"Polar bear experts said that numbers had increased not because of climate change but due to the efforts of conservationists.
The battle to ban the hunting of Harp seal pups has meant the seal population has soared - boosting the bears' food supply."

"I don't think there is any question polar bears are in danger from global warming," said Andrew Derocher of the World Conservation Union, and a professor of biological sciences at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. "People who deny that have a clear interest in hunting bears."

"They are declining due to global warming and changes in when the ice freezes and melts in Hudson's Bay," he added. He and other scientists in his group are concerned that the retreating ice in the Arctic may pose a danger to future generations of polar bears because of 'habitat loss'. "The critical problem is the sea ice is changing. "We're looking ahead three generations, 30 to 50 years.
"To say that bear populations are growing in one area now is irrelevant."

With about 22,000 polar bears living in the wild, the species is not currently endangered, but its future is far from certain. In 1973, Canada, the United States, Denmark, Norway and the former U.S.S.R. signed the International Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears and their Habitat. This agreement restricts the hunting of polar bears and directs each nation to protect their habitats, but it does not protect the bears against the biggest man-made threat to their survival: global warming. If current warming trends continue unabated, scientists believe that polar bears may disappear within 100 years. WWF funds field research by the world's foremost experts on polar bears to find out how global warming will affect the long-term condition polar bears. To learn more about the topic, read the WWF report Vanishing Kingdom: The Melting Realm of the Polar Bear (PDF, 885k). (WWF's report, Polar Bears at Risk (PDF, 373k), provides a more detailed analysis.)

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ORIGINAL: puella


"I don't think there is any question polar bears are in danger from global warming," said Andrew Derocher of the World Conservation Union, and a professor of biological sciences at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. "People who deny that have a clear interest in hunting bears."

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ORIGINAL: seeksfemslave

Emotion Puella....emotion....gets us nowhere.

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ORIGINAL: puella

Hehe, I am still trying to figure out where I was being overly emotional and not clear?  lol

“U.S. polar bears are found only in northern Alaska where, to date, USGS research has not linked global warming to changing population dynamics, according to Regehr and his colleague, George Durner, another UW Ph.D. candidate who has worked with the USGS on polar bear research for 14 years."

"Western Hudson Bay is near the southern limit of polar bears' range. As such, USGS researchers say findings in that region may foreshadow how more northern polar bear populations (specifically those in Alaska) could respond if the Arctic continues to warm as predicted by climatologists.”