NBC: Global Warming to Blame for Deadly Polar Bear Attack
On Monday's NBC Today, correspondent Martin Fletcher reported on a deadly polar bear attack in Norway and explained: "The attack began at dawn with a bear looking for food....it's believed that with global warming, food is scarce. A post-mortem showed this polar bear was 110 pounds underweight, with almost no fat reserves. It must have been starving."
Fletcher began the report by declaring: "And today in the Arctic Circle, one of the most beautiful and hostile places on the planet, it's warmer than usual. There isn't much food for the polar bears. So when a group of British youngsters on a wildlife adventure trip set up camp for the night they became bait for a bear."
At the end of the segment, Fletcher noted that all the usual methods to defending against a bear attack had failed: "The expedition cut short its trip amid tough questions. Why did the gun not fire? Why did the warning trip – trip wire to stop bears not work? And especially at this time of year, when polar bears are hungry, why were the youngsters there in the first place?"
Here is a portion of Fletcher's August 8 report:
7:50AM ET
MATT LAUER: Back now at 7:50 with a horrifying and deadly polar bear attack in Norway, the victims, a group of teenagers on a wildlife adventure camping trip. NBC's Martin Fletcher is in London, he's got details on this. Martin, good morning.
MARTIN FLETCHER: Hey Matt, good morning. Two British survivors of that horrific attack by the polar bear returned home this weekend, two more still in the hospital in Norway. The attack began at dawn with a bear looking for food. They're adorable at a distance and when they're well fed. When they're hungry, polar bears are mean killing machines. Ten feet tall, they weigh half a ton and can be ferocious.
And today in the Arctic Circle, one of the most beautiful and hostile places on the planet, it's warmer than usual. There isn't much food for the polar bears. So when a group of British youngsters on a wildlife adventure trip set up camp for the night they became bait for a bear.
(...)
FLETCHER: There are about 2,000 polar bears here, but it's believed that with global warming, food is scarce. A post-mortem showed this polar bear was 110 pounds underweight, with almost no fat reserves. It must have been starving.
JIM MCNEIL [POLAR EXPLORER]: If you're the only food source there, then they will come after you for that. It's just a natural process. And whether you can put them off is the key question.
FLETCHER: Tragically, the British youngsters could not. The expedition cut short its trip amid tough questions. Why did the gun not fire? Why did the warning trip – trip wire to stop bears not work? And especially at this time of year, when polar bears are hungry, why were the youngsters there in the first place? Hard questions as a family mourns its son. Matt.
LAUER: Alright, Martin Fletcher in London with this tragic story. Martin, thank you very much.
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Comments
When do the food drops start?
Submitted by Red Jeep on Mon, 08/08/2011 - 3:49pm.
Come on, gotta start emergency food drops to those bears, especially the ones stranded on ice floes.
I have a question though, " Polar bears feed mainly on ringed seals and bearded seals. Depending upon their location, they also eat harp and hooded seals and scavenge on carcasses of beluga whales, walruses, narwhals, and bowhead whales...When seals are unavailable, polar bears eat other marine mammals, reindeer, small rodents, sea birds, ducks, fish, eggs, vegetation (including kelp), berries, and human garbage." http://www.seaworld.org/infobooks/polarbears/pbdiet.html
So how is global warming limiting their food supply? Just askin'
Jeep it's just common
Submitted by Dan The Man 2 on Mon, 08/08/2011 - 4:11pm.
Jeep it's just common knowledge that th food supply decreases when it gets warmer.
Whose truth is that?
Submitted by Red Jeep on Mon, 08/08/2011 - 4:16pm.
Bears aren't into grass and vegetables.
Yes, they are
Submitted by CobraMan on Mon, 08/08/2011 - 6:29pm.
Bears eat far more grains (grasses) and vegetables than fish and seal. It's the carbohydrates that sustains them over winter. It's also the first think they eat in the spring once the snow melts and the tundra blooms.
The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States. The US Constitution
Unless you're a fetus. The US Supreme Court
Or Anwar al-Awlaki.
Nonsense
Submitted by Hooray for Capt... on Tue, 08/09/2011 - 2:27pm.
Polar bears are exclusively carnivorous.
As much as I hate to quote
Submitted by JoeBob on Tue, 08/09/2011 - 5:25pm.
As much as I hate to quote Wikipedia, it is sourced:
"Unlike brown and black bears, polar bears are capable of fasting for up to several months during late summer and early fall, when they cannot hunt for seals because the sea is unfrozen.[60] When sea ice is unavailable during summer and early autumn, some populations live off fat reserves for months at a time.[44] Polar bears have also been observed to eat a wide variety of other wild foods, including muskox, reindeer, birds, eggs, rodents, shellfish, crabs, and other polar bears. They may also eat plants, including berries, roots, and kelp, however none of these are a significant part of their diet.[58] The polar bear's biology is specialized to require large amounts of fat from marine mammals, and it cannot derive sufficient caloric intake from terrestrial food.[61][62]"
To confirm other comments in this thread, the first part of quoted material also explains an 100#-underweight bear at this time of year.
