The image of a lonesome polar bear on an ice flake is used so often to illustrate global warming that it is almost becoming a cliché. Still, new evidence puts the fate of polar bears in focus as the bears, loosing their hunting grounds, are driven closer to habitation.
”Hungry bears don’t just lie down – they go looking for an alternate food source. In many cases this brings them into human settlements and hunting camps,” Ian Stirling, zoologist at the University of Alberta, Canada, tells New Scientist.
In the West Hudson Bay the total polar bear population has declined by 22 percent since the late 1980s, but even so the number of attacks on humans has more than tripled. Global warming has reduced the period where the bears are able to hunt their natural food source, seals, by three weeks.
”Previous research has postulated that climate change will boost numbers of problem bears. This is the first evidence for the link,” comments Andrew Derocher, a scientist in Stirling’s team.
New data from US National Snow and Ice Data Center reports this year’s Arctic summer ice cover to be the third-smallest on record
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