Posted on 09/19/2015 12:03:25 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Pictures of a horribly thin polar bear have emerged, sparking a debate over global warming.
Many have said it is a sign of how global warming is destroying the planet while others suggest it could actually be an old or sick bear.
The picture was posted by Kerstin Langenberger who spotted the bear on the Norwegian archipelago Svalbard.
She said: ‘Yes, I have seen bears in good shape – but I have also seen dead and starving polar bears. Bears walking on the shores, looking for food, bears trying to hunt reindeer, eating bird’s eggs, moss and seaweed.
‘Many times I have seen horribly thin bears, and those were exclusively females – like this one here.
‘A mere skeleton, hurt on her front leg, possibly by a desperate attempt to hunt a walrus while she was stuck on land.’
But while the general consensus is that climate change is destroying our planet, this photo isn’t necessarily evidence of that.
Professor Iain Stirling of the University of Alberta told Mashable ‘You have to be a little bit careful about drawing conclusions immediately. [The bear] may be starving but it may just be old.
‘A difficulty hunting could be involved. I don’t think you can tie that one to starvation because of lack of sea ice.’
Whatever the real cause of the bear’s starved appearance, the photo does serve as a reminder that sea levels are rising at an increasingly alarming rate and bears and other animals will inevitably suffer.
Indeed, National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen took this photo of a polar bear in the same region – a place he had visited numerous times before – and noted in his description that it he believed it was evidence of the harsh reality of climate change.
He wrote that the lack of sea ice and the multiple polar bear corpses were something he had never previously witnessed.
‘In all my years of growing up in the Arctic and later, working as a biologist, I have never found a dead polar bear,’ he said.
He suggests that this particular polar bear died as a result of an absence of sea ice, leaving it unable to hunt seals.
My brothers cat recently had to be put down because it had cancer and it was as thin like this bear. But I guess it wasn’t because of the cancer, it must have been global warming making my brother a mean guy who purposely starved him.
Obviously, no photographers were around to snap images of emaciated dinosaurs when their “easy prey” ran out and wily mammals were able to evade their clumsy hunting! As to “Anthropogenic Global Warming”..., how did we humans turn up the sun???
I have a different theory .. I think it may be a “mother” bear who has been spending the winter months nursing twins or triplets.
That action alone could have robbed her of all her body fat which she had stored up in order to be able to feed her brood until spring would allow her to hunt and fish again.
It would be interesting to know how far away this guy was when he took the photo. If he was close enough to be seen, why didn’t the starving bear attack him?
Take away food stamps and welfare and millions of people not working (that could) would look like this.
That could be one of those vegan polar bears... Or lesbian polar bear, er, no scrap that, lesbians grow fatter
I thought the polar bear population was actually increasing.
That’s how liberals think.
Rewire the entire world because a polar bear is dying.
There is another explanation. A very rich environment in which old bears suffer no predation would produce an unusually high population of aging bears. As with humans, many weak and feeble seniors survive today who would have died 50 years ago.
See? It means what you want it to mean.
A predator population can only increase until the prey population drops as a result of too many predators. Then the predators die off, and the prey population rebounds. At that time, the predators once again have sufficient food, and their population grows. Then the prey population starts to decrease. Etc.
The boom/bust cycles of predator and prey population numbers have been going on for as long as there have been predators and prey.
A friend recently asked a hog farmer he was doing a project for “What causes a few of your pigs to die?’
The reply was “If you have a town of 12,000 people, some of them just get sick and die.”
OH NO! A starving polar bear! Let’s spend another $trillion to fight “global warming” and give up to more government control.
Because if only ONE polar bear is saved...
How dare you enter the fray with the logic of thousands of years on your side. If you continue to do this you will prove the nut jobs wrong and political correctness will not allow that to happen.
Now go to your room.
Why hasn’t anyone stated the obvious? Look at the picture. That polar bear IS on the sea ice.
They must live forever.
More proof that National Geographic photographers and biologists are scaring away the seals that polar bears feed on.
Oh no they wouldn’t, they would go to work just like lazyasses have always done. You would not be seeing near as many morbidly obese though.
The bear is likely either a juvenile separated from Mom too soon or really old. They don’t make it.
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