6 ms·
New evidence that polar bears survived 1,600 years of ice-free Holocene summers
- kouru225 3y agoI don’t know why but the fact that Polarbearscience.com exists is beautiful to me. Raise your hand if you’re a regular on polarbearscience.com
- willmadden 3y agoI'm not a regular but I might become one. I hope topic based websites run by enthusiasts make a big comeback.
- pkdpic 3y agoI came for the article, I stayed for the domain name.
- imjonse 3y agoIt may be named like that purely for SEO reasons as the author seems to be a human caused climate change denier and promoting her book. A cute name though, I agree.
- kouru225 3y agoNothing is sacred
- Dalewyn 3y ago[flagged]
- Terr_ 3y agoTechnically true, but that ignores the unusual rate of change. https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/
- Dalewyn 3y agoThere's Chicxulub smacking Earth and turning the weather upside down instantly. Of course, life still adapted and persevered.
- Terr_ 3y agoI did consider scenarios like that when I said "unusually", however I though it went without saying that it'd be kinda-crazy for anyone to try excusing the current situation on the basis of: "Our CO2 emissions are actually quite nice compared to the ancient death-mageddon genocide god-strike from the outer realms."
- patrickdavey 3y agoNot all life though right? Usually accompanied by extinction events. Worth remembering that too.
- Arnt 3y agoAnd even "smaller" changes that extinction events can be quite noticeable to those who are alive. Like, when the north pole melts and the jet streams find a new equilibrium, is somewhere else going to have a lot of really cold winters? Somewhere like Kentucky or Texas? I haven't the faintest idea what's going to happen but obviously something is, the pole actually is melting and there actually is unusual weather elsewhere.
- erulabs 3y agoYou’re not wrong, but it’s important to note that “life has adapted” means “billions or trillions of deaths”.
- fumar 3y agoRight, ELE, extinction level events. We are living through one. Is it inevitable if one species becomes too dominant on earth? We are earth after all.
- SketchySeaBeast 3y ago> Is it inevitable if one species becomes too dominant on earth? I am fairly certain that this is the first time a single species has become too dominant across the entire Earth. Maybe single celled life forms? Diseases?
- actionfromafar 3y agoCyaonobacteria fits the bill I think.
- ceejayoz 3y agoYup. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rufus_foreman 3y agoIn this instance it was thousands of years though: > "Not only did polar bear survive these two extended periods when ice-free summers prevailed, but the Eemian warm summers came only about 10,000 years after the bears arose as a unique species. This makes polar bear survival through the Eemian even more impressive than most scientists acknowledge."
- barbazoo 3y agoOver thousands or even millions of years, that's right. Unlike what we're seeing right now.
- titzer 3y agoAlways worth remembering that before Earth existed it was a meaningless dust cloud created by the unimaginable power of exploding stars, and after that, it spent nearly 3 billion years as a lifeless rock. So if we accidentally nuked it to a cinder, no biggie, amirite? Sorry for the snark, but your comment is just plain tonedeaf and vapid that it needs to be called out. Pushing thousands or millions of species to the brink or even into extinction because we cannot control our consumption and waste products is not excusable because "meh, it was dead before." Rather it's thoughtless and destructive and self-defeating in the end. Like trampling delicate flowers for fun or smashing stained glass windows that someone labored their entire life making.
- pestatije 3y agoit depends on your timeline perspective...in 1000 years time when all the water has boiled out and long time after all humans have disappeared, will it matter if it happened in 2150 or in 2487?
- CatWChainsaw 3y agoThe Lord Farquaad energy in the parent comment is far from unique here, unfortunately.
- Dalewyn 3y ago>Pushing thousands or millions of species to the brink or even into extinction because we That's going to happen regardless of humanity.
- titzer 3y agoBecause heat death of universe, no morals. Got it.
- deanCommie 3y agoDo you think people think that Humanity will go extinct because of climate change? I certainly don't. However people DO think that in the near future HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE will either die from climate change, or worse ([citation needed]), become refugees and a drain on the parts of the world that will not have the resources to keep them alive and maintain a high standard of living for everyone else. Our children and our children's children in the west will have a meaningfully worse standard of living, and an insane amount of calories will be burnt on trying to figure out how to act reactively to changes to the sea levels, temperature spikes, extreme weather events, loss of fresh water, (and yes, those climate refugees). Instead of just acting proactively now (and really, yesterday) to reduce fossil fuel usage.
- swader999 3y agoIf anything, life and human life will do better a few degrees warmer
- heavyset_go 3y agoBillions of people live in places that will be underwater, or subject to disaster-prone extremes, because of those few degrees of warming.
- titzer 3y agoThat's fundamentally a humanist argument. What about all the other intricate little forms of life we snuff out thoughtlessly? And I don't mean the ones we directly eradicate either due to killing them off or eating them all, but the hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of species that choke to death on our waste products, are crushed under the wheels of the economy, or are fried/frozen out of their niches, or have their food supplies evaporate because of the same. We're committing ecocide at a massive scale that has no upside except more consumption for more humans to hate and rue their lives. I find myself unable to identify with humanism anymore, because humanism has become equated with this crazy, unsustainable economic system with an absolutely enormous footprint on this planet. If it were some reason level of human population that reached some kind of equilibrium with nature, I could be a humanist again. But I don't see that happening in my lifetime, so I am pretty down most of the time, TBH.
- Denvercoder9 3y agoThe danger of climate change isn't the end of life on Earth, it's the end of human civilization. The planet will be fine, we won't be.