JoeBob
Speaking of malnourished mammals
Submitted by Prisondog1776 on Mon, 08/08/2011 - 9:12pm.
http://moonbattery.com/michelle-obama-boob-belt.jpg
Exactly
Submitted by Galvanic on Mon, 08/08/2011 - 4:14pm.
"....it's believed that with global warming, food is scarce. A post-mortem showed this polar bear was 110 pounds underweight, with almost no fat reserves. It must have been starving."
Believed by whom?
And was this bear otherwise healthy? Has an autopsy been conducted? Knut -- Berlin's late celebrity polar bear -- appeared perfectly normal until one day, it suddenly acted bizarrely and fell over into the pool; he died of some sort of brain aneurism. Are other polar bears in Norway starving?
But leave it to the MSM to jump to conclusions before the facts are known.
It's true! It's true!
Submitted by David N MO on Mon, 08/08/2011 - 4:30pm.
Now EVERYbody knows that seals prefer their drinks on the rocks over hot toddies. And that rats flourish only in the dead of winter. With global warming the bears don't stand a snow flake's chance in Texas.
Maybe it died of anorexia?
What I can't understand is these so called journalists don't make anymore sense than I do here yet spew it as news!
David
Save me from the Good People!
"It's believed..."
Submitted by Pilgrim1949 on Tue, 08/09/2011 - 3:34pm.
By some people.....
That the Earth actually IS flat.
That the Earth really IS the center of the Universe.
That that little guy over in the corner in the straightjacket really IS Napoleon Bonaparte.
That you really CAN spend your way into prosperity (which means all those get-out-of-debt services must be addressing a non-existent problem in an alternate universe). After all Lunchbox-for-brains Biden said we actually can spend our way out of our debt/death spiral.
That the oncologist who somberly tells you that you have Stage 4 lung cancer is him/herself personally responsible for the results of your 4-decade-old, 2-packs-a-day smoking habit.
President Ozoneman denies that his own dog ate his homework assignment. He would have it be believed that it was actually everyone else's dogs that ganged up and ate his masterpiece - "It was genius, AAAAA+++ level, I tell you, genius!"
"Ye canne change the laws of physics....." but some politicians believe that with the right legislation you can pretend they don't really apply to your own pet projects...
What's wrong with Norway?
Submitted by bigdaddy on Mon, 08/08/2011 - 4:00pm.
Why are they so hateful against Polar Bears? Don't they have a BIC (Bear and Infant Cub) Program providing additional nourishment?
Coincidence?
Submitted by Galvanic on Tue, 08/09/2011 - 8:57pm.
Last month, the MSM reported about a Norwegian man ("a probable Christian extremist") armed with guns and a lot of ammo, who killed 70+ people at an island campground, shortly after a bomb he probably set to emulate Timothy McVeigh's attack went off in Oslo, bring the death total to 76.
And this month, a hungry polar bear -- starving due to the effects of global warming - attacks some Norwegian campers.
Then, S&P downgrades the US's credit.
And we're supposed to accept that these events are unrelated?
(How;s that for my CNN audition?)
are you folks nuts-
Submitted by JIMMY1660 on Mon, 08/08/2011 - 4:00pm.
Polar Bears the largest predator-has no Emmies-he/she kills and eats.
whom ever took the kids close to the bears should be strung up-not knowing the dangers.
fool with a momma bear and her cubs-even worse.
do not play on the interstate you may get hit by a truck.
Polar Bear count has gone from 5,000 to 25,000-bears are happy-bears make babies.
wow what a concept-no abortions either.
Nature to "blame"
Submitted by deadeyedan on Mon, 08/08/2011 - 4:09pm.
It was in April of 2007 that I participated in a campus debate over global warming and as part of it each side was to draw up questions to pose to the respective opponent. Because of so many questions asked by the audience we only had time for one each, and this one I could not get to:
It has been understood through DNA evidence that polar bears evolved from Kodiak bears only about 250,000 years ago and are still so closely related that they can do interbreed mating and have fertile offspring. Most species are much older than that, so why in the 65,000,000 years of the Age of Mammals did it take so long for there to be an ecological niche favorable to polar bears?
The answer is that the earth has not been cold enough long enough for the trial-and-error machinations of DNA experimentation for polar bears to have come into existence until then. It had not been cold, snowy and icy enough prior to the natural change of landscape that would eventually enable polar bears, arctic fox, snowy owls , Arctic hares and Arctic wolves to exist.
Nature did not allow polar bears to have a niche prior to then despite hominid fossil evidence of our ancestors having walked upright as much as 4,400,000 years ago. We are not a threat to the Arctic as much as natural processes are.
