Sunday, January 09, 2011

Saving polar bears by killing them?
If the Siberian humans of 200,000 years ago had killed all the white bears that began to appear, we'd never have had the polar bear species. Humans would have forestalled one of Nature's major strategies for improving and adapting her animals. Are today's humans proposing to play the eugenics card to stop adaptation? Are activists afraid of the adaptations the animals produce themselves? Further, we know all of today's species have adapted to massive past changes in the earth's climate.

The claim of "unprecedented speed" in modern climate change is false. At the end of the Younger Dryas cooling event 11,500 years ago, temperatures near Greenland rose 15 degrees C in less than a human lifetime! Ocean temperatures and sea ice conditions apparently moved even faster. The polar bears obviously survived this.

(A question: About 500 polar bears are killed by permit each year in Canada. Will each bear have its DNA tested and will hunters be charged more or less if their kill counts as a hybrid?) ESR

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