Does “climate change” cause more polar bears to chat up the grizzly girls producing Grolar Bear babies? Maybe…
The Headline: “Grolar bears: Climate change could be behind grizzly-polar bear hybrid, scientists say”
The evidence:
Chris Servheen, a bear biologist and Adjunct Associate Research Professor at the University of Montana, said sightings of this hybrid bear species have been very rare in the past.
“But they seem to be more common now,” he said.
Mr Servheen said not very much was known about the grolar and pizzly bears, as little contact had yet to be made between them and humans.
The recent photo of what many suspect to be one of the hybrid bears was posted on Facebook…
That’ll be one data point confirmed then?
Mr Servheen said it was hard to know how many of the bears existed.
In 2006 a bear shot by hunters in the Arctic was tested and confirmed as a polar-grizzly hybrid.
So if a scientist reported that thermometers “seem” to be more near airport tarmacs than they were in 1910, with a photo of an unconfirmed one on facebook, would that be worth an interview, ABC feature and a photo? Can someone ask the ABC’s Sarah Sedghi — I know someone she should talk to.
Just a hint of sarcasm sneeking in there Jo.
I think the ABC journos get excited if it’s a hybrid.
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“This bogus claim has been busted so many times it’s a wonder it still arises …”
Susan J. Crockford
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Yes, John – thanks!
It’s odd though, isn’t it, that no polar bear specialists were interviewed.
There are a few who would actually know the details on the background of hybridization (including myself) but the reporter for this story (and the CBC one I cite) went with a bear biologist who would go the climate change route.
Just saying…
Susan
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Web of science lists this extraordinarily dull and peculiar study as the only “scientific” article that even mentions grolars (it is in no way a swtudy of grolars as you can guess from the title)
Grolar bears, social class, and policy relevance: Extraordinary agendas for the emerging 21st century
By: Fiske, Susan T.
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY Volume: 45 Issue: 5 Pages: 551-559 Published: AUG 2015
the only citation this gives wrt grolars is this nyt article which has no references or scientific merit
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/17/magazine/should-you-fear-the-pizzly-bear.html?_r=1
The reverse hybrid, the pizzly, drew a complete blank in the literature.
Plenty of scientific references about range changes in bears caused by climate, food availability, roads, agriculture, human settlements etc etc
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Polar bears are an arctic, marine adapted species that is closely related to brown bears. Genome analyses have shown that polar bears are distinct and genetically homogeneous in comparison to brown bears. However, these analyses have also revealed a remarkable episode of polar bear gene flow into the population of brown bears that colonized the Admiralty, Baranof and Chichagof islands (ABC islands) of Alaska. Here, we present an analysis of data from a large panel of polar bear and brown bear genomes that includes brown bears from the ABC islands, the Alaskan mainland and Europe. Our results provide clear evidence that gene flow between the two species had a geographically wide impact, with polar bear DNA found within the genomes of brown bears living both on the ABC islands and in the Alaskan mainland. Intriguingly, while brown bear genomes contain up to 8.8% polar bear ancestry, polar bear genomes appear to be devoid of brown bear ancestry, suggesting the presence of a barrier to gene flow in that direction.
Cahill et al DOI: 10.1111/mec.13038
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These stories are hilarious. I worked in the arctic and saw grizzlies, polar bears, caribou, wolverines etc.
The joke goes:
Question: “What does a 1600 lb. polar bear make love to?”
Answer: “Anything it wants.”
In my experience, if a VW bug was left unattended I wouldn’t be surprised to see a polar bear attempting to mount it.
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Canada has now adapted the bogus cap and trade Global Warming garbage policy now…Any way to hasten that economic collapse of enforcing more laws and regulations to make our country less and less economically competitive to this global trade agenda.
All this does is show how incompetent our government is and how they can NEVER be trusted now or in the future.
This will definitely will be applied in Australia…no matter who you vote in.
