ABC news crew in minus 40 weather gets a sob story from WWF about how Polar Bears now only have one cub, when the used to have two. Due to global warming, of course.
The next day the news crew finds a mother – with three cubs.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3sA3D63cco]
Well honest, it could be because of global warming…
….but only because it’s getting colder
If they really are recording fewer multiple births, then it would be explained by cold.
It’s an adaptation by all cold animals to have fewer/larger babies so they have a better chance of survival.
If it were getting warmer, they would have more smaller babies………..
especially by animals that give parental care………….
Yeppers. Do climate alarmists realize there’s such a critter as a zoologist? I swear, the average alarmist’s IQ must be 10-20 below the mean.
Educable aments.
Why are you so kind with IQ evaluations? ha ha ha ha!
The mob at Churchill have also been reporting triplets.. Ironically, they’re partly funded by WWF. I think they should replace the second W with a T.
Should we set up a Global World Wildlife Fund (For shits n’ giggles) and accept donations?, THE GWWF will be more productive and will always be there to prevent the WWF from geting a good story! i.e our activists will show up and prevent the WWF from killing polar bears to get a good misanthropic story!! F**k Those people to hell!! if there is such a place!
Maybe the Polar bears would be happier if they
were molested less often by naturalists, environmentalists and camera crews.
The penguins would agree with that.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v469/n7329/extref/nature09630-s1.pdf
Scroll down to page 3 and see the breeding success of non-banded vs. banded.
IF I read that correctly the difference is remarkably consistent.
They should leave them alone for a while.
Yeh, this whole time they were blame climate change on the diminishing of the flock. Turns out the only diminishing that was occurring was the ones they were
killingobserving.There’s 3 or 4 other studies that back up that finding.
I swear to be a climatologist you must be a educable ament.
Through a mechanism called ‘delayed implantation,’ the number of cubs a female bear has is determined by their relative fatness in the fall when they enter their dens.
Any female with three cubs had a very good year the year before they were born.
The average for all North American bears is about two so obviously some will have one. That can often be due to individual differences in home range, feeding skills or just age or luck.
Conservation Biologists are chronic liars.
lol, it worked for climatologists!
They work together. Megabucks in researching ‘the effects of climate change’ on whatever. And then they get to monitor populations forever if they ‘discover’ something suitable.
(If they manage to get a ‘species’ listed as Threatened or higher they can get jobs for life. Conflict of interest or what?)
On the flip side the AGW liars get to point to fake wildlife studies that appear to support their story.
Polar bears are the best example of this collusion.
So if you want to research something, anything – newts, flies, penguins, whatever – just put the ‘climate change’ spin on your proposal and chances for funding rise exponentially. See it all the time.
Yeh, I remember when some nutjob group sued the U.S. because the poley bears were going to get de-listed as an endangered species.
The alarmists have a creed. The alarmists believe if they are honest then the ignorant masses may become complacent and not do as the alarmists wish them to do.
Big statistical failure in the video. If >50% of cubs would survive every year, polar bears would soon cover the Earth. If for example a species’ female reproduces for 10 years at 2 babies a year, it means population will stay constant only if one baby in 20 becomes old enough to reproduce. Add accidents and lonely adults and the figure might have to go to 1 in 10 or 1 in 5 but not 1 in 2. Otherwise polar bears would have died out long ago, or more likely nature would have selected bears making 4+ cubs per year.
OMG global warming is killing more cubs than thought before.
Polar bears only have cubs every two years under the best circumstances, and females must first be five to six years old (or sometimes older) to first reproduce.
The exact numbers depend primarily on the quality or their habitat, which in this specific case basically means how much food they have. That varies dramatically in different areas.
So you need to adjust your calculations accordingly.
And where there is no hunting and lots of food, bear populations are regulated by aggression between bears, typically by male bears killing other bears, most often cubs.
But there has been hunting in the Arctic since humans arrived there. That is why the current polar bear population is at ALL TIME HISTORIC HIGHS, and probably the highest since the big Inuit expansion thousands of years ago.
thanks for the corrections. If Wikipedia is right and life expectancy is 25 years, still the average female could be expected to have around 15-20 cubs during her lifetime.
ps let me thank ABC publicly, as the video above has been used to introduce Junior to the concept of “critical thinking” in the realm of environment news.
25 is an exceptionally old bear of any species. Definitely not the average life expectancy, except maybe in a zoo.
And again, must emphasize how their reproductive rates vary depending on food availability. Your numbers are probably close for an area where they are very well fed.
Of course, add 0.5 degree and they all die like flies 😉
One degree and they start getting romantic with Brown Bears.
If you want to be a climate scientist, repeat after me. “it’s worse than we thought”, “it’s worse than we thought”, “it’s MUCH worse than we thought”.
OK, now that you have that down pat, you can now apply for a climate change study grant, even if it’s better than we thought.
Don’t we all pine for when reporters were journalists instead of PR men? I can remember it now….ah yes.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_E_o_0Bdm4GA/S-GLKxeXuSI/AAAAAAAAyA8/jvjekWmXVWY/s1600/mm-rug.bmp
Why didn’t (minus spaces) work when I inserted the above link into the first “” and ‘the days’ into the second “”?
Wow. You can’t believe that supposedly science/logic based people would attribute a change in the amount of cubs to a 0.5 degree change. And this not withstanding that there are as many polar bears as ever for the past 50 years. Why any reporter would not ask a question in this regard tells you a lot about the IQ of him or her also — or their political agenda.To think these people are pushing to destroy our great civilization based upon such dogmatic stupidity is frightening.