Image: Hugh Ducklow
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Slide Show: Endangered Animals of the Poles
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In-Depth Report: The Future of the Poles
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CNN: Polar Bears Listing
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CNN: Watching the Arctic Ice Melt
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CNN: Planet in Peril
Polar bears and penguins get all the attention but there's more than large, fuzzy and feathered animals thriving at the frozen antipodes of our planet. Both of Earth's polar environments host rich webs of plants and animals—and all of these inhabitants face a changing clime.
A warming global climate may favor species that don't intimately depend on ice that floats on the sea to hunt or are more versatile in what they can eat as well as those able to thrive in higher temperatures. Although it is inevitable that some flora and fauna will go extinct in the coming years, experts agree that the poles will not become a dead zone. There will still be life, but the residents will be different.
"In a very short amount of time, you're going to drastically rearrange that ecosystem," says Brendan Kelly, a marine biologist at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau. "There will be some biological community there, it just won't look like anything like what's been there."
Slide Show: Endangered Animals of the Poles
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11 Comments
Add CommentI wish there was more about this subject!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe arctic ice sheet grew, polar bears are flourishing with a 5 fold increase in their numbers, glaciers in Alaska have grown, over the past ten years the climate has cooled. and Algore keeps getting fatter.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLet's just sit around and argue while global warming kicks in, shall we?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPrairieDweller, again-- spend some money and go check out the polar bears. Go to Churchill and see what is going on. I have, and it is not pretty. I find your responses offensive. You must be a very angry, frustrated person to write so rudely. There is no need for personal attacks, but there is need for level-headedness. We don't need to have know-nothings try to subvert reality with ridiculous statements that do not come from facts.
I know that tons of physics professors crise this blog, my question to you is, " how can we help the arctic from melting away"? We all know about fossil fuel emissions etc.. and beside "aerosol spraying" which can tip the balance and send us fastracking to a ice-age, i ask is their another way to help keep the polar regions from mellting? a way to slow it down? can we freeze the melt off to keep it from running to the sea? can we take the melting snow and turn it back into ice/snow and recoat during the winter months to aid in multiyear layer growth? I am sure we can! and we should before it all melts away, it is easier to do this while their is still ice and snow than after it melts.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd I find your response irrational and wrong. Your assessment of the polar bears at Churchill is bs.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHello Praire Dweller,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"The arctic ice sheet grew..."
When you say "grew" what you mean to say is that more area was covered than last year's minimum extent. That of course omits the fact that last year's minimum was the smallest area covered in the past 30 years. It also conveniently ignores the fact that this years' was the second lowest recorded. Then of course, we got that other geometric measure of shapes called VOLUME. Now, if you were paying attention to what the people who actually study the topography of the cryosphere actually say and not just slavishly repeat what Deniers say regardless of reality, you would be aware of this fact. Here take a look at this report from the National Snow and Ice Data Center: http://nsidc.org/news/press/20081002_seaice_pressrelease.html
From the link we find the following:
"Arctic sea ice extent during the 2008 melt season dropped to the second-lowest level since satellite measurements began in 1979, reaching the lowest point in its annual cycle of melt and growth on September 14, 2008. Average sea ice extent over the month of September, a standard measure in the scientific study of Arctic sea ice, was 4.67 million square kilometers (1.80 million square miles) (Figure 1). The record monthly low, set in 2007, was 4.28 million square kilometers (1.65 million square miles); the now-third-lowest monthly value, set in 2005, was 5.57 million square kilometers (2.15 million square miles)."
Now of course this is really just blowing smoke because you are worrying over weather when climate is about 30 year trends and the thirty year trend is unmistakeably downward.
Here take a look at the following graph: http://nsidc.org/news/images/20081002_Figure3.png
"...polar bears are flourishing with a 5 fold increase in their numbers,.."
You could only speak of a rebound in Polar Bear populations if you took into account the fact the Polar Bears have had a population increase after hunters stopped SHOOTING them indiscriminately in the 1970's. Why not just look at what the Arctic Wildlife Biologist are actually saying?
"At the most recent meeting of the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group (held in Seattle in 2005), the world's leading polar bear scientists reported that of the 19 subpopulations of polar bears, five were declining, five were stable, two were increasing, and seven had insufficient data to make a determination."
From: http://www.polarbearsinternational.org/faq/#q2
How could you NOT expect Polar Bear populations to fall as 80% of their habit ( sea ice) shrinks?
People believe what they want to believe regardless of the truth and regardless of any scientific evidence, most of which they can't read anyway. Thus: tunnel visionaries like prairie dweller who prefers to know nothing because it suits his world view comfort zone and to him all else is BS. The TITANIC was unsinkable, strontium 90 is good for you, the dikes and levees will never fail, Reaganomics brought down the Soviet Union and Bush/Cheney are the greatest executive team in all of history! Scientific information only interferes with people's right to be completely wrong and don't forget if weren't for all those trees there wouldn't be any forest fires.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo I'm full of you know what, huh. Then explain this..http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/11/16/do1610.xml
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm sorry it appears that link doesn't work. This article in the London Telegraph exposes a big fat lie by the global warming priests. Here is the article.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"The world has never seen such freezing heat
By Christopher Booker"
The world has never seen such freezing heat
By Christopher Booker
A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.
Read more from Christopher Booker
This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.
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So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.
The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs - run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious "hockey stick" graph - GISS began hastily revising its figures. This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new "hotspot" in the Arctic - in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year.
This site can't handle all of the text, it's a long article. If you find it and read all of it it is a direct kick to the balls of the alarmist and exposes the sloppy science behind global warming.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf the polar bears will die out without the current or near pasts levels of cold and ice does that mean that the man-made warming alarmists believe that a god/power/alien/force created them 450 years ago? And that while placing them didn't feel that the earth would return to it's more normal temperatures? seems kinda silly that anyone would believe that polar bears weren't around 600 years ago when the world was 3 degrees warmer than now and Greenland was a beautiful and -gasp- green land!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe simple facts are these: the earth always warms after each ice age, carbon dioxide has no proven link to warming, in fact while co2 has steadily risen since 1998 the temperature has done the opposite, and that the arrogance of believing that something must always be simply because it's what you remember from childhood should never contaminate science.