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I’ll add to this slightly OT thread with news of what’s going on in my immediate area – http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2016/05/us_doe_awards_37_million_to_la.html –
“The grant is the third the DOE has awarded to LEEDCo, bringing the total federal funding to $10.7 million. Previous grants have helped pay for the development of foundation engineering designs” and
“The $3.7 million DOE grant depends on the LEEDCo and Fred.Olsen partnership providing a $1.9 million cost share, according to a DOE memo, making the total funding now available nearly $5.6 million.” and
“Karpinski said the goal now is to complete detailed electrical and mechanical engineering designs — everything from the wiring and transformers, to underwater cables, to exact foundation specifications and even details as small as ladders on the turbine foundations. ”
10.7 MILLION (US$) and they don’t even have completed designs.
sigh.
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And in yesterday’s news we have US Attorneys General battling it out. Looks like some are after Exxon, and others are after the ones after Exxon.
I love my country.
http://watchdog.org/265567/ags-battle-each-other-over-exxon-probe/
“Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Monday called Walker’s actions “a fishing expedition.”
“What is ExxonMobil’s transgression? Holding a point of view about climate change that the Virgin Islands attorney general disagrees with,” Paxton said, speaking in Fort Worth. “This is about the criminalization of speech and the criminalization of thought.””
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What will they blame hybridization on when the Arctic ice comes back? And it surely will.
We all know what happens when boy meets girl. Fortunately the two species don’t have overlapping habitats to any great extent or there would be nothing but Grolar Bears by now.
Well, maybe not. But I’ll believe what Susan Crockford had to say before I’ll believe climate change did it.
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Roy Hogue.
“when the Arctic ice comes back?”
Well maybe if you wait long enough. Looking at the sea ice extent data and trend line, it might be a while.
There will still be plenty of ice around, I am not too concerned about the polar bears right now. But in a couple of hundred years they probably will be very short on pack ice. And the higher arctic temperatures might be more of a problem.
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So, Harry, even you, the diehard warming believer, are convinced that the Arctic ice will come back? Good! You’re thinking for a change.
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There is a difference between “belief” and “knowledge”.
In several tens of thousands of years there is likely to be another ice age, kicked off by the earth’s orbit. It all depends on whether CO2 levels drop low enough again to allow an ice age to start.
[How interesting. You can tell the difference between belief and knowledge. So Harry, why don’t you apply that when you make those completely off the wall comments we don’t let through. Past CO2 levels have been higher when it was colder than now.] AZ
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Harry,
There’s not enough carbon on the planet for CO2 concentrations to have an effect large enough to suppress the next, inevitable ice age. If this was even remotely possible, we should be pumping as much CO2 into the atmosphere as we possibly can. Mankind and indeed the whole biosphere does far better during warmer, wetter climates than in the colder, drier ice ages where the planet has been for most of at least the last several million years. Do you realize that the current warmth is an aberration and the only thing remotely unprecedented about it is how stable its been for the last few thousand years?
It would be useful if this stability was the consequence of CO2 emissions, but it seems to be related to how the Earth’s orbit and axis interacts which during the current interglacial spread the warmth out over a longer period of time as compared to the prior interglacial which was both shorter and reached higher average temperatures.
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Let’s sum up the facts,
1. No warming in the UAH satellite record before the 1998 El Nino
2. No warming between the end of that El Nino in 2001 and the start of the current El Nino at the beginning of 2015.
3. No warming in the southern polar region for the whole 38 years of the satellite record.
4. No warming in the southern ex-tropicals for 20 years.
5. No warming in Australia for 20 years, cooling since 2002
6. No warming in Japan surface data for 20 years
7. No warming in the USA since 2005 when a non-corrupted system was installed, until the beginning of the current El Nino.
8. UAH Global Land shows no warming from 1979 – 1997, the no warming from 2001 – 2015
9. Iceland essentially the same temperature as in the late 1930’s as now, maybe slightly lower
10. Southern Sea temperatures not warming from 1982 – 2005, then cooling … (is this a CO2 thing as well?)
11. Even UAH NoPol shows no warming this century until the large El Nino based spike in January 2016
Since CO2 is meant to be well mixed all these places should be affected by CO2…… But they are not.
