Dan's Outside

Polar Bears and Climate Change

New York Times:

Warming Is Seen as Wiping Out Most Polar Bears. Shrinking polar ice caps will cause at least two-thirds of the world’s polar bears to disappear by 2050, government scientists reported on Friday. By JOHN M. BRODER and ANDREW C. REVKIN. [NYT > Science]

Not everyone realizes that polar bears live in three environments, almost equally well: land, ice pack, and ocean. Global climate change creates problems for these animals in all three.

From the article:

The scientists concluded that, while the bears were not likely to be driven to extinction, they would be largely relegated to the Arctic archipelago of Canada and spots off the northern Greenland coast, where summer sea ice tends to persist even in warm summers like this one, a shrinking that could be enough to reduce the bear population by two-thirds.

The bears would disappear entirely from Alaska, the study said.

“As the sea ice goes, so goes the polar bear,” said Steven Amstrup, lead biologist for the survey team.

September 8, 2007 - Posted by gdanmitchell | Environment