How Hungry Polar Bears Are Bad News for Humanity
What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic
[Graphic by Zack Labe @ZLabe]
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Hello Friends,
This issue is about how a melting Arctic is really screwing up our weather. It’s also about how polar bears’ hunting technique relies on a freezing cold Arctic. And finally some advice from a climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe on how to talk climate with people who don’t want to hear it. But first; how I became polar bear bait.
Some 1200 kilometers inside the Arctic Circle, I was alone on a glacier, unarmed and buried up to my waist in snow. While struggling in the deep snow I realized it didn’t matter that I was breaking the law since a polar bear was way more likely to find me first.
Being unarmed outside of the town of Longyearbyen — the world's northernmost settlement with more than 1,000 permanent residents — is illegal. Longyearbyen is in largely ice-covered Svalbard, Norway and has at least 300 polar bears roaming around. For that reason anyone venturing outside of the town is required to carry a rifle for protection. Last August a man was killed by a bear on the edge of town. Several other people have been mauled or killed over the years.
I was certainly prime polar bear bait when I hiked out of Longyearbyen onto the Longyearbreen glacier tongue in the summer of 2009. I’d just spent the week even further north in a very comfortable Arctic research camp in Ny-Ålesund. For days a select group of climate scientists, political leaders and corporate executives discussed climate change in an informal slippers-no-shoes setting. Although I was there with one other jurno, it was an off-the-record meeting. Here’s what I wrote in an email to friends and supporters who helped pay my travel expenses to get there:
Despite the clear warnings from science, it remains a debate about how risky climate change may be amongst business and political leaders and what the “reasonable/practical” course of action should be. There is some urgency from some of the European hi-level decision makers but that is not widely shared, I'm sorry to report.
That’s when I knew the world would not agree to take action at the 2009 Copenhagen climate negotiations that was to take place a few months later. And that’s why I was hiking alone on that glacier.
Being Canadian, I like snow. So being up to my waist in the stuff in June under a 24-hour Arctic sun was a delight. Combined with the crisp air and vast, treeless snowy vistas, I settled into the snow, intoxicated by my surroundings, feeling at peace and at home.
Home. But not my home! Home for polar bears whose long-legs could easily outrun me and whose incredible sense of smell could find me even if they were a couple of kilometers away in the next mountain valley. They’re fierce predators, unafraid of humans and double the size of the largest lions or tigers. On land they’re always hungry because there is so little food.
‘Poof’ went my peaceful calm on realizing I was potential prey. I scanned the stark landscape for any sign of movement. I’d never seen a polar bear in the wild at that point, and if I did that day it would have been my last wildlife encounter.
I dug myself out of the snow and over a few heart-pounding hours made my way safely back to Longyearbyen. When I got back home I would often be asked if I saw a polar bear while in Svalbard. I’d answer emphatically: “No! Thank God!”.
Hungry ice bears bad sign for humanity
It occurs to me now if polar bears are really hungry it’s not just dangerous for dumb tourists wandering around the Arctic, it’s generally bad news for humanity.
Polar bears are truly ice bears. A Need-to-Know about polar bears is that they almost exclusively feed on seals and can only catch them on sea ice. Here’s how I explained it in a National Geographic piece:
Polar bears rely almost exclusively on a calorie-loaded diet of seals. To minimize their energy consumption the bears still-hunt, waiting for hours by seals’ cone-shaped breathing holes in the sea ice. When a seal surfaces to breathe the bear stands on its hind legs and smacks it on the head with both of its front paws to stun it. Then the bear bites it on the neck and drags it onto the ice.
Polar Bears Really Are Starving Because of Global Warming, Study Shows
The Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else in the world and the sea ice has shrunk by half over the past 40 years. As the reflective sea ice melts it means ever more, dark open water to absorb the sun’s heat. A day of 24-hour summer sun in the Arctic puts more heat on the surface than a day in the tropics. And so the Arctic Ocean warms up, melting more ice and delaying the formation of winter ice even when temperatures plummet and there is little sunlight. This is called a positive feedback loop. The Need-to-Know to remember is this: Ice loss due to warming leads to a warmer ocean resulting in more sea ice loss.
Winter is not coming to the Arctic
Less ice means the world’s 20,000 to 25,000 polar bears have to burn extra calories traveling long distances to find sea ice to hunt from. In summer most stay on land and fast for months until the winter ice forms. The winter ice season is getting shorter and shorter. As I write this, parts of the Arctic are currently exceptionally warm with Longyearbyen at 78 degrees north latitude as warm as Ottawa, Canada, at 45 degrees north latitude. This year the winter ice is a month late in forming as the graphic at the top shows. Hungry polar bears are now roaming Arctic coastlines.
Our global climate system has four main elements: Two cold polar regions at the top and bottom of the planet; a hot tropical zone in the middle; and the world’s oceans. With the Arctic polar region shifting into defrost, it is having significant impacts on the global climate system, in particular the weather patterns in the Northern hemisphere.
What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic
I reported on the very first studies in 2008-2010 that found a warming Arctic meant Europe, eastern Asia and eastern North America will experience cold and snowy winters more frequently. The Need-to-Know is that this was confirmed in a 2019 study that also found that the recent summer extremes — heat waves, floods and droughts — are also linked to a hotter Arctic and loss of sea ice.
Other studies have linked the California drought of 2011–2017 to changing Arctic conditions. I previously interviewed meteorologists who said California’s record-breaking warm temperatures in fall of 2017 likely set up the conditions for the very cold and snowy winter of 2018 in eastern Canada and the US. That article had a terrific Need-to-Know headline: “Freezing Your Ass Off Is Also a Symptom of Climate Change.” It’s one to share when a climate doubter is complaining about cold weather.
That reminds me; we love to complain about the weather but if someone mentions climate change, the conversation usually gets awkward and shifts to another subject. And while it is vitally important to talk about climate, it’s still not socially acceptable to talk about climate in some families or groups of friends/acquaintances. Despite it’s factual basis, climate change remains politically charged in some regions. Finding common ground on related topics is a useful way to over come this. That could be talking about polar bears. The best advice on how to talk about climate comes from scientist Katharine Hayhoe who has a terrific 25-minuteNeed-to-Know podcast on this. Highly recommend giving it a listen and sharing.
Until next time, stay safe.
Stephen