A very recent paper, published in Frontiers of Ecology and the Environment, elegantly responds to a contention I hear many times, which is that polar bears, an icon of climate change, in fact have survived previous warming periods in the earth’s history, and will therefore survive this one. The paper explains that, although polar bears, who diverged from ancestors common to brown (grizzly) bears some 150,000 to half a million years ago, did survive warm spells, they probably did so by consuming the fat this species so desperately needed from carcasses of stranded whales – the ancestors to the bowhead whale.
But, there are four major changes between then and now. One, there are a lot fewer whales, the bowhead being classified as endangered. Two, there are a lot of human-caused sources of stress and mortality, such as toxins in the environment, not previously present. Three, those ancestral bears had not evolved as far from an omnivorous origin into the current situation where massive fat intake is required. Four, the past warming periods unfolded much more slowly than the current one, giving ancient polar bears time to adapt to the changes.
I’m typing this just after a walk in the woods during which I wore shorts and a t-shirt and still was uncomfortably warm, nearing mid-October. I entered my office to hear the radio inform me of a massive, category 4 hurricane slamming the Florida panhandle, not too long after one of the most immense typhoons in history hit the Philippines.
Three days earlier, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a report that warns of devastating consequences from almost inevitable future developments. For years, experts have long been warning us of the very things now happening, just as predicted. Do we so soon forget the draughts, the wildfires, the vast storms like the one now attacking Florida, heading toward the Carolinas?
The IPPC report’s 91 expert authors cited over 6,000 references in showing the horrors awaiting, but also in trying to show world leaders what can be done. But, those world leaders would not only include the U.S. president – varyingly in denial or indifferent to climate change – or the governor of Florida, where the Department of Environmental Protection has been ordered not to write “climate change” or “global warming” in any official communications. My own Ontario premier said he’d eliminate the province’s cap and trade program, designed to slow global warming, and joined Saskatchewan’s legal challenge to the federal government’s carbon price plan, while the Manitoba Premier plans to stop supporting federal initiative to tax greenhouse emissions by as much as fifty dollars per tonne in four years. Alberta is also unwilling to follow the already inadequate federal lead.
Pity the poor polar bear, yes, but, while political clowns in high places fiddle around with their inadequate schemes and short-term partisan interests, pity, too, any young children you see today as they will will, upon reaching maturity, be in a far more dangerous and hostile world than we have evern known.
Keep Wildlife in the Wild,
Barry