The Conversation: Climate Change Turned Polar Bears into Opportunists

According to PHD student Henry Anderson-Elliott, the uptick in photos of polar bears scavenging trash dumps or hunting land animals is likely because of climate change.

I suspect the change is more due to the increase in phones with cameras.

I think, polarbears and also a lot of other animals are oppurtunist, if there is an offer of easy food .
Btw, the reason is not CC, but civilisation and it’s
follow up.

I wonder what passed in the mind of the author’s cat when it was lazily reclined over the desk and reading what he was typing when preparing the manuscript: “Idiot! Why spend that much energy chasing reindeer when it is so simple to go to your bowl and find the food that those cretin bipeds have thrown there? Do those fools think that carnivores are dumb, or what?”

At the dawn of polar bear civilization, they were hunter-gatherers living in small family groups that spent a large portion of their waking moments foraging for food. Over time they discovered simple agricultural methods and learned how to domesticate animals that provided a reliable source of high calorie protein and fat, primarily fish and aquatic mammals like seals. Growing crops was not realistic because the growing season at high northern latitudes is extremely short but aquatic farming drastically reduced the amount of time required for caloric sustenance.

With their newfound free time, polar bears began to explore other modes of invention and entertainment, leading to a highly sophisticated culture where specialization and trade became possible. Some were primarily devoted to food production while the majority provided other services though barter like child care, education, den construction, transportation, art, entertainment, etc. With the surfeit of leisure time, a class of indolent bears emerged devoted primarily to satiating immediate cravings like hunger, sex, and intoxication, wholly divesting themselves of any sort of productive behavior that involved delayed gratification and self-discipline, like planning, working, saving, and contributing to family groups or the wider polar bear community. Mental illness was rampant among this group, not surprisingly, as thousands of years of polar bear experience demonstrated that indolence leads to mental illness. There is speculation, however, among experts that in some cases mental illness precipitated the degenerate behavior. Research is ongoing.

Polar bears weren’t the only highly evolved mammals on the planet, however. Humans achieved an even higher level of technological sophistication including automation of previously labor-intensive activities facilitated by power production mainly from mining and burning fossil fuels. The climate of earth had achieved a static state where all the forces of nature were ideally balanced until human power production released vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, nearly 4 percent of the annual CO2 flux, raising global temperatures over the last century and a half by as much as 0.2° C causing glaciers to melt and retreat, sea level to rise by a precipitous 0.1 mm per year, devastating heat waves, droughts, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, freezing, winter storms and other extreme weather; all of which were unprecedented until humans upset the balance of nature.

Responding to these massive changes in temperature and sea level rise, polar bear civilization rapidly collapsed and they became opportunists again, devoting most of their time to finding food sources that were easy and reliable, like raiding landfills around human cities with their abundant supplies of waste food and even resorting, on occasion, to stealing butchered game stored carelessly by human hunters or attacking their sled dogs. Such is the pitiful state to which polar bears have been reduced thanks to the thoughtless innovation and industry of humans.