The ONLY warming is coming from El Nino events and ocean cycles.
CO2 is not even in the picture.
It is very obvious that CO2 has very little to do with warming, otherwise the bulk of the Southern Hemisphere would be warming, and there would be a clear steady rise in temperatures around the world…
Neither of these things is happening.
Unless one wants to pretend that EL Ninos and the AMO, PDO etc are driven by CO2, then the whole assumption of CO2 warming is arrant nonsense.
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Hi red thumbs.. Which of my “no warming” points have you got evidence to dispute?
Bring on your arguments…. or not 😉
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” It all depends on whether CO2 levels drop low enough again to allow an ice age to start.”
Obviously something we must do absolutely everything possible to avoid.
A large increase in atmospheric CO2 is totally necessary.
Wouldn’t you agree, Harry ? 😉
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Harry,
I hope you are familiar with circumstantial evidence because I’m going to make an argument based on just such evidence.
I’m the first one to admit that one piece of circumstantial evidence or even several do not make a case for or against anything. And it’s foolishness to believe otherwise. In addition to that, it’s not possible to ascribe a meaning to something when you don’t understand it. For example, I reject every UFO ever thought to be alien spacecraft for that reason. But bear me out.
There is a large body of circumstantial evidence that Arctic ice has come and gone, come again and then gone again in cyclic fashion for a very long time and that the cycles are a lot shorter than anyone who believes CO2 is responsible for anything is willing to believe — possibly as short as a single human lifetime or less. The evidence ranges from old written and printed reports of a Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific ocean over the top of world, to photographs of U.S. nuclear submarines surfaced at the geographic north pole in open water in March in the mid 1960s (no ice visible or only small pieces of it floating around).
Have you ever asked yourself how it could be that submarines could even navigate under the polar ice if it never melted? The scenario is simple. The ice at the south pole is sitting on land, it never melts significantly and accumulates more ice with every storm and is now thousands of feet deep. If the Arctic ice never melted until we humans came along with our CO2 to cause warming, the ice there would also be deep, far too deep for any possible passage under it, probably pushed clear down to the bottom by its weight. But that ice sits on water and can be melted from below just as the Antarctic ice that sits on water is seen to melt, again, probably from below.
None of this proves anything. But taken together it tells me that Arctic ice comes and goes as a very natural phenomenon and I’m quite confident that it will be back long before even a hundred years, much less thousands. Science also consists of looking at what circumstantial evidence shows you and then devising experiments or measurements to verify even those theories that the circumstantial evidence suggest.
We do not have adequate records of Arctic or Antarctic ice changes to be so sure things are the way you think they are. And, like something strange seen in the sky, we don’t understand everything there is to know about Arctic ice and how it melts and it’s foolish to pretend that we do. Just for starers, we don’t know if it melts from below or above or both and how much melt goes on at each interface.
You believe what you want. I can’t change that. But I choose to look at everything available, not just a theory based on CO2 warming of the Earth.
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Roy Hogue.
You do not seem to understand Arctic sea ice.
“photographs of U.S. nuclear submarines surfaced at the geographic north pole in open water in March in the mid 1960s”
Nuclear submarines can travel under the ice because it is an ocean, the ocean does not freeze to the bottom. The sea ice floats on the ocean. The ice is not one solid piece, it is made of up pieces that float and move around. There can be plenty of space between them (this is one reason polar bears are good swimmers). You can watch any number of YouTube videos that explain all this, it is not a mystery it is well documented.
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Three points:
1. It doesn’t matter that the Arctic Ocean is, well, an ocean. I think we all accept that. The point Roy was making, I think, is that the submarine was able to break through the sea ice at the geographic North Pole, where ice should have been at its thickest. Now nuclear submarines are not small boats, and at least two previous attempts to get a boat to the North Pole had failed, because of insufficent depth of liquid water, under the ice.
