Marita Noon comments on drowning polar bears” scientist queried story here (“Climate Change Alarmist Alarmed They’re Wrong,” Townhall, July 31, 2011):
The scientist who reported on dying polar bears gave the global warming movement its mascot—even though he wasn’t studying polar bears. His study was on whales. He saw dead polar bears. While working on the whales, he made some observations based on anecdotal evidence—not science. Monnett’s report is filled with words like: speculate, suggest, may, presume, apparent, almost, and could. The basic conclusion found in his polar bear mortality paper is that the dead polar bears were the result of high waves during a storm.
Why wasn’t the guy a full-time Darwinist writing about human evolution? He’d be way safer. We still don’t know if the investigation relates to that paper, but here’s a possibility about the bears that might be worth considering:
Bear swimming underwater
Years ago, during the “population doom” (one of many secular apocalypses UD News staff have somehow survived), a story went the rounds that overpopulated Arctic lemmings committed mass suicide by rushing into the ocean. Any biologist worthy the name knew, of course, that that was nonsense. The lemmings migrate when food supplies are low, but they don’t know how wide the body of water they are trying to cross is. Hence, mass drownings when they guess wrong. Perhaps that’s what happened to the bears. In general, bears are strong swimmers but they don’t have superpowers, and drowning could be a very minor cause of bear mortality in any given year.
On the last page of the report, he states: “Although a number of published papers have discussed implications of climate change on polar bears, to date, mortality due to swimming has not been identified as an associated risk.” Despite the statement that the “poster-child” of global warming propaganda isn’t drowning due to climate change, and regardless of the fact that there have not been increasing reports of downing polar bears (other than those mistakenly killed by the researchers), alarmists embraced the polar bear as the icon—making it into the star of An Inconvenient Truth.
The thing is, you can always find an apocalypse if you look hard enough.