Climate change is causing polar bears to starve into extinction, a study predicts that the predators could all but disappear within a century
According to research published Monday, Climate change is causing wild polar bears to starve into extinction; the study predicts that the apex predators could all but disappear within the span of one hundred years.
In some regions, the polar bears have already been caught in a vicious downward spiral, with melting sea ice reducing the time that bears have to hunt seals, reported by scientists in Nature Climate Change.
The low body weight of the bears, whose native range lies largely within the Arctic Circle, undermines their chances of surviving through the Arctic winters without food, the scientists added.
This comes after the government has admitted that its contact tracing programme, that Boris Johnson pledged would be ‘world beating’, is unlawful in a legal letter which confirms that it has been breaching data protection laws since it has been running in May.
On current trends, the research study had shown that polar bears in 12 of the 13 sub-populations that were analysed, will have been wiped out within the next 80 years due to the drastic pace of climate change in the Arctic, an area which is warming at three times the rate as the planet as a whole.
Steven Amstrup, who conceived the study and is chief scientist of Polar Bears International, has said:
“The bears face an ever longer fasting period before the ice refreezes and they can head back out to feed,”
“By 2100, recruitment” — new births — “will be severely compromised or impossible everywhere except perhaps in the Queen Elizabeth Island sub-population,” in Canada’s Arctic Archipelago, said Amstrup.
That scenario foresees the average surface temperature of the Earth rising by 3.3 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial benchmark. So far one degree of warming has caused a series of heatwaves, droughts and super-storms across the globe, which has been made more destructive by the rising sea-level.
CBS News meteorologist and climate specialist Jeff Berardelli has said:
“The Arctic is warming at 3 times the average of the globe because of human-caused climate change … and as a result the landscape of the Arctic is changing at a staggering pace,”
“We are running out time to limit the damage from climate change. There is no doubt we will forever lose vital species. The question is just how many are we willing to sacrifice? That will be determined by how quickly and boldly we take action to limit climate change and habitat destruction.”
This comes after the United Kingdom has secured early access to 90 million COVID-19 doses of two kinds of coronavirus vaccine through partnerships between the government and pharmaceutical companies.
Lead author of the study, Peter Molnar, a professor at the University of Toronto, has said:
“By estimating how thin and how fat polar bears can be, and modelling their energy use, we were able to calculate the threshold number of days that polar bears can fast before cub and adult survival rates begin to decline,”
