The above photo is
from the 2005 science fiction movie An Inconvenient Truth, wherein Al Gore
inserted an animated clip of the polar bear in danger of drowning, trying to
get onto a tiny ice flow made smaller, presumably by global warming. Science
magazine used this fake image to hype the issue and subsequently apologised for
this.
Gore based his
presentation on a study by a US federal wildlife biologist whose observation in
2004 of presumably drowned polar bears in the Arctic helped to galvanize the
global warming movement. He has been placed on administrative leave and is
being investigated for scientific misconduct, possibly over the veracity of
that article. The population of polar nears from 5,000 in 1950 multipled over
five times by 2010.
Imagine the
environmentalists like WWF, Greenpeace, Centre foe Environment & Science
and their magazines like Sanctuary and other foreign funded NGOs like Oxfam,
ChristianAid; Care; World Vision etc had used this scam to whip up climate
hysteria in India. We reproduced this
excellent article by Amrutha Gayathri of International Business Times revealing
the scam.
If you think statistics are a pointer towards the growth
or decline of a species, it will be interesting to have a look at the estimates
published in a 2008 report by U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works
Committee.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates
that the polar bear population is currently at 20,000 to 25,000 bears, up from
as low as 5,000-10,000 bears in the 1950s and 1960s. A 2002 U.S. Geological
Survey of wildlife in the Arctic Refuge Coastal Plain noted
that the polar bear populations "may now be near historic highs," it
read.
J. Scott Armstrong of The Wharton School,
University of Pennsylvania; Kesten
C. Green of Business and Economic Forecasting, Monash University; and Willie
Soon of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, published their
findings in 2008,
arguing that the claims of declining population among polar bears are not based
on scientific forecasting principles.
Polar Bears Have a Strong History of Survival
The reports and
photographs of polar bears dying of exhaustion from swimming,
unable to navigate the larger-than-usual water bodies formed between ice covers
in the arctic, also added to the fears propagated by global warming alarmists.
But a quick look at polar bear facts and figures will prove that deaths of
polar bears cannot necessarily be associated to swimming large distances as
there can be myriad numbers of reasons for the deaths of these cold-weather
predators.
According to polar bear facts provided
by World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), the bears are excellent swimmers and have
an average swimming speed of 9.7 kph (6 mph) while their average walking speed
is a much less 5.5 kph (3.5 mph) which is a mechanism to keep body heat to the
minimum. They have a layer of fat up to 11 cm (4.3 in) thick keeps the bears
warm, especially while swimming.
Polar bears first evolved more than 110,000
years ago in coastal Siberia and proceeded to interbreed with brown bears
multiple times after they first diverged. Under their dense fur is black skin,
which aids in absorbing the rays of the arctic sun.
Polar Ice
One can look at the history of polar ice melting to
better understand the habitat of polar bears.
Scottish scientist Dr. Chad Dick, of the
Norwegian Polar Institute in Tromso, after researching the log books of Arctic
explorers spanning the past 300 years, believes the outer edge of sea ice may expand
and contract over regular periods of 60 to 80 years. According to his research findings, he
concluded, "the
recent worrying changes in Arctic sea ice are simply the result of standard
cyclical movements, and not a harbinger of major climate change."
If 300 years of study revealed 60-80 cycles
of climate changes, the arctic climate would have presumably undergone many
more cycles of drastic changes over the past thousands of years. And with a
more than 110,000-year history of survival, it doesn't mak sense to believe
that polar bears are dying unable to withstand swimming exhaustion due to
larger water bodies.
Award-winning quaternary geologist Dr. Olafur Ingolfsson,
professor from the University of Iceland, has conducted extensive expeditions
and field research in both the Arctic and Antarctic.
"We have this specimen that confirms the
polar bear was a morphologically distinct species at least 100,000 years ago,
and this basically means that the polar bear has already survived one
interglacial period.
"This is telling us that despite the on-going warming in the
Arctic today, maybe we don't have to be quite so worried about the polar
bear," according to a report
published by U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
Death by Hunting
Polar bears are not immortal, and they do
succumb to death. What is disputed is the exact cause of death. "The
international Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears allows for the
taking of polar bears for use by local people using traditional methods and
exercising traditional rights," says the WWF's site,
as it supports the "right of indigenous peoples to continue to sustainably harvest
local animals."
Canada allows legal hunting of polar bears by
non-native sport hunters and the hunting statistics of Russia and Greenland
are not available due to lack of monitoring. "Since it is not known whether killing
polar bears is balanced against the sustainable yield of a known population
size in such areas, there is reason for concern regarding the sustainability of
these practices," the WWF claims.
If the world is actually feeling threatened that polar bears might cease to
exist at some future point of time, why are they still being subjected to legal
hunting? And even if only the native populace holds the right to hunt polar
bears why is monitoring inadequate to track the hunting by non-natives?
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