2. We also have to consider the nature of the ice itself. Yes, it is not one contiguous sheet of ice, and it does have cracks in it. But it doesn’t “move around”, as you suggest, because to “move around” would require areas of ice free water, for flows to move into. Those areas of ice free water do not exist at the North Pole. When the ice does move, it is to subduct or superduct over adjacent pieces of ice, making the ice thicker. The thicker the ice, the harder it would be for a submarine to break through the ice in order to surface.
3. As far as I am aware, you don’t find polar bears at the North Pole. You find them at the margins of the ice pack, which is a significant distance from the North Pole itself. Polar Bears need to breathe, and they need ice free water in order to do that.
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Submarines are always referred to as “boats” irrespective of size. I don’t know why.
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RW:
reluctantly I have to admit that H. Twin O has a bit of a point.
It was not necessary for the boat to crash through thick ice. There are open areas (polynyas) where they could surface for a propaganda photo.
The reaction of the Soviets suggests that the USN was very near the North Pole because 2 years later their biggest ice breaker was dispatched to the North Pole for photgraphs of happy(?) russians playing on the ice.
Mind you polynyas are supposedly stationary and ice doesn’t move into them (probably because they are supposed to be due to warm water up-welling from below.
Nor do polar bears figure in any description of the North Pole. I suggst that we send Harry to the North Pole to check.
P.S. Ships are expected to float, boats please themselves.
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RW,
You piqued my curiosity and I went looking for information to answer the question, why is a submarine called a boat? I found this, which agrees with several other sources that say something that can float and is carried aboard a ship is a boat. Hence since early submarines were carried aboard ships they were called boats. The tradition grew a life of its own for submarines and the name became “cast in concrete”, regardless of size or any other factor.
That answer comes from several people who served on subs and can be assumed to be sufficiently authoritative. Interestingly one person’s answer is that the official U.S naval designation for submarines is ship, not boat, even though they’re still called boats.
After searching I’m doubtful there’s any better explanation for a submarine being called a boat. It’s just a tradition from the past that took on a life of its own.
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And to Harry,
Rereke has expanded on my reply very well. Read and learn.
As for polar bears, they are native born swimmers who take to the water almost like a fish. You couldn’t drown one just because some ice has disappeared. Only 4 are known to have downed and it was because they were caught by a fast moving storm and were overwhelmed before they could get to safety.
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And by the way, Harry, you misunderstood me completely. The geographic pole was assumed to be covered with deep ice. When subs actually went there they found open water. Surprise, surprise. According to a contributor to this blog who calls himself Submariner and was aboard one of those subs, pictures of a sub punched up through the ice supposedly at the north pole ware taken elsewhere and are all propaganda. They had to search for a place with enough ice to use for the photo op.
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I have not verified this video, but this is the sort of thing I was referring to. When the science people say Arctic sea ice, the ice can be solid, or it can be broken. It can have areas of open water. When they survey sea ice, the definition if “sea ice” is an area covered by 15-100% of ice – that allows for a lot of open water to be classified as “ice”.
I think people have taken a right-hand turn somewhere with their polar bear comments, I never said there are polar bears at the north pole.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8V-EMWPp5Cs
00
What do you expect that movie to prove?
It is a right of passage for all Russian Naval Officers to swim in artic waters.
Even President Putin has done it, to show that he hasn’t become soft, sitting behind the presidential desk. In fact, he stayed in a lot longer than the two Officers in that movie clip.
The clip itself was probably filmed in the Barent Sea, or the Kara Sea. There is nothing to indicate that it was in the Arctic Ocean, above the 75th parallel.
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I quite enjoy looking at sea ice extent data, with or without trend lines, because there are so many interpretations to choose from.
The Russians aren’t that interesting, because they don’t alter very much, but the American ones can be very imaginative, sometimes with two versions in the same week. Either way, it is good entertainment.
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RW,
There’s that aspect to it too. Highly entertaining if the results weren’t so dangerous to our future.
But I always try to keep my sense of humor.
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Says who and why? Evidence please.
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Only yesterday, the British Museum had to close, because a bunch of muppets from greenpeace decided to scale the building and display banners protesting against an exhibition about underwater archaeology. The exhibition was largely sponsored by BP, you see, which, according to greenpeace, causes all those deadly sea-level rises which, ermmm, don’t actually happen.
