I don’t know about you, but I’m sick to death of hearing about the polar bears as a proxy for Arctic ice issues. Yesterday, Steve Goddard pointed out the ramifications related to polar bears of NSIDC’s Dr. Walt Meier’s part two on Arctic Sea Ice saying: Polar Bears Survived the Ice Free Arctic
Today, we have new research from the University of Alaska (and they should know) that shows polar bears did just fine in warmer periods of the past.
“This is verifying that the polar bear lived through at least one warming period,” Talbot says. “The Eemian was a very hot period, and polar bears survived it,” she says.
So next time you have somebody sniffling and tearing up over polar bears and sea ice, show them this research and hand them a Kleenex. Now, they can worry about the polar bears eating hippos in the future. (see story)
This column is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer at the institute.
An ancient jawbone has led scientists to believe that polar bears survived a period thousands of years ago that was warmer than today.
Sandra Talbot of the USGS Alaska Science Center in Anchorage was one of 14 scientists who teamed to write a paper based on a polar bear jawbone found amid rocks on a frigid island of the Svalbard Archipelago. The scientists determined the bear was an adult male that lived and died somewhere between 130,000 to 110,000 years ago, and that bear was similar to polar bears today. Charlotte Lindqvist of the University at Buffalo in New York was the lead author on the paper, published in the March 2010 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
An Icelandic researcher in 2004 found a fossilized lower jawbone, in excellent condition and complete with a canine tooth, on a narrow spit of land on the far west edge of Norway’s Svalbard Archipelago. It was a stunning find because there aren’t many fossils of polar bears around. The largest bears in the world spend most of their lives on sea ice, so they often die there, and their remains either sink or get scavenged by something else.
With bone and tooth in hand, scientists got to work with the latest techniques for finding the age of formerly living creatures and determining their genetic backgrounds. The latter is the specialty of Sandra Talbot. She is a research wildlife geneticist who earned her doctorate degree at the University of Alaska Fairbanks by helping determine that the mitochondrial DNA of brown bears on Admiralty, Baranof and Chichagof islands of Southeast Alaska is more closely related to that of polar bears than to the DNA of other brown bears.
Talbot says the evidence of a polar bear from 130,000 years ago shows that the creatures somehow survived conditions warmer than they face today.
“This is verifying that the polar bear lived through at least one warming period,” Talbot says. “The Eemian was a very hot period, and polar bears survived it,” she says.
During the Eemian, about 125,000 years ago, the planet was warm enough that hippos lived where London is now. Polar bears, now adapted to eating seals that live only near sea ice, somehow made it through a few thousand years when there may not have been much sea ice, if any existed at all.
“It gives us hope that they survived that stage,” Talbot says. “It does make you think about refugia more.”
“Refugia” are places that polar bears may survive without ice. The Svalbard Archipelago may have been one of those places. Biologists today think polar bears would have a difficult time living on land, because other species like the grizzly bear could outcompete them.
The warm period of the Eemian might have come at a time when the polar bear wasn’t such an ice specialist, Talbot says.
“We can’t predict whether the polar bear is too far out (in its evolution towards a life on ice),” she says. “It’s interesting that there are a few examples of hybridization (between polar bears and brown bears). That’s something worth watching.”
And maybe polar bears have been trying to adapt to life on land, but one species has blocked that avenue of evolution. Polar bears that wander onto land, especially near a human settlement, tend to get shot. And humans — who didn’t wander out of Africa until about 45,000 years ago — weren’t present on the edge of the sea ice when polar bears first made it their home.
“We weren’t impacting them then the way we are now,” Talbot says.
Though the polar bear perhaps prospered through hot times in the past, what they have in store ahead may be their greatest challenge ever.
“We’re going into a very similar period of time, but it’s generally thought that this is going to be warmer than (the last great warm period),” Talbot says.
Source: http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF20/2018.html
Ben U.: July 15, 2010 at 6:54 pm
The Eemian stage was recognized from bore holes in a bed that somebody called, in French, the “Système Eémien,” after the Dutch river Eem. I’m glad to know that the two e’s aren’t pronounced as two syllables, but I’m still wondering whether I should pronounce them like an English double e or instead like a French é or Dutch double e, which would come out more or less like an English long a. I can’t find the pronunciation anywhere. I even tried Google video, hoping to find a recorded lecture on interglacials. I mean, imagine mentioning the Eemian and somebody saying hah, ya can’t even pronounce it!
