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View Full Version : Population of Canadian Polar Bears is up...a lot!


Regis Philbin
May 20th, 2007, 10:00 PM
Now wait just a doggone minute here! :redmad:

Al Gore said polar bears are going to be wiped out by global warming...why are their numbers increasing? Must be an error in the polling data somewhere. The American Republicans must have told the bears to cheat. They must have fudged the numbers somehow. There needs to be a "probe".

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0503/p13s01-wogi.html

Canadian controversy: How do polar bears fare?

Despite global warming, an ongoing study says polar bear populations are rising in the country's eastern Arctic region.

By Fred Langan | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

Page 1 of 3

Toronto - Polar bears are the poster animals of global warming. The image of a polar bear floating on an ice floe is one of the most dramatic visual statements in the fight against rising temperatures in the Arctic.

But global warming is not killing the polar bears of Canada's eastern Arctic, according to one ongoing study. Scheduled for release next year, it says the number of polar bears in the Davis Strait area of Canada's eastern Arctic – one of 19 polar bear populations worldwide – has grown to 2,100, up from 850 in the mid-1980s.

"There aren't just a few more bears. There are a ... lot more bears," biologist Mitchell Taylor told the Nunatsiaq News of Iqaluit in the Arctic territory of Nunavut. Earlier, in a long telephone conversation, Dr. Taylor explained his conviction that threats to polar bears from global warming are exaggerated and that their numbers are increasing. He has studied the animals for the Nunavut government for two decades.

Updates from the study by Taylor and his team have received significant media coverage in Canada, shaking the image of the polar bear as endangered.

"I don't think there is any question polar bears are threatened by global warming," responds Andrew Derocher of the World Conservation Union and a professor of biological sciences at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. He spoke by phone from Tuktoyaktuk in Canada's Northwest Territories 1,800 miles to the west of Davis Strait.

Richard Tafoya
May 20th, 2007, 10:45 PM
And a little farther in the story:

Animal rights activists can take some credit for the growth of polar bear numbers in the eastern Arctic. The battle to ban the hunting of harp seal pups has meant that the harp seal population has jumped from 2 million to 5 million. It also means sealers, especially those from Norway, are no longer hunting the polar bears, which they used to do when the seal hunt was larger.

"The increase in the population is not a climate-change related issue," Derocher claims. It's the result of "conservation and an increase in the harp seal population," he says.

db44
May 21st, 2007, 07:05 AM
I would further guess the population isn't neseccarily greater, but that perhaps they have migrated do land from their shrinking original environs?