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Manfred.
Says who? Me, actually. I said “might” so it is clear I am speculating. But considering polar bears are cold-adapted, my guess is higher temperatures will not be good for them.
[You used the world “might” in a figure of speech, now you try to use it to wriggle out from under – you are just playing childish games] Fly
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“I said “might” so it is clear I am speculating”
Ahh.. more fairy-tales.
speculative nonsense, as usual.
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AMO has started to head back down.
El Nino morphing rapidly to La Nina.
Gunna get colder up there over the next couple of decades.
Did you know that there has been NO WARMING in the Arctic this century apart from the very transient El Nino effect in January, February.
http://s19.postimg.org/ys0o3bw6r/UAH_No_Pol_2000_El_Nino_spike.jpg
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Yeah, when you ignore the warming in the full data set.
Cherry-picking data is so last decade, most have moved on.
http://images.remss.com/msu/msu_time_series.html
[It is you who is cherry picking the range of data. The two decades that Andy showed on the UAH graph is mirrored in yours – same result. You are just playing with the scale to score a rather childish point. Can you explain why temperatures over the two decades, in both graphs, show no trend?] Fly
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roflmao.. you truly are totally useless.
I said north pole, you post global. DOH !
Lets have a look at some slightly longer term data for the Arctic , shall we.
Flat this century, and still COOLER than the 1930’s
http://s19.postimg.org/kiio2ao4z/arctic_temp.png
Also, you have AGAIN made my point, thank you, that the ONLY way you can show any warming in the global temperature is to include the 1998 El Nino step, which had nothing to do with CO2.
Keep up the good work… glad to see you are now becoming a skeptic/realist. 🙂
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Note that the Arctic temperature graph also highlights that almost EVERY trend that is ever created by alarmist starts in the late 1970’s 🙂
(apart from those that have intentionally wiped out the 1940 peak through mal-adjustment of data.)
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Yes Fly, its totally amazing that despite climbing CO2 levels, there has been basically ZERO warming over a very sizable portion of the globe over the last 20 or more years.
Proves that CO2 is a bit player at the very most.
The only places showing any warming are those affected by El Ninos and ocean cycles.
I listed the ones I have data and graphs for last thread, (I’m sure there would be many more) but I’ll post the list again , just for Harry. 🙂
1. No warming in the UAH satellite record before the 1998 El Nino
2. No warming between the end of that El Nino in 2001 and the start of the current El Nino at the beginning of 2015.
3. No warming in the southern polar region for the whole 38 years of the satellite record.
4. No warming in the southern ex-tropicals for 20 years.
5. No warming in Australia for 20 years, cooling since 2002
6. No warming in Japan surface data for 20 years
7. No warming in the USA since 2005 when a non-corrupted system was installed, until the beginning of the current El Nino.
8. UAH Global Land shows no warming from 1979 – 1997, then no warming from 2001 – 2015
9. Iceland and Arctic essentially the same temperature as in the late 1930’s as now, maybe slightly lower
10. Southern Sea temperatures not warming from 1982 – 2005, then cooling …
11. Even UAH NoPol shows no warming this century until the large spike in January 2016
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“Yeah, when you ignore the warming in the full data set.”
or when you ignore the massive cooling in the proxies.
https://mandobob.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/gisp-last-10000-new.png
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You red thumb guys are all thumbs.. zero substance.
Bring it on… I’m waiting. 🙂
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But it wouldn’t generate the same hysteria..
Global warming threatens Grolars.
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“Global warming threatens Grolars.”
No, the cretins that shoot the furry fellas on sight are the ones that threaten the grolers.
Gees, it looks different.. must shoot it so we can study it !!!
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They seem to think that when the white haired bears mate with the black haired bears it signals a climate Armageddon. Sounds like bear species-ism to me …
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It would appear diversity is a one way street, somehow they’ll always blame whitey for everything…….