Please, would somebody tell me how to pronounce “Eemian”?
When in doubt, go with the original derivation. Since it’s named after a Dutch river, go with the Dutch pronunciation. After all, everyone uses the German “th” when pronouncing “Neanderthal” — right?
Oh, wait.
“The author writes, “And humans – who didn’t wander out of Africa until about 45,000 years ago – …””
Yeah, that is why I heard on the news last week about newly a discovered set of ancient human tools in England that dated almost 1,000,000 years old. Other people have the human exodus from Africa first happening 1.8 million years ago.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/jul/07/first-humans-britain-stone-tools
[REPLY – He means Homo sapiens. Homo erectus was bumming around outside of Africa long before HSS evolved. They were tool and fire users. So far as I know, the Australopithicenes never made it out of Africa. OTOH, I have read that HSH, HSN, and even HSS were well out of Africa by 60,000 ya. maybe there’s new scholarship on that one. ~ Evan]
@899 Maybe we can replace ‘When pigs fly’ with ‘When i see Hippo’s in London’ to outragious claims by the warmists?
” Shevva says:
July 16, 2010 at 12:58 am
@899 Maybe we can replace ‘When pigs fly’ with ‘When i see Hippo’s in London’ to outragious claims by the warmists?”
Well according to the Alarmists, the Hippos will have to compete with Polar bears as global warming will cause the North Atlantic Conveyor to shut down and cause glacial conditions across the whole of Northern Europe.
That is the problem with the Alarmist camp. CO2 will cause extreme warming AND extreme cooling and more droughts and floods and therefore, any change in weather is attributable to man-made climate change and this becomes a hypothesis which cannot be disproven. Whatever change happens is caused by man. It is not falsifiable, therefore is NOT scientific.
Hippos in the Thames?
Yeah we can do that! After all, we already had a Lady Polar Bear and her cute cub in the Thames!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2009/jan/26/conservation-poles
I think the best thing for the Polar Bears would be to boost their self esteem.
Why don’t we set up a fund to pay for all the greenies to go to Spitzbergen or Hudson Bay and give those bears a good hug! I’ll chip in for sure!
“Refugia” are places that polar bears may survive without ice.
Since they hunt on dry land quite as well as they hunt on the ice, most of the Northern Hemisphere is one vast refugium.
It also begs the question why didn’t polar bears die off from some malaria-like tropical disease that they would not have had any immunity against?
Gail Combs says:
July 15, 2010 at 6:59 pm Check out
Global Diversity Treaty:
Thanks Gail
“We’re going into a very similar period of time, but it’s generally thought that this is going to be warmer than (the last great warm period),” Talbot says.
Too bad she felt the need to add that completely unscientific statement. Being part of the CAGW/CC establishment, though, I suppose she had to. Keeping the funding gravy train rolling along for as long as possible is, after all, a huge priority. Science is secondary. One must have ones priorities straight.
We already know polar bears survived whatever the climate was in the past.
You may be surprised that I, too, am heartily sick of everybody going on about Polar bears in the Arctic, as if they were the only animals there.
I think part of the mistake people make is that they are not in the strictly scientific sense a distinct “species” at all. They are a pale furred variety of the “Brown Bear” which includes the North American Grizzlie. From the PBS “Nature” program web site:
As a variety of a very adaptable animal, I would imagine that even if their numbers were to dwindle, some populations of Polars will be able to adapt to a lack of Summer sea ice by varying their diet and interbreeding with neighbouring populations of Grizzlies. Either that or they will die out completely with other, more omnivorous, Browns moving in to fill the evolutionary niche left behind. No doubt, given a few hundred thousand years, if the ice returns, those Grizzlies might develop paler coats and a taste for Seal meat again!
I find it difficult to understand why the Warmists use the Polar bear as their poster-child for the imagined perils of a slighty warmer world. These creatures seem quite able to survive in a huge range of climate types and temperatures by hunting and by scavenging; the only factor that has diminished their numbers is not the presence of Man per se, but the presence of Man equipped with weapons, Man who absolutely has to display large bear rugs in his residence. Having casually observed Polar bears in zoos located in very temperate climes, I am convinced that, if a Polar bear were to be released in the English, North American or, indeed, any countryside where other animals can survive, Pb would survive just fine without ice. That may be a little rough on any other quadruped or biped that got too near to Pb, however.