- Someone 3y agoCould they also have become extinct, hiding their genes in a population of Grizzly or Kodiak bears, for the “polar bear” genes to be selected upon again after that close escape? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grizzly–polar_bear_hybrid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grizzly–polar_bear_hybrid: “Genetic analysis has revealed multiple instances of introgressive hybridization between bear species, including introgression of polar bear DNA into brown bears during the Pleistocene ("grizzly bear" is a local common name for Ursus arctos whereas "brown bear" is used internationally and in science to refer to the species as a whole)“
- throwup238 3y agoTFA's author has a book about that exact topic: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1778038328 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1778038328 > The book includes a detailed account of brown bear and polar bear fossil evidence, recent hybridization events between brown bears and polar bears, and summaries of more than a dozen genetic studies that have been done on these bears. (It's on my bookshelf but I haven't had a chance to read it yet)
- mytailorisrich 3y agoI suppose that having white fur would be a death sentence for most animals in an ice-free landscape. Luckily for them, polar bear were at the top of the food chain, although that still made them conspicuous to potential preys.
- alganet 3y agoCould it be that they lived on fish? From inside the water, to a fish, a polar bear could be just a cloud. Waterfalls and currents are pretty bright as well. Wild guess here, I know nothing about these things.
- TSiege 3y agoThe author is conflating two things, the fact that change has occurred with the rate of the change. And that one species is threatened vs entire ecosystems. I don't think there is anyone scientist saying if earth transitioned slowly over the course of thousands of years to a higher temperature there would be a mass extinction. We know for a fact from our recent ice ages thawing and freezing that this isn't the case. The rate of change is totally different. The Holocene warm period was slightly warmer than our preindustrial era and had CO2 levels around 300ppm. The Eemian period was 1-2C warmer than preindustrial society and had 280ppm of CO2 (and sea levels were about 30m higher). Those periods of warmth happened SLOWLY over the course of thousands if not tens of thousands of years. We've gone from ~280ppm to ~420ppm of CO2 in less than 300 years, half of it happened in the last 30 years. (And it's really 500ppm if you add methane and other greenhouse gases.) The last time atmospheric concentrations were this high was 2-3 million years ago and temps were 4-5C higher with sea levels at 60m higher than today. My point is that it is the meteoric rise on a geological timeframe of CO2 that is the issue. If the sea ice melts but also the surrounding tundra, boreal forest, and marine ecosystems collapse what would an apex predator like a polar bear survive on? I also think focusing solely on polar bears is bit of misguided when we're talking about the effects of climate change. They are one species and deciding whether or not things are bad given the outcome of that one species is misguided. We're talking about complex interdependent ecosystems where it's estimated half of all species on the planet are experiencing some stage of decline. Will polars survive? Who knows! They could interbreed with grizzlies and form a new species, the real question is do we want to continue making their existence our own more difficult and less likely? https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/05/26/almost-half-worlds-species-seeing-rapid-population-decline-study-finds https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/05/26/almost-half-worlds...
- junofan 3y agoI dunno, haven’t most populations sometimes gone through boom-bust cycles on the order of a few years/decades? It feels a little absurd to consider only a single ecological factor.
- Kerrick 3y agoI think that most people would like to avoid the population of humans going through a bust. Personally I have no worries about human-induced rapid climate change eliminating life on Earth. I am, however, concerned about it affecting humankind.
- stillbourne 3y ago[flagged]
- indigodaddy 3y agoOr, you could read what she writes, evaluate, do your own other research, and come to your own conclusion regarding the merits or lack thereof of any piece of content.
- stillbourne 3y ago[flagged]
- not2b 3y agoPlease explain what you mean by "do your own other research". Searching with Google or scanning social media posts by people you agree with is not research. Someone with no education in the field isn't qualified to do research.
- makeworld 3y ago> She is known for her blog posts on polar bear biology, which are unsupported by the scientific literature and oppose the scientific consensus that polar bears are threatened by ongoing climate change. > Crockford is a signatory of the International Conference on Climate Change's 2008 Manhattan Declaration, which states that "Carbon dioxide and other 'greenhouse gas' emissions from human activity...appear to have only a very small impact on global climate," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_J._Crockford https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_J._Crockford
- sureglymop 3y agoThank you for bringing this up!
- loceng 3y agoWhat were you able to derive from those two short quotes that don't really have any substance to them?
- throw310822 3y agoLet me use this occasion for a quick review of her Wikipedia entry. I don't know anything about Crockford but her entry is the typical smear job written by some activist editor who is only concerned with presenting the subject in the worst possible light. This stuff and writing style has no place on a decent encyclopedia, and the persistence of these entries through the years is one of the reasons I'm fed up with Wikipedia. Warning: irony ahead. In the first line of the lede, Susan Crockford is introduced as "a Canadian contract scientist who runs a small business identifying bones and other items in scat of wildlife". (italics mine) It's clear that the lady is just a contract scientist with a small business. We can picture her rummaging the scat of wildlife for "items", presumably keys or other small objects lost perhaps by serious scientists while doing their work. In the "Early life and education" section, we're first told that she "gained her interest in the Arctic in elementary school" and that her scientific interest was stoked at age 11 when she received a dog for her birthday. It's sad how sometimes you don't live up to your childhood dreams and you end up rummaging in wildlife scat. The education part then briefly informs us that she received a doctorate (of which no title is given, but that is specified to be in "Interdisciplinary Studies" despite being about evolutionary biology), and concludes reporting extensively on criticism of her work. Then the "Career" section, divided in four small chapters, in this order: "Business", "Books", "Dogs" and finally "Polar Bears". Then the article ends with a rather large "Criticism" section, which focuses entirely around the climate change issues. Almost all the references throughout the article are coming from a climate change blog or are related to climate controversies.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- KevinMS 3y agonice work HN, flag anything that is merely adjacent to skepticism of global warming.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]