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The climate alarmists would scowl,
If a Polar bear out on the prowl,
Made any advance,
To respond with romance,
To a love-calling grisly bear howl.
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O/T here but I need to know.
Does anyone know how to search comments on this blog by person and subject or keyword?
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Google
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Hi Peter, as CO2 says google. There may also be an internal search spot here.
Put in Jonova, the name being searched, any other key words and go.
All you will get is the relevant thread.
From there its a manual search.
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enter this into google plus your words of interestsite:joannenova.com.au
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there was meant to be a space before the word “site”. Anyway… the site: is the way to restrict searches to the site in question. Very handy if you are looking for a supplier of goods in australia to restrict your search to site:.com.au
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Thanks Kinky and Gee Aye,
Very helpful.
The Internet of friends and helpful colleagues!
🙂
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I reckon the Polar bears must be heading south to get away from all that cold up there. 🙂
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Apart from skiers, everyone I know heads to warmer areas for holidays.
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Saw my first whale of the season yesterday off Bar Beach.
Heading North Andy.
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Ooo, Its that time again is it. Thanks.
And I have a couple of days off work next week.
Coffee at the “Blue Door” at Merewether. 🙂
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” … grolar and pizzly bears, as little contact had yet to be made between them and humans.”
Given that the bears are very large, very intelligent, very strong, very fierce, and carnivorous, this is probably a good thing for the humans.
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May I suggest closer contact between the Greens and Grolars and pizzlys.
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The occasional sight of a pizzly
Sends the gullible into a tizzly
But don’t let the grolar
Stampede you to solar
And surely avoid the wind whizzly.
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Very good! 🙂
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Yes,I agree with Annie that it is very good.You have hit the spot there Lightning Camel.
10
That one sort of wrote itself but thank you Ruairi, I do appreciate a compliment from the master.
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The Grizzly Bear, as I understand, isn’t actually a species, but a sub-species. It’s part of Ursus arctos, which just means “Bear [Latin] bear [Greek]”. Over time, far from there being hybridization between the Brown Bear and any other species, the dispersed Brown Bear populations are themselves more likely to evolve into separate species.
10
Let’s break this down. Here is an ABC article with the alarming headline: “Grolar bears: Climate change could be behind grizzly-polar bear hybrid, scientists say”
Firstly, the word “could”. Please point to the data with error bars that support the “could” word.
Secondly the wonderful coverall, “scientists say”. Well, it is apparently just one individual. So the plurality is erroneous unless there is more than one individual.
This particular individual is “Chris Servheen, a bear biologist and Adjunct Associate Research Professor at the University of Montana”. I haven’t researched who this person is, but if he is an adjunct, he’s not the guy in charge. If he is an associate, he’s not in charge. So he is two magnitudes away from any scientist worth mentioning.
This is not ad hominem, it is disputing the argument from authority.
[Better not to use pejorative terms when describing real people] Fly
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So AGW is proven by one randy bear, big deal, I had a puppy that would hump my wife’s furry slipper and when it grew up your leg wasn’t safe. I didn’t immediately think “oh dear that’s Global Warming at work”
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Brown on white.. or white on brown
The world goes around 😉
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Hillary Clinton has an Arkansas Leg Hound that’ll hump anything that moves….
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Now we have a problem. To the children of the world, polar bears are fuzzy cute animals that no one but an ogre would harm. Grizzly bears, on the other hand, are terrors that if one encounters on the trail will scare the you-know-what out of you. One of the major unanswered questions facing the world is: Will Grolar bears be fuzzy cute or your worst nightmare? If the latter, then since global warming is responsible for Grolar bears, global warming isn’t all bad. If the latter, global warming gets another black mark because global warming is turning fuzzy cute animals into nightmarish killers. Maybe some one can channel Timothy Treadwell’s spirit and find out.
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The bear was SHOT by hunters…
OK, I’ll admit, that is one bear that was endangered – the rest are doing just damn fine and dandy, thanks.
An alternate conclusion – maybe the polar bear is extending its range due to population growth?
Cheers,
Speedy
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