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Thirty to 40 ships -- including several passenger ships -- were stuck Thursday in ice off the coast of Sweden, said a spokesman for the Maritime Search and Rescue Center in Gothenburg, Sweden. The area of the Baltic Sea worst hit by the ice were the waters bounded by mainland Sweden, the Stockholm archipelago and the Finnish island of Aland, said Tommy Gardebring, press officer with the Swedish Maritime Administration. Several passenger vessels from Viking Line were stuck, he said. One of them had been freed. "It has been a lot colder than normal in the southern parts of the...

Photographer Norbert Rosing, wanted to shoot some photos of some sled dogs with the sunset as a backdrop. So he found the perfect spot around Canada’s Hudson Bay. He had it all set up with a local who tethered his dogs to a stake for the shoot. The photographer set his equipment up at a distance to allow for the right effect from the sunset in the background and just as he was ready to begin the shoot, an unexpected visitor arrived. What you will see in the accompanying photos is a polar bear doing something so unexpected, that it...

In these series of photos, you will see a polar bear come upon some sled dogs tethered to a steak. Normally you would think that a dog tethered to a steak would be lunch for a polar bear, but these pictures tell a completely different story. From what I can see, the polar bear just wanted to play and get a little brotherly love. The professional photographer who took these photos said, the bear came back every night that week to play with the dogs. Excellent photos, taken by Norbert Rosing when he was in the wilds around Canada’s Hudson...

Despite terrorist attacks against the United States recurring with the Fort Hood shooting and the December underwear bomber, President Obama has tasked the Central Intelligence Agency with investigating global warming. Obama has resurrected a program formerly cancelled by President Bush that shares information from the CIA's spy satellites and other classified sensors with environmental scientists. The program, called Measurements of Earth Data for Environmental Analysis, or MEDEA, has already been used by a group of government-chosen scientists to measure Arctic sea ice.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska, Jan. 8 (UPI) -- A 27-year study of polar bears in the southern Beaufort Sea showed them spending more time on land and open water as ice disappeared, officials said. Between 1979 and 1987, 12 percent of bear sightings were associated with no ice. Between 1997 and 2005, however, 90 percent of bear sightings were associated with no ice, said Karyn Rode, a polar bear biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Anchorage, Alaska. As sea ice disappeared, more bears were seen near shore in the southern Beaufort Sea, Rode said in a recent issue of...

Climate Change: We can't stop terrorists from boarding planes with explosive undies, but the CIA has assets sufficient to monitor Arctic ice and look for signs of global warming? Is al-Qaida recruiting polar bears? One wouldn't think that the increasing polar bear population and the increasing rate of recidivism of former Guantanamo detainees released into the wild were related, but they are. At the urging of Al Gore, the administration is signing on to a plan to task vital intelligence assets to protect not the people of the United States, but the environment. The program, shot down by President Bush,...

Arctic char is now on the bears' menu at the Polar Bear Habitat and Heritage Village in Cochrane. The recent change was prompted by a university study of the polar bears' adaptability to various diets. Arctic char is part of the bears' natural diet in the wild. Markus Dyke, who lived in Nunavut for 11 years and taught science at the Arctic College in Iqaluit, has been conducting the study for a PhD he's working on through the Department of Biology at Queen's University in Kingston. Dyke said the idea for the study was triggered by environmentalists who suggest global...

Global Warming: The Alaskan governor who knew polar bears weren't endangered says the planet isn't either and challenges the oracle of climate change. Al Gore says despite the CRU e-mails, the situation is of the utmost gravity. In a Dec. 9 Washington Post op-ed, Sarah Palin noted that the Climate-gate e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia "reveal that leading climate 'experts' deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to 'hide the decline' in global temperatures and tried to silence their critics from publishing in peer-reviewed journals." This did not sit well with Gore. "The entire North...

Some tourists on a tundra buggy tour of the Churchill wildlife management area on Nov. 20 were shaken and started crying after witnessing a male polar bear eating a baby polar bear, said John Gunter, general manager for Frontiers North Adventures, an area tour operator.Eight cases of mature male polar bears eating baby bear cubs have been reported this year..... Infanticide [ Baby killing ] occurs among polar bears when they run low on fat reserves and become hungry enough to resort to cannibalism [and murder ]..... Scientists predict that with later formation of ice in the fall and earlier...

Control: The House and Senate climate bills contain a provision giving the president extraordinary powers in the event of a "climate emergency." As chief of staff Rahm Emanuel says, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. If you thought the House health care bill that nobody read has hidden passages that threaten our freedoms and liberty, take a peak at the "trigger" placed in the byzantine innards of both the House-passed Waxman-Markey bill and the Kerry-Boxer bill just passed by Democrats out of Sen. Barbara Boxer's Environment and Public Works Committee. As Nick Loris of the Heritage Foundation points...

