Modeling the Polar Bear Tipping Point

oldseadog says:
May 25, 2010 at 12:50 pm
RHS:
There are lots of animals that hunt man:
Tiger, Lion, Buffalo, Wolf (occasionally), Leopard, Hyena, Wild Dog, Dingo, lots of snakes,………… etc. .
I belive the Tigers & Lions ect. but you need to provide a link for the man eating Buffalo.

gcb says:
May 25, 2010 at 11:46 am
“There’s a reason that Churchill, MB has a problem with bears, and it’s not because they’re throwing seals out with the rest of the garbage.”
Key point. Those polar bears do not have access to that dump anymore. But they used to and that unnatural food supply inflated their population. When they cut that food supply off the results were absolutely predictable. The same thing happened to grizzly bears on a more severe level when they closed the dumps in Yellowstone; that bear population was more dependent on dumps. The same thing happened everywhere where dump-feeding bear populations were cut off from those rich and dependable food supplies.
In Yellowstone the predictable decline of the grizzly population after the dump closures – due to bears rampaging around looking for other human food, inter-bear competition, and starvation – was the excuse the EPA used to list the U.S. continental population as ‘Threatened’ under the ‘Endangered Species Act.’
Now that population has been delisted and has recovered by switching to natural foods – but only after the ‘garbage bear’ population was purged. There are now more grizzly bears in that region than ever, but that includes large areas outside of the park where they were not found earlier.
BUT the average size of those bears is only about two-thirds the size of the dump-fed population, and they reproduce slower. That’s adaptation to the new reality. The AGW gang would no doubt ‘model’ that it means imminent ‘extinction.’
But things are not looking so good for the bears because one of their key natural foods used to be winter-killed elk and elk calves, a real super-feast when the park was so unnaturally over-populated with elk until recently. But in the mid-1990’s they introduced wolves from Canada to Yellowstone and two other areas. Everywhere they have drastically reduced the elk (and moose, deer, even bighorn sheep populations) – by at least 75%, and up to 90% by some estimates so far – leaving less protein for those bears, and wolf packs compete with bears for carcasses and attack them. In the meantime, the exploding wolf population is causing all sorts of other problems in the region, as well as massacering game populations everywhere.
The worst part of this wolf story is that when they were proposing this reintroduction, the enviros, including the government scientists, lied. They said that the wolves would have no significant impact on their prey populations – and used fancy models to ‘prove it.’
Even worse, this wolf population was introduced it was sold as a “non essential experiment” with a target population of about 100 (10 packs) but now there are at least 3,000! Every time somebody – including state governments – has tried to do something about this the enviros sue them, find the right idiot judge , and stop any efforts to control them… until recently. Things may be changing because things are getting so out of control. This past year there were very limited hunting seasons, but so limited as to have no effect. Wolf populations can reproduce at 40% annually.
None of this ever seems to make it to the national media, of course. But it is big news in MT, ID and WY.
And its all about land grabs. Every time the wolves expand to a new area – they are now in Oregon – the enviros behind this project push to declare more areas as ‘Critical Habitat.’ For a shocker, google ‘Rewilding’ for the grand plan.
This is all supported by the junk pseudoscience called Conservation Biology, the twisted sister of IPCC style global climatology.
If you go to Yellowstone this year, enjoy the thrill of seeing wolves but don’t expect to see many elk or any of their other prey. And soon it will become much harder to see wolves because their population has already peaked and is crashing due to, what else, insufficient prey. In the future, this will stabilize at low wolf and low elk (etc.) populations, which park visitors won’t be too thrilled with and which you can bet will be blamed on something else… maybe/probably AGW?

Polar bear populations might increase if the “modelers” just followed the old joke where the Texan is so irate that he’s not a resident of the largest state, he travels to Alaska to become an Alaskan. The residents there tell him that to become an official Alaskan he must do three things: (1) drink a small keg of beer in 12 hours, (2) wrestle a polar bear, and (3) make love to the ugliest native American he can find. The Texan decides to tackle the beer challenge first. He succeeds. He then wanders off in a drunken stupor. No one seeds him for two days, when he comes crawling back into camp terribly beat up and bleeding everywhere. When the Alaskans ask him what’s wrong, he says “Nothing. Now where’s this native American you want me to wrestle?”

Is the tipping point robust?

I cant help seeing a religious side to all this. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that with the downwards trend in traditional religion there is concomitant rise in “environmental” religion. In traditional religion man is given a special place in the universe by virtue of its separate creation from animals. With the demise of organized religion there is a feeling of “loss” of that special relationship. I believe that atheistic man in now filling that gap by inventing a purpose to life, a higher role, by again marking out that separation between man and the rest of “creation”. We have given ourselves the sacred role to save the polar bears and the whales etc. We are the self-appointed custodians of the planet. It is our special duty to preserve all the current range of species on the planet without change. We must stop evolution, stop climate change, reverse technological evolution. It’s sort of like re-inventing Eden – only this time getting it right.
What I’m suggesting here, without benefit of research grants, is that global warming causes rational people to lose their marbles.

So the problem seems to be that because of recent favorable conditions, the polar bear population has recently expanded to a point that is un-sustainable.
And they could suffer, and more needlessly die than necessary.
Here’s a thought.
Open up polar bear hunting season again.

That one picture proves the paper BS. That bear is obviously NOT fasting.

Ahhh. The magic threshold.
And if the threshold is a balmy 50 degree winter, will the model be released?

How many tree rings did they kill to publish this story?

Photographic evidence that hot peppers are now growing naturally in the Arctic.

It’s hard to measure so to get a more accurate picture we modelled it. Directly modelled it in fact. I mean what’s better than direct modelling?

Psycho, slasher movies, and CAGW.
What is the connection?

“That is, as the climate warms, we may not see any substantial effect on polar bear reproduction and survival for a while, up until some threshold is passed, at which point reproduction and survival will decline dramatically and very rapidly.”

Ah, yes, the Freddy Kreuger/Norman Bates bogeyman threshold, that comes at us, out of the dark, who knows where, who knows when.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Could it be they have been softening us all up with slasher movies, ever since Alfred Hitchcock?
At least we do have Chicken Little Global Warming (CLGW). And The Boy Who Cried Wolf Global Warming (TBWCWGW). Without town criers, where would civilization be? There is no defense for CLGW or TBWCWGW, just a good Civil Defense System.
Once the Soviet bogeyman was dead, in 1990, we had to have a new bogeyman. And we got one, just in time.