacial and continued transition during the recent Würm glacial. I suspect they will survive the present Holocene interglacial, as well.
Here is a brief summery of their development:
http://www.geol.umd.edu/~candela/pbevol.html
OT – Interestingly it would appear both the development of modern H. sapiens and U. maritimus were driven by the need to adapt to glaciation.
So Kent Brockman is at CNN now?
“Professor, without knowing precisely what the danger is, would you say it’s time for our viewers to crack each other’s heads open and feast on the goo inside?”
“Yes. Yes I would, Kent.”
snowfalcon (04:44:46) :
Dee beat me to it, her link includes “As late as 10,000 years ago, polar bears still had a high frequency of brown-bear-type molars. Only recently have they developed polar-bear-type teeth.”
Given it’s such a species in transition, I’d expect it to be one of the most evolutionarily adaptable critters on the planet. Evolution isn’t a very pretty process, at least if you’re among the unfit.
[…] Read More: wattsupwiththat.com Tags: alaska, CNN, global warming, news, polar bear, Recycling Related Posts […]
Its the same as the “seven polar bears seen swimming in the open ocean” story.
No fact-checking in that story either as only one bear was seen swimming any significant distance from the ice or land. The other six sightings started in June (when the ice had not melted yet) and extended to bears on ice floes close to shore in early August. The picture accompanying the story was a stock photo taken years before by the WWF of a bear standing in shallow water near the shore (being terrified by the WWF helicopter.)
One might speculate (and I admit I don’t know of any studies off-hand) that the survival pressures due to the extremity of the arctic environment have selected for a greater ability to adapt in the native species.
If H. sapiens has shown the greatest ability to adapt of all the biota which arose during the late Pleistocene, perhaps we will discover that U. maritimus is penultimate?
Jerker Andersson (04:33:56) :
“I saw a wasp that ate a fly this summer. What is that a sign of?”
Superior firepower.
Right now it is about 14 degrees warmer in Enterprise, Oregon. Last year the low temp early in the morning was 26 degrees F. This is causing me to stop cannibalizing my wood pile. This is a good thing this global warming. Or at least the Wallowa County warming this week. And since it is warmer, I can say it is climate, not weather we are talking about. I do remember that warm is climate, cold is noisy weather. But I don’t care if I am now saying “global warming”, and neither does my less freezing behind. Leif and I must be near the same age. We care more about staying warm. The bears can fend for themselves.
Warming Island is still on CNN’s website………
The usually sceptical Daily Telegraph is reporting methane plumes under the arctic. Just thought you’d be interested, it’s not just about the Bison.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/09/25/eamethane125.xml
Polar bears, smoler bears–they’ll be fine. This guy, “Walt Meier,” needs something serious to do. He sits around and watches ice melt–the more that melts, the more excited he gets.
As for the journalism, it’s reaching. Here’s the stretch:
“Scientists have noticed increasing reports of starving Arctic polar bears attacking and feeding on one another in recent years. In one documented 2004 incident in northern Alaska, a male bear broke into a female’s den and killed her.”
One documented case is evidence for increasing reports? Shouldn’t old Walt, the ice melt gazer, be seeing a lot more of this going on or is he too focused on the ice?
Drudge finally has the NASA conference up:
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080924193222.3r9aw25a&show_article=1
The cooling that’s {temporarily} masking the warming is not masking the warming as much this week, and will be masking the warming a little less next week, as you will have highs in the 80s.
http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/forecast/MapClick.php?site=pdt&textField1=45.4253&textField2=-117.2761&smap=1
So enjoy it while you can, because pesky global masking usually returns in October, while the REAL Climate Change, which is always warming, goes to, um…
the oceans…
or someplace.
sorry…
that last message was for Pamela, with the link to the NWS forecast for Enterprise.
Haven’t polar bears always behaved like this? Male bears are known to frequently stalk and kill young cubs. It’s just a matter of what food is available most easily at a particular time. This behavior is hardly unique to polar bears and is seen in many species.
That’s the problem with so many of today’s *nature lovers* — they have no clue about nature! They have some idea in their head that animals are pure but man is a virus. All animal species expand to fill their niche. All animal species reproduce at a level that’s unsustainable — they overpopulate to the level where there’s not enough food and the overpopulation dies off of starvation or migrates somewhere else. Nature appears to be in balance but it’s really a see-saw that bounces back in forth from population boom to bust.
BTW: Do you know polar bears eat baby seals, too?
As soon as the Arctic Ice Melt stopped this season the propaganda machines kicked in to make sure to drown out the reality of the situation. When the monthly average came out last month there was a flurry of reports, and the environmental machine is not going to let that happen again.
Every network has shown or will show a Arctic Ice Story this week, I even saw a guy standing in front of a calving glacier, I think in Sweden I will have to check, saying that global warming causes the ice to break off.
At the very beginning they do mention that it has been happening for thousands of years but it is glossed over pretty fast and the end statement is man is causing it. The order you say things is important, people take away the last sentence.
Does anyone know the energy loss/gain comparison between multi-year sea ice and non-multi-year sea ice areas in polar regions would look like?
If I think of multi year sea ice as clothing and non-sea ice areas as exposed skin then when the sun goes down the exposed skin cools off a lot more than the unexposed skin. The more sea water is exposed to polar cold the more energy the planet looses. Multi-year Sea ice promotes global warming open water and first year sea ice promotes planetary cooling. First year sea ice melts and minus 1.6 degrees c while multi-year sea ice melts at 0 degrees ( The salt has been leached out of it).
Bil Banks (06:46:59) :
The usually sceptical Daily Telegraph is reporting methane plumes under the arctic. Just thought you’d be interested, it’s not just about the Bison.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/09/25/eamethane125.xml
I found the following quote from the Telegraph article to be telling:
“Although it is likely that methane has been released continuously for 15,000 years, it is not known how much the process has been accelerated by recent climate changes or how much the releases themselves will contribute to global warming.”
Harold,
We have what we call fire-ice lakes here in Northern Canada, you can chop a hole in the ice in the winter and light the gas on fire.
Resources Canada
“By most estimates, gas hydrate is the largest global reservoir of organic carbon, greater than all conventional hydrocarbons”
“It is interesting that gas is observed escaping to the surface through some arctic lakes that, because of their warm temperature, provide underlying holes in otherwise continuous permafrost.”
OMG lets pave over those lakes right away! Would not want any methane getting out like it has for the last 10,000 years.
Polar bears resort to cannibalism as Arctic ice shrinks
Polar Bears subsist on polar ice. Who knew?
“Changes in the past decade have been alarming to climate researchers and oceanographers.”
Nature has characteristically surprised scientists with the unexpected. Now Nature is alarming the scientists.
Mother Nature, it is not nice to fool the scientists.
Hi Harold,
Although I don’t visit often and haven’t read enough on Anthony’s site to know whether this has been discussed elsewhere, the release of methane in Siberia and other tundra-like areas has been touted over the last few months by the BBC (by the same prof who did the recent BBC Climate Wars whitewash) as the real proof for the AGW tipping point having been reached.
Goes like this: man creates CO2, AGW occurs, methane trapped in permafrost released as perfmafrost defrosts due to AGW, methane stronger GHG than CO2, greater feedback, runaway AGW.
Apologies for the simplistic nature of my explanation. Don’t pretend to be a scientist or understand much of what I read. But my sense of smell remains acute.