My Poor Polar Bears are Dying!!

I know this is my first blog post with a documentary in it. (I promise more to come!!) This is actually the real inspiration for the topic that I chose for this blog. One day I was lying in bed, worrying about a topic for my blog (then worrying about the module, then worrying about the blog again), and so I decided to consult the soft toys on my bed about what topic I should focus on. Of course they weren't of much help in terms of helping me bounce off topics, but I have a white bear soft toy on my bed, and it reminded me about polar bears, and polar bears remind me about "An Inconvenient Truth" featuring Al Gore. And hence, I thought that media portrayals of the environment would be an interesting topic to focus on. Just in case you have never watched this overated documentary, you can watch it here:



For all those who weren't annoyed with the political promotion Al Gore was doing for himself, this film is actually successfully emotionally provoking, or what Rosteck and Frentz (2009) would describe as "'political jeremiad’ (the pragmatic attempt to persuade that the environment is doomed without immediate action)". His use of theatrics to create a documentary of argument was able to spur nations of people into emotional outrage, if not action. I too, admit, that I was very taken into the arguments presented in his documentary. Since I have gone on and on about the nature of documentaries before, I will not harp upon his cleverly juxtaposed scenes of nature and disaster and use of scenes of graphs that reinforce the apparent "scientific basis" of his facts. Rather, I would like to discuss the validity of some of his claims.

Polar bears are dying because the ice is shrinking
Although that's how I interpreted it when I watched the video, his actual claim was that "a new scientific study shows that for the first time, they are finding polar bears that have actually drowned, swimming long distances like 60 miles to find the ice" because the ice sheets in the arctic is now disappearing into a "vast ocean at the top that once used to be covered by ice". It is important to understand his argument. He had proposed that the greenhouse gases that we are emitting into the atmosphere (specifically CO2), has trapped heat in the atmosphere that is concentrated at the top of the earth, hence melting the arctic at an exponential rate.

Here we see two premises:
- It is entirely our fault that the arctic is disappearing.
- Polar bears are drowning because of loss of ice in the arctic.
For the sake of this post, we assume that his science explanation that the build up of CO2 leads to global warming is completely accurate (we know that it is not, because greenhouse gases isn't just about CO2)

1. Polar bears are drowning because of loss of ice in the arctic

There is basis for this claim. According to a powerpoint presentation done by Hansen (2008), "future loss of Arctic sea ice could result in a loss of 2/3 of the world's polar bears within 50 years". This is backed up by data from the USGS (2009) that stated that "The polar bear depends on sea ice as a platform to hunt seals, their primary food, and projected loss of sea ice due to global warming was believed to jeopardize polar bears throughout their range". Note that of course that the term "loss" is open to interpretation. Loss could refer to the general extinction of a species of animal, or to the migration of the animal away from the habitat they are most familiar with to another place with more suitable climatic conditions. For example, in a paper written by Ferguson et al (2000), "polar bear movements and habitat selection seem to follow a season cycle of ice distribution and characteristics" that is dependent on "accessibility of their prey [that] vary with structural and spatial characteristics of sea ice" (Stirling and Archibald 1977, Smith 1980). So the loss could be related to polar bears moving to less preferred environments. Of course, we do not doubt that polar bears are indeed decreasing in numbers because of the loss of productive ocean areas that could reduce individual survival rates and hence breeding ability (WWF 2005). However, polar bears are not DROWNING because of the abrupt wind storm in 2004. Data shows that their deaths would probably have greater correlation to seal numbers than distances travelled. Of course that image of the polar bear desperately clinging onto sea ice had a huge impact on our visual understanding of climate change. Furthermore, according to WWF, Polar bears have evolved from brown bears during the Pleistocene the time period that spanned from 1.8 million to 11,000 years ago. In that period of time, the earth has experienced temperatures that are far warmer than that of today, and yet, the polar bears still survived. Admittedly our understanding of animal adaptation is limited, although one can still argue that the time frame for adaption has been significantly shortened by human induced global warming.

Furthermore, to assume that ALL polar bear populations are decreasing is not entirely true. A polar bear map on WWF suggests that despite warming temperatures, there are some increases in polar bear population, or that we are mostly data deficient.

(source: http://assets.panda.org/img/original/polar_bear_subpopulation_status_170709_1.jpg)

I am less inclined to question the information that polar bear numbers are declining due to global climate change, than I am to question the link Al Gore drew between global warming and polar bear deaths. I still believe that we should protect the habitat of polar bears, as far as our understanding of their habitat goes.

Oh dear, I have gone on too long about my warm fuzzy polar bears. I'll discuss ice sheet melting in my next blog post. :)

Sources:
If you want to learn more about the many fallacies that Al Gore's video holds (this is a very myth buster kind of article), you can refer to this 110 page long paper:
Lewis, M.J. (2006) "A Skeptic’s Guide to An Inconvenient Truth", Washington: Competitive Enterprise Institute. (DRAFT)


Or you could refer to the polar bear fact sheet at WWF:
World Wildlife Fund (2005) "Polar Bears", http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/where_we_work/arctic/area/species/polarbear/, assessed on 5 November 2011


The alternative fact sheet is at the USGS website:
USGS (2009) http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/special/polar_bears/, assessed on 5 November 2011


Other resources used here:
Hansen, J. (2005) "The Threat to the Planet: Dark and Bright Sides of Global Warming", Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research, Iowa: University of Iowa. (Presentation)


Rosteck, T. and Frentz, T.S. (2009) "Myth and Multiple Readings in Environmental Rhetoric: The Case of An Inconvenient Truth", Quarterly Journal of Speech , 95,1,1-19


Ferguson, S.H., Mitchell, K.T. and Messie, F.O. (2000), "Influence of Sea Ice Dynamics on Habitat Selection by Polar Bears"Ecology, 81,3,761-772