Youngsters in Churchill are warned not to dress in furry white costumes, to steer clear of baited traps stuffed with seal meat and to listen for the tell-tale sound of fireworks. That's because these candy-seekers have more to worry about than ghosts and goblins. They need to avoid a different kind of predator on Halloween - the polar bear. School children get a visit from the polar bear patrol team to go over safety tips. On the day of Halloween, several conservation officers take to the sky in a helicopter to see if there are any bears nearby. As dusk...

Ecology: The administration creates the mother of all protected habitats for a species whose numbers have increased since Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth." It's our hopes for energy independence that are drowning. When filmmaker Phelim McAleer, whose documentary "Not Evil Just Wrong" takes apart the myths of global warming, got to ask Gore a question at the annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists, McAleer brought up the nine critical errors in Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth." A British court two years ago listed them and said they must be righted before the film could be shown in schools...

Reporting from Seattle - In what would be the largest habitat zone ever established in the U.S. to protect a species from extinction, the federal government today proposed designating 200,541 square miles on the coast of Alaska as critical habitat for polar bears. Officials said the designation is not likely to further slow the pace of oil and gas development, and it crucially would not impose any controls to slow the biggest threat to polar bears, the melting of sea ice as a result of climate change. Those steps are crucial for polar bears but are being addressed separately in...

Belief in the myth of Global Warming has dropped 20 points in the last 3 years according to polling done by the Pew Research Center. Obama has followed this up by opening a polar bear habitat in Alaska, which will make drilling for oil and natural gas there much more difficult. ...

The Obama administration is setting aside 200,000 square miles in Alaska and off its coast as "critical habitat" for polar bears, an action that could add restrictions to future offshore drilling for oil and gas. Federal law prohibits agencies from taking actions that may adversely modify critical habitat and interfere with polar bear recovery. Assistant Interior Secretary Tom Strickland called the habitat designation a step in the right direction to help polar bears stave off extinction, recognizing that the greatest threat to the bear is the melting of Arctic sea ice caused by climate change. The Bush administration last year...

Climate Change: As a Colorado Rockies playoff game is snowed out, scientists report that Arctic sea ice is thickening and Antarctic snow melt is the lowest in three decades. Whatever happened to global warming? Al Gore wasn't there to throw out the first snowball, er, baseball, so he might not have noticed that Saturday's playoff game between the Colorado Rockies and the Philadelphia Phillies was snowed out - in early October. The field should have been snow-free just as the North Pole was to be ice-free this year. It seems that ice at both poles hasn't been paying attention to...

Climate Change: As a Colorado Rockies playoff game is snowed out, scientists report that Arctic sea ice is thickening and Antarctic snow melt is the lowest in three decades. Whatever happened to global warming? Al Gore wasn't there to throw out the first snowball, er, baseball, so he might not have noticed that Saturday's playoff game between the Colorado Rockies and the Philadelphia Phillies was snowed out — in early October. The field should have been snow-free just as the North Pole was to be ice-free this year. It seems that ice at both poles hasn't been paying attention to...

At a conference for environmental journalists in Wisconsin, Al Gore dodged questions on the many identified errors in his global warming movie, An Inconvenient Truth. "We're very close to that political tipping point," Gore said. "Never before in human history has a single generation been asked to make such difficult and consequential decisions." While the audience of environmental journalists were largely in agreement with Mr. Gore's presentation and his positions, one Irish journalist and filmmaker asked Gore about the many scientific errors that were found in Gore's global warming movie, An Inconvenient Truth. "A judge in the British High Court,...

Polar Bear Spotted Riding On Its Mother's Back [Pic in URL] Polar bear cubs ride 'piggy back' on their mother's back to avoid falling into the freezing waters of the Arctic, according to new scientific evidence. By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent 05 Oct 2009 A British holidaymaker visiting Duvefjorden, Nordaustlandet, spotted the mother bear with a seven-month-old cub hitching a ride. Photo: Angela Plumb The behaviour has been observed in the wild before by polar bears emerging from the den for the first time or crossing open water. However there was little research into the phenomenon and no photographic evidence....

Which may explain why a polar bear cub has recently been seen riding on the back of its mother as the bears swim across parts of the Arctic Ocean. The cub then briefly rode her back as she clambered out of the icy water, a unique event photographed by a tourist. Experts have rarely seen the behaviour, and they say the latest find suggests it may be a more common practice than previously thought.