And the final statement in the article just had to inject the usual Warmist forcast that academics seem required to employ as caveats to continue funding.
Mike M: July 16, 2010 at 4:24 am
It also begs the question why didn’t polar bears die off from some malaria-like tropical disease that they would not have had any immunity against?
Malaria isn’t a tropical disease — the anopheles mosquito is quite happy living in the Arctic. The worst malarial outbreak of modern times happened in Siberia, with thirty thousand deaths in Arkhangelsk alone, which is right on the Arctic Circle.
I’ve said on other posts that if the ice disappeared, the polar bears’ hunting paradigm changes from a two dimensional surface to a linear surface – the seals have to come ashore and are easier to catch. I believe it also possible that seals in California and the seal-like manatee in Florida are likely vestiges of former ice critters of the ice age – maybe they migrated south away from the polar bears as the ice melted and reduced their safety.
899 says:
July 15, 2010 at 7:00 pm “Let’s see a picture of those ‘hippos’ that were around last winter when the UK was completely covered in snow.”
Here they are 😉
http://www.longleat.co.uk/news/?id=27
I’m sure things will work out just fine for the polar bear once the climate change pushes it out of it’s current remote habitat.
Unlike the fate of giant sloths; short faced bears; giant polar bears; California tapirs; peccaries; the American lion; giant condors; Miracinonyx (“American cheetahs”, not true cheetahs); saber-toothed cats like Xenosmilus, Smilodon and the scimitar cat; Homotherium; dire wolves; saiga; camelids such as two species of now extinct llamas and Camelops; at least two species of bison; stag-moose; the shrub-ox and Harlan’s muskox; horses; mammoths and mastodons; and giant beavers as well as birds like teratorns — North American Pleistocene megafauna that went extinct during the Quaternary extinction event:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene_megafauna
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_extinction_event
Polar bears are very adaptable – I saw one living in Central Park NYC, once.
Anu : July 16, 2010 at 1:56 pm
I’m sure things will work out just fine for the polar bear once the climate change pushes it out of it’s current remote habitat.
Unlike the fate of [insert laundry list of extinct Pleistocene fauna]
Yup. Polar bears, black bears, and brown bears all survived quite nicely, didn’t they?
Anu says:
July 16, 2010 at 1:56 pm
I’m sure things will work out just fine for the polar bear once the climate change pushes it out of it’s current remote habitat.
Historically, climate has always had one of two directions; warming OR cooling.
Alarmists always seem to forget that. The polar bears may actually have to adapt to much colder, LIA-type conditions in the coming decades, just as we humans would. Cooling, in fact, is far more likely. Anthropogenic C02 has about as much effect on climate as a rowboat has on an ocean liner.
Bruce Cobb says:
July 17, 2010 at 9:33 am
Don’t limit yourself to “historically”, that’s only 5000 years. And you should find some smarter Alarmist acquaintances – the ones I know are quite knowledgeable about paleoclimate.
Speaking of the extinction of species, good news – even if the current model of human goes extinct, some of your genes might live on:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/may/06/neanderthals-dna-humans-genome
Bruce Cobb,
Anu’s genes are safe, too.☺
If Smokey’s genes survive into the future, the future will have to look something like this:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
My understanding was that they’re pretty well adapted to eating unarmed humans too.
DaveE.
Polar bears have adapted to eat anything that can’t move faster than they can — and they’ve been doing it for a long, long, *long* time.
latitude says:
July 15, 2010 at 5:21 pm
But they don’t understand, it was the warm period that killed that bear. 😉
and of course, it’s going to get warmer now and it’s going to be worse than we thought.
Is that line required on all papers having to do with climate science? It’s got to be in the rule book somewhere………..
latitude says:
July 15, 2010 at 5:21 pm
Is that line required on all papers having to do with climate science? It’s got to be in the rule book somewhere………..
I do not know how it is done in climate science, but there was a certain period here, in Hungary, when communist rule was starting to get weaker but was still in power. Then one could publish pretty much anything, even in social sciences, provided it had a Marxist tail. At the end of the paper one was expected to pay homage to the general idea of scientific socialism or some similar bullshit, but a brief lip service was enough, no one took it too seriously, not even the censor. The actual content of the paper could be the very opposite of what would have been suggested by Marxist theory, no one cared.