Global Warming Makes Cute Polar Bears Into SAVAGE CANNIBALS!

They're really pulling out all the stops. Someone wrote a few weeks ago that they'd decided polar bears would be the human face of global warming.

Well, not human face, technically. But a cute face.

Polar bears in the southern Beaufort Sea may be turning to cannibalism because longer seasons without ice keep them from getting to their natural food, a new study by American and Canadian scientists has found.

The study reviewed three examples of polar bears preying on each other from January to April 2004 north of Alaska and western Canada, including the first-ever reported killing of a female in a den shortly after it gave birth.

...

Polar bears kill each other for population regulation, dominance, and reproductive advantage, the study said. Killing for food seems to be less common, said the study's principal author, Steven Amstrup of the U.S. Geological Survey Alaska Science Center.

"During 24 years of research on polar bears in the southern Beaufort Sea region of northern Alaska and 34 years in northwestern Canada, we have not seen other incidents of polar bears stalking, killing, and eating other polar bears," the scientists said.

Ummm... two paragraphs ago, the article said polar bears killing each other for food was "less common" than than other motives for bear-on-bear violence. Now this, um, "scientist" seems to be alleging bears killing other bears for food has never been seen before.

Which is it?

Gee, I hope this isn't a bit of hype to advance the global warming agenda. I hope that the rest of the experts in this article will avoid rhetorical flourishes better delivered from behind a politician's podium than a scientist's lectern.

...

Deborah Williams of Alaska Conservation Solutions, a group aimed at pursuing solutions for climate change, said the study represents the "bloody fingerprints" of global warming.

There you go. Sober and scientific.

posted by Ace at 02:07 AM

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