Monday, December 28, 2009
Animals and Christmas
There seemed to be a few thousand pro-animal commercials on TV this past weekend, including a local sanctuary, Sarah McLaughlin's earnest plea for all dogdom and a World Wildlife Fund spot for Polar Bears with former ER star, Noah, uh, whatever his last name is. Hey, Noah, I say, quit lying to me! The protected polar bears are not in danger. Their numbers are up, way up, better than lower 48 bald eagles, over the past half century and the numbers are recently stable and growing where hunting has not been reinstated.
No one knows what the niche carrying capacity is for the Arctic vis a vis polar bears. We do know that when there is overpopulation of predators to prey, the number of predators goes down because there is not enough food to sustain them all. Of the 19 areas where there are plenty of polar bears, how many have reached what I'll call saturation? I am aware of not a single scientific inquiry into the subject.
Every interglacial for the past 600,000 years has produced average polar temperatures much higher than today's for thousands of years. The Northern ocean has indeed in the past been ice free by September, yet we still have at least 25,000 polar bears today. Loss of sea ice does not appear to be the huge threat of extinction Noah kept saying it was.
No one knows what the niche carrying capacity is for the Arctic vis a vis polar bears. We do know that when there is overpopulation of predators to prey, the number of predators goes down because there is not enough food to sustain them all. Of the 19 areas where there are plenty of polar bears, how many have reached what I'll call saturation? I am aware of not a single scientific inquiry into the subject.
Every interglacial for the past 600,000 years has produced average polar temperatures much higher than today's for thousands of years. The Northern ocean has indeed in the past been ice free by September, yet we still have at least 25,000 polar bears today. Loss of sea ice does not appear to be the huge threat of extinction Noah kept saying it was.
Labels: Global Warming Hoax; Polar Bears in Danger of Climate Change
# posted by Roger Fraley @ 8:40 AM 
