Another day, another misleading piece on the alleged dangers of global warming. This time it's an article by Matt McGrath, which sexes up claims made in a new paper about polar bear metabolisms:
Polar bears are unable to adapt their behaviour to cope with the food losses associated with warmer summers in the Arctic.
Scientists had believed that the animals would enter a type of 'walking hibernation' when deprived of prey.
But new research says that that bears simply starve in hotter conditions when food is scarce...
Polar bears survive mainly on a diet of seals that they hunt on the sea ice - but increased melting in the summer reduces seal numbers and as a result the bears struggle to find a meal.
The paper's findings about polar bear metabolisms may well be correct, but McGrath's background "information" is plain wrong. Polar bears do most of their feeding in the spring, when seal pups are born. Moreover, seal populations are seen to have little correlation to summer ice, but instead are linked to winter and spring ice levels, with thick ice proving problematic. What is more, bears don't feed very much in the summer anyway, as an excerpt from a paper by Hammill and Smith makes clear:
In late spring, polar bears enter a period of intense feeding (Stirling and McEwan 1975, Ramsay and Stirling 1988), which begins with the onset of the ringed seal pupping season. …Feeding on young seals continues throughout the spring and early summer as bears replenish depleted fat reserves. After ice breakup, bears move ashore and begin another period of little feeding (Stirling and McEwan 1975, Ramsay and Stirling 1988).
So we being asked to worry about polar bears' struggling to get food at a time of year when they don't feed anyway.
It's probably something to do with the unique way the BBC is funded.