Excerpts: from the Sunday Times: Polar bear is a ‘new’ species
by Jonathan Leake
Polar bears may have come into existence only 150,000 years ago, when trapped brown bears had to adapt to an ice age
Polar bears may have come into existence only 150,000 years ago, when brown bears were trapped by an ice age and had to adapt quickly to survive, scientists have found.
The suggestion follows the discovery of the jawbone of an animal that died up to 130,000 years ago, making it the oldest polar bear fossil found. The bone has yielded new insights into the origins of Earth’s largest land predator.
One is the possibility that polar bears owe their existence not only to past climate change, including ice ages, but have also survived at least one long period of global warming.
The bone was discovered at Poolepynten on the Arctic island of Svalbard by Professors Olafur Ingolfsson, of the University of Iceland, and Oystein Wiig, of the University of Oslo.
…
In a paper they said: “Brown bears of the ABC islands may be descendants of ancient ursids [bears] that diverged from other lineages of brown bears and subsequently founded the polar bear lineage.” This view is expected to get support from new research, out this week, based on DNA extracted from the Poolepynten jawbone.
It means polar bears have already survived a global warming that affected the northern hemisphere from 130,000 to 115,000 years ago, when the Greenland ice sheet and the Arctic ice cap were smaller than now. Professor Chris Stringer, of the Natural History Museum in London, an expert in ice ages, said: “Early polar bears would not have had all the specialisations of modern animals and we know nothing about their behaviour.
“Living through a warm period back then does not mean they are resilient to climate change now.”
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I can bearly stand these stories.
http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2010/02/the_oregon_zoo_hopes_to_educat.html
“a typical day at the Oregon Zoo’s polar bear exhibit — a place with a mission that, in this era of melting ice caps, increasingly goes beyond simple care and feeding. Today, keepers use the polar bears to spread the message that stemming climate change begins at home. They try to impress on visitors that small changes anyone can make may help slow or reverse global warming and save wild polar bears’ disappearing habitat.
But in 2008, according to Polar Bears International, arctic sea ice shrank to its second-lowest level since scientists began satellite measuring in 1979. The bears’ habitat is melting away.
Zoos offered help, and in the past couple years, keepers have met with field biologists, government agencies, industry representatives and various conservation groups to respond to the crisis.
Keeper talks now branch out to the basics of sustainable practices: Saving energy means fewer fossil fuels are burned, which means less carbon dioxide — a key source of human-caused climate change — enters the atmosphere.
Christie explains Earth-friendly lifestyle changes she’s made to show children and their parents how easy it can be: hanging her clothes to dry, for instance, instead of using a dryer. She hands out stickers emblazoned with a polar bear’s face; they read, “Lights out! Fight global warming.” And she asks kids if they always remember to turn their computer games off when they finish.
“I always try to give them a tool,” Christie says, “something they can do locally to help polar bears in the wild.”
When keepers finished their hygiene and medical tasks they opened gates to the bears’ outdoor world and tossed them an empty plastic Coca-Cola barrel, still smelling of the syrupy sweet soda. Conrad and Tasul took turns chewing on its edges and trying to crush it, pushing hard with their front paws. The move looks just like one their wild counterparts make when trying to collapse a seal den in the melting ice at the top of the world.”
“Living through a warm period back then does not mean they are resilient to climate change now.”
__________________
Ippso facto cocomo…
people, who also lived through a warm period of two, may not be resilient to climate change now, especially when you remember that we are NOT Homo Sapian ‘Cromagnum’ peoples, we is Homo Sapian Sapian peoples. We have only been around 50-60 thousand years. We have never lived through a complete Ice Age/Interglacial cycle of 120K years.
In other words –
Donate Everything You Own To ‘The Cause’ c/o Al Gore. Com
Then – bend over as far as you can and kiss… goodbye.
Got it. Global cooling created the polar bears. Then global warming failed to kill them. Then it cooled again and that didn’t kill them either. Then it started warming again…. which might kill them again even thought it didn’t last time. Oh wait, there was no warming period in NA, that was confined to Europe. That’s why there’s no polar bears in Europe, the local to Europe global warming killed them. Proof positive that medieval warm period was only in Europe, otherwise they would have polar bears.
