Polar bears might be extinct by 2100 if climate change continues, according to research. With the shrinking sea ice cutting short the time bears have for hunting seals, polar bears are now being driven into starvation. If polar bears are starved, their chances of surviving Arctic winters without food plummet, as Rappler details:
"The bears face an ever longer fasting period before the ice refreezes and they can head back out to feed," Steven Amstrup, who conceived the study and is chief scientist of Polar Bears International, told the Agence France-Presse (AFP).
On current trends, the study concluded, polar bears in 12 of 13 subpopulations analyzed will have been decimated within 80 years by the galloping pace of change in the Arctic, which is warming twice as fast as the planet as a whole.
There is not enough data for 6 others to make a determination as to their fate.
"By 2100, recruitment" – new births – "will be severely compromised or impossible everywhere except perhaps in the Queen Elizabeth Island subpopulation," in Canada's Arctic Archipelago, said Amstrup.
image via wikimedia commons
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is this 1980?
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Presumably they will be gone someday. Will we still live to see th last of them die? and will they be gone before or after the north west passage became permanenty navigable.
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...despite twenty years of predictions about the dire fate of polar bears starved by global warming.
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More polar bears now compared to 1960
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are they still gonna make coca cola
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