Monday, October 29, 2007

Polar bears on the way out

U.S. Ge­o­log­i­cal Sur­vey sci­en­tists do not hold out much hope that car­bon di­ox­ide can be turned around in time to help the po­lar bears...
Report: Most polar bears to die out by 2050
Two-thirds of the world’s po­lar bears will be killed off by 2050 — and the en­tire popula­t­ion gone from Alas­ka — be­cause of thin­ning sea ice from glob­al warm­ing in the Arc­tic, U.S. gov­ern­ment sci­en­tists fore­cast Fri­day.
Only in the north­ern Ca­na­di­an Arc­tic is­lands and the west coast of Green­land are any of the world’s 16,000 po­lar bears ex­pected to sur­vive through the end of the cen­tu­ry, said the U.S. Ge­o­log­i­cal Sur­vey, which is the sci­en­tif­ic arm of the In­te­ri­or De­part­ment.
USGS pro­jects that po­lar bears dur­ing the next half-cen­tu­ry will dis­ap­pear along the north coasts of Alas­ka and Rus­sia and lose 42 per­cent of the Arc­tic range they need to live in dur­ing sum­mer in the Po­lar Ba­sin when they hunt and breed. A po­lar bear’s life usu­ally lasts about 30 years.
Sci­en­tists do not hold out much hope that car­bon di­ox­ide can be turned around in time to help the po­lar bears.
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1 comment:

Joseph Hunkins said...

Do you know why we don't implement more aggressive rules about hunting Polar Bears? My understanding is that habitat declines have less impact (currently) than hunting, though from this it appears maybe the system won't sustain any bears at all in future.

Also this raises the big question -if we can't reverse CO2 to have much affect on pending GW problems like this, what are the smartest actions.