Polar bears are far more resilient than many ENGOs say. Their numbers have increased; they are very adaptive animals. This fellow looks well-fed.
Read Susan Crockford’s report on polar bears and sea ice stability.
Sea level rise:
Canada – Saving the Planet and Marshall Islands from…Marine Emissions
Marshall Islands and Climate Change – Dr. John D. Harper
Florida – At Risk of Sea Level Rise or Natural Sinkhole – Dr. John D. Haper
Polar Bears and Glaciers:
Arctic Warming a Natural Process – Polar Bears Lived well in Warm Hypsithermal – Dr. Ian Clark
Glaciers – Dr. Ian Clark
Sea Ice
Sea ice melt has been claimed as the next catastrophe – causing sea level rise. It turns out sea level rise is not such a simple thing to measure, nor is the apparent cause.
While sea level has risen in some places, in others, the land has fallen, or ‘subsided.’ This can be due to human effects from underground mining or the extraction of water from aquifers, tectonic plate movement or other phenomena.
For example, shown below is the dramatic drop in the level of the land, due to the drawing of ground water in California.
Other factors may be the type of rock or geological formation. Other geologic phenomena may make it appear that sea level is rising, when in fact some of the land is rising as a rebound from the Ice Age and in the United Kingdom.
This article by Friends of Science co-founder, Albert Jacobs, explores some of the challenges of sea level rise in The Netherlands – a country in which about 20% is below sea level today, and about 21% of the population live there.
As Albert Jacobs points out, claims of dramatic, short term sea level rises are not in keeping with historic records. Ove the past few years, people have claimed that sea levels are rising due to glacial and Arctic or Antarctic ice melt.
However, there has been past glacial melt with no apparent sea level rise of any significance. Hannibal crossed the Alps on elephants in 218 BCE and there was little or no snow. Yet in the 1600’s, in Austria, priests were dispatched with Holy Water and prayers to try and stop the advance of glaciers that were threatening to overwhelm villages, as recorded in Brian Fagan’s book “The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History.”
Most recently, a NASA team has reported that mass gains of ice in Antarctic exceeded reported losses.