What A Difference A Degree Makes - SF Chronicle

[hatrack]

Long, fascinating article.

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But lately (ed. - Barrow resident Marie) Rexford has seen evidence of the earlier melt -- rising sea levels, erosion and odd wildlife sightings. "We've been getting silver salmon and a weird-looking humpbacked salmon in our nets at Griffin Point, east of Barter Island,'' she said. In 1998 she caught, froze and brought to a state biologist one of the first saffron cods to show up in the refuge's waters. "This year we got 18 in our net,'' she said. These fish are normally found west and south of the Arctic Ocean. But a change in marine currents and as little as a half-degree rise Fahrenheit in water temperature can create or ruin a fish's habitat, scientists say.

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In the last few years, new documentation of the shrinking sea ice and the harm to bears has switched the focus from managing hunting to studying climate change. Two Canadian researchers, Ian Stirling and Andrew Derocher, found that in the southernmost bear population of Hudson Bay, where the sea ice was shrinking fastest, bears weighed less and had fewer births and survivals. As sea ice thinned and broke up, the bears were forced to change how they lived and hunted. And they spent more time on land, using greater amounts of energy to survive.

In the Beaufort Sea, meanwhile, more bears have come ashore in September as the distance between sea ice and land has increased, Schliebe's team discovered during the first five years of an ongoing study. Polar bears don't come to land at all if conditions are good on the ice, Schliebe said. Conditions are ideal when the ice is close enough to land to float over the shallow waters of the continental shelf, a rich feeding ground for the seals that are the bears' main prey. Now, even though the continental shelf extends 43 miles from the shore, summer ice retreats far beyond it. There are no seals, so, out of desperation the bears go to land, where there is hardly any food at all.

Since the mid-1990s, the sea ice has receded farther from Barter Island, this year as far as 250 miles or roughly five times the distance of some previous years. Increasingly, the long swim to land poses its own danger. Some bears drown. Females that give birth on land over the winter may not be able to bring their cubs back to the distant sea ice in the spring. In aerial surveys to count bowhead whales, the federal Minerals Management Service reported seeing four drowned polar bears floating in open water in 2004, apparently fatigued while trying to swim in high winds. They were seen in areas where the ice was between 125 miles and 185 miles from land. Many more bears may have drowned than they happened to spot.

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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/01/15/MNG3FGMHML1.DTL&hw=global+warming&sn=001&sc=1000

[gulfcoastliberal]

1. Runaway train

Nothing will stop what we've started. And who knows how long we have before this train slams into the end of the tracks that is our civilization.

[Boojatta]

2. Title suggests: if W hadn't gone to college then W wouldn't be President