All seem so obvious when you stand back and look at the big picture.
Sorry for being OT:
2007 IPCC WG3 is now coming under the microscope, and what is being found is far from pretty. Loads of gray literature, and ambiguities made fact.
Richard Tol shows that it’s much more than just a few minor mistakes in AR4 – it’s rotten meat throughout.
http://klimazwiebel.blogspot.com/2010/02/richard-tol-on-wg3-of-ipcc.html
Excerpt from: http://www3.hi.is/~oi/svalbard_geology.htm
“During early-mid Holocene, Svalbard glaciers were probably smaller than at present, and the early Holocene climate was considerably milder. Some of the present cirque- and valley glaciers probably did not exist prior to ca. 2500 BP. Glaciers expanded considerably during the so-called Little Ice Age, which culminated on Svalbard during the first decade of the 20th Century. Since then most glaciers have retreated, probably as a consequence of a considerable summer warming occurring in the period after ca. 1915. “
We can no longer take any article serious that carries the alarmist message of “climate change”. Scrap it. It’s un-bearable.
We can no longer take any article serious that carries alarmist content like nature being “out of control”. Like this example about the Chili earth quake:
http://scienceblogs.com/eruptions/2010/02/chilean_earthquake_fallout_msn.php
And this example about the Haiti flash floods:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8541361.stm
Buckle up for a hefty season. Out of control weather events are the new bate to hook us up for climate legislation and taxes. The green machine still has not stopped.
MSM, politicians and the alarmists among the scientific community don’t care about their reputations.
They rather support the vested interests that will bring us the new, happy, bright and green economy!
They have not learned a bit from ClimateGate and in response we should go for a zero tolerance policy in regard to all the crap they put into the world.
If we don’t neutralize these freaks and bring them into the courts, they will regard our failure to address their treason as an encouragement to continue their criminal schemes.
In short, if we fail to address them know, we will face a much bigger problem in the future. Much, much bigger.
Another “Him a lyans” exaggeration.
Steve Goddard (10:53:06) :
Paraphrasing the EPA –
“The fact that populations have quadrupled in the last 50 years does not mean that they are not going extinct.”
Excuse me while I clear the tears from my eyes.
Maybe we should put the EPA on the endangered list: Thier statement activity has quadrupled, but that doens’t mean they are not going extinct.
It appears to me that Stringer is correct. If it is true that early polar bears do not have the specializations of modern polar bears, then it would be erroneous to conclude on the basis of this discovery that the modern polar bear could survive in a warm climate like the one that existed between 115,000 and 130,000 BP. It is quite possibly true that modern polar bears could avoid extinction given a warming of the climate, but it does not logically follow from this discovery so long as the initial assumption of further specialization is sound.
Polar bears ‘thriving as the Arctic warms up’
Polar bear population: 1950 = 5,000 and 2005 = 20,000+
More un-bearable news:
Global warming Climateers were all caught red-handed trying to shove fake climate data, disinformation, propaganda, and lies down humanity’s throat.
What the “cyber-emergency” bill is really about and how it relates to Climategate!
Do we really want to debate these guy’s? We should fight them!
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/20505
Steve Goddard (10:53:06) :
Paraphrasing the EPA –
“The fact that populations have quadrupled in the last 50 years does not mean that they are not going extinct.”
*******************************************
Isn’t it obvious? Today’s bears are rotten bears. Older bears could adapt to climate change because they were more robust.
““Professor Chris Stringer, of the Natural History Museum in London, an expert in ice ages, said: “Early polar bears would not have had all the specialisations of modern animals and we know nothing about their behaviour.
Living through a warm period back then does not mean they are resilient to climate change now.”
Scary comment from someone who is a mucky-muck at a natural history museum, but not so perhaps, if the fudgebucket is an anthropologist. Biological history and its mechanics were never their strong points. Most anthropologists I have met or read were really just sociologists.
