Are polar bears drowning (John Eidson) USofA

Information Worth Sharing John Eidson | April 23, 2019

The Chloe girl schools the Climate Kids about global warming Lesson 3: Are polar bears drowning?

Hi, Climate Kids. The Chloe girl here.

Had to sleep in this morning—was up late last night reading about polar bears.

Did you guys know that Al Gore says the Arctic will soon be ice-free, reason being global warming?

If he’s right, that would be bad news for polar bears, reason being polar bears are icedependent animals that rely on ice as a platform to hunt seals and raise their young.

No ice = no polar bears. Nobody disagrees with that.

The picture below is a screenshot from an animated presentation Mr. Gore gave in his 2006 movie, An Inconvenient Truth.

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That picture really tugs at the heartstrings, a desperate polar bear swimming in an ocean with almost no ice.

In the video, Mr. Gore said there’s been so much melting that polar bears are drowning while trying to find ice: A new scientific study has found that for the first time they’re finding polar bears that have actually drowned swimming long distances up to 60 miles to find the ice.

The Chloe girl has a few questions: What study? How many polar bears drowned? A whole bunch? Or only a few? Polar bears have been around for hundreds of thousands of years. How does the study know that some are drowning now for the first time ever?

Those are important questions and let me tell you why.

Maybe Mr. Gore doesn’t know, but polar bears can swim incredible distances, a lot farther than 60 miles.

Between 2004-2009, the U.S. Geological Survey used GPS collars to track 52 female bears, recording 50 swims that averaged 96 miles. That’s is a long way to swim, but polar bears can swim even longer distances. MUCH longer.

Last night I read a National Geographic article that said a female polar bear swam for a record-breaking 9 days straight, traveling 426 miles!

Any way you cut it, 426 miles is a long way to swim.

Here’s another question the Chloe girl has: How healthy were the drowned bears in the scientific study Mr. Gore talked about?

Bears that aren’t healthy are more likely to drown. Mr. Gore didn’t say how many of the drowned bears in the study he talked about were sick or injured.

He says Arctic ice has been in a sharp downward trend for the last few decades. Even if that’s so, it’s nothing new. The same thing has happened many times before.

Warming trends come and warming trends go. Ice that retreats during warming trends eventually gets thicker when a cooling trend arrives. When another warming trend shows up, ice sheets get thinner, and so on.

Did you Climate Kids know that not too long ago Earth was in a TERRIFYING global cooling trend?

That’s true.

Here is a picture of two covers of TIME magazine, one from four decades ago, the other around the time most of you were born.

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The 1977 cover article said that unless things warmed up fast, much of life on Earth would be wiped out by a new Ice Age brought on by global cooling. But as always happens, the climate changed, and things eventually warmed up again.

The same magazine that told kids in 1977 that Earth was on the brink of a global cooling “tipping point” changed its tune in 2006 by telling kids they should be VERY WORRIED about the global warming phase that began in the 1980s.

What do these totally opposite TIME covers show? That publishers know they can sell a lot of magazines by scaring people into thinking the environment is at a “tipping point.”

Despite what the people who try to frighten kids say, it doesn’t look like polar bears are being wiped out by anything. They’ve been around for a long, long time, including many periods when Earth was much warmer than it is today. These big white bears are resilient animals that have always known how to figure things out when there’s less ice.

Anyway, that’s the Chloe girl’s global warming report for today. Stay tuned, Climate Kids. More to come!

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