If the current crop of polar bears are scion of the browns, then way back they would have the ice-edge survivability of a brown, expanding their range onto the ice as selection favoured certain traits for those trying to breed there. Traits selected for living on ice are not mutually exclusive of those for living off ice. As modern polar bears have shown, they are not obligate dwellers of ice sheets, but it is a comfortable niche, one their cousins are not so competitive in.
It might come as surprise to Prof. Stringer that the ice ages didn’t just “happen”. There is a reasonably long timeline betwen advances and retreats. Polar bears will do now as they did then – live the edge with genetic forays that keep them in the competitive sweetspot, as will the browns. Interfertility is both the secret and the key to the survivibility of both. Gene exchange allows the polar bear to remain plastic in an environment that has significant extremes.
DeNihilist
The most dangerous teaching of Darwin was that species are merely a taxonomic human convenience. We draw lines where often there are none. The hybrid polar/ brown bear shot was fertile. In the old days before the definition of species evolved- this would imply that brown bears and polar bears are the same species.
Just to reiterate in a nutshell: Polar bears have survived the Holocene Optimum, Roman warm period and Medieval warm period and I indicated that today they are thriving; which makes the statement –
quite suspect.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/polar-bear-numbers.jpg
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1545036/Polar-bears-thriving-as-the-Arctic-warms-up.html
Just wait to they find the “jawbone of an ass” to slay all you denialists!
;~p
“Climate change has been, and will always be a primary driver of evolutionary change. Witness the development of hominids for example.”
This statement is not correct. Climate change is not a primary driver. Evolutionary change has more to do with adaptability through hybrid vigour to the boundaries (for the species) of a stable, or very slowly changing, climate. It is more about niche exploitation in a micro-environment than a macro-environment defined by climate change.
Hominids developed through processes of competitive exclusion and grossly, reproductive isolation, rather than climate change. Most of the reproductive isolation was geographically driven originally, but ultimately became statistically cultural for the major races.
Living through a visit from my mother-in-law two years ago doesn’t mean that I am resilient to her visiting now.
Maybe that will fly.
Yeah, when the antarctic ice sheet melts!
Darwin stated that he thought that whales had evolved from bears that had returned to the ocean. The latest genetic evidence would suggest that that is at least partially correct.
You have to ask yourself, could all that land-based CO2 returning to the ocean have caused an ice age? I’ll need a £50M grant, tenure and three research students to prove it.
Talking of resilience:
Polar bear swims 200 miles!
while another is clocked swimming 100 km
“Early polar bears would not have had all the specialisations of modern animals and we know nothing about their behaviour.”
….Or…..
Modern polar bears may not have all the specialisations of early animals and we know nothing about their behaviour.
It is interesting that many scientists still feel it is necessary to throw in a comment about global warming to be PC. I have lost count of all the science articles, some with sound findings, that will say their findings could relate to global warming. It may have been they would not have received money for the study unless they gave lip service to AGW. And those studies that mentioned that the dire findings could possibly relate to AGW where the studies published on the front page of my hometown paper the SF Chronicle (aka comical). It is no wonder the public is losing trust in what scientist have to say.
I think I got it, polar bears might go extinct because present warming is so unprecedent and so fast and so … antropogenic, that they are all going to die. pooooooor little white bears, they are so cute … hell! where do I have to give money to save them? I need to do something! we have to!
Living through a warm period back then does not mean they are resilient to climate change now
Nor does it mean you will not have a new bear species with climate change now.
Is stupidity a contagious illness?
“It appears to me that Stringer is correct. If it is true that early polar bears do not have the specializations of modern polar bears, then it would be erroneous to conclude on the basis of this discovery that the modern polar bear could survive in a warm climate like the one that existed between 115,000 and 130,000 BP. ”
Bringing it forward to a more recent event, wasn’t there an abrupt change of climate 12,500 years ago when the last Ice Age ended? The modern day polar bear appears to have survived it quite well.
What was the temperature swing at the end of the last Ice Age compared to best projections for the current period of warming? (Ahem, after we get past the next 2-3 decades of cooling that have been widely predicted.)