Global warming - authoritarian, rather than authoritative, science - deadeyedan
ClimateGate - the revelation that the pseudo-scientists at East Anglia University know just as much about the atmosphere as Harvard law professors know about the Constitution - deadeyedan
So if the earth is cooler... than polar bears, who thrive in
Submitted by gmaniac1 on Mon, 08/08/2011 - 4:12pm.
colder temperatures are less likely to attack someone? Hmmm okay it makes sense to me!
Gives a whole new meaning to "meatspace"
Submitted by SickofLibs on Mon, 08/08/2011 - 4:19pm.
Stay in the basement, you trolls.
And it's going back back back...
Submitted by The Vet on Mon, 08/08/2011 - 10:07pm.
Harry Doyle: [as SickofLibs hits a high-fly ball] SickofLibs swings and crushes this one toward South America. Tomlinson is gonna need a Visa to catch this one, it is out of here, and there is nothing left but a vapor trail.
Nicely Said Vet...
Submitted by packman on Tue, 08/09/2011 - 10:51am.
Nicely Said, Vet...
"...Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread..." ~Thomas Jefferson
The experts in the MSN seem to always have the answers to all.
Submitted by Bobbygn on Mon, 08/08/2011 - 4:45pm.
The experts in the MSN seem to always have the answers to all and when it;s concerning anything to do with nature the problem is always Global Warming, um or is it Climate Change or something else this week. Not ice age. That was in the 70s I think.
I doubt that any of the media commenting of this bear would know the difference between the end that bites and the end that craps!
And especially at this time
Submitted by motherbelt on Mon, 08/08/2011 - 5:06pm.
And especially at this time of year, when polar bears are hungry, why were the youngsters there in the first place?
THAT is the question that needs to be answered.
People insist on encroaching upon animals' territory, and then wonder why disaster strikes.
If you bring up a police
Submitted by jdhawk on Mon, 08/08/2011 - 5:06pm.
If you bring up a police blotter from any major city, you will read about of crimes of assualt and murder of people that were in the wrong part of the city at the wrong time. Of course, not one of those stories begins or ends with the ridiculous idea that the perpetrators that created the mayhem did so because of global wamring, that they were hungry, or were under weight. Yet, the presstitutes (ryhmes with prostitutes) fell free to charge just that in this tragic story.
That facts are that the guide in this tragic bear mauls kids episode recognized he was in a bad area and night time would be the most dangerous time period while visiting that area. He set up a trip wire system and had a loaded rifle on hand if needed. This story is about the failure of the trip wire system and the subsequent events that took place following that safety failure.
As a college kid in California, I hiked around Yosemite, Sequoia, and the John Muir Wilderness area. Bears were a constant problem. If one didn't put food up in a tree sufficiently difficult for the bear to reach and keep all cooking items well away from sleeping areas, you could expect bears to attempt to "rob" you of your food supply and "snuggle" in your tent. These events always happened at night and the bears were totally non plussed with the banging of pots and the yelling at them to go away. The only way they were deterred was if they determined that either there was no food or it was just too hard to get to.
Polar bear numbers are up and
Submitted by rbosque on Mon, 08/08/2011 - 5:38pm.
Polar bear numbers are up and are far from being extinct, especially from a global warming fantasy. Go up to any huge bear in the wild, and if its pissed enough, it'll come at you. That have NOTHING to do with the climate.
I seem to recall
Submitted by ckc1227 on Mon, 08/08/2011 - 5:55pm.
I seem to recall hearing/reading that polar bears are the one species of bear that actually preys upon humans. Most bears will avoid contact with humans. Polar bears will actually track them down and eat them. That being the case, there's nothing unusual here.
GW in Polar Bear country -- Svalbard, Norway
Submitted by Gary Hall on Mon, 08/08/2011 - 6:01pm.
Well, always curious, why the MSM doesn't take a look at actual temperature records. OK, no I'm not.
Svalbard is a cluster of islands west of Norway. The polar bear was taking to Longyearbyen (appears to be the capital) for autopsy. They killed the bear? My my -- no respect for nature.
The nearest GISS temp records I could find -- not much luck on short order:
Jan Mayen - some 621 miles to the SW (between Iceland and Svalbard) -- OK, got warm (like now) in the 1930-40's, cooled way off to the 1070's, then warmed back up again. About to where it was in the '30-40's.
Bodi Vi - a bit futher SW in Iceland - but like most of Greenland, we know there's no real GW going on over that way. History repeating itself - certainly not getting all warmed up yet, like it did back in the 1930's.
Tromo/Skatto - some 611 miles south, on the west coastline of Norway -- OK, well, every year brings change here (Obama'd like that). But nothing to indicate any GW trend.
Then I found this, from Climate Wiki (my bold):
Maybe NBC should just ask the darn polar bears about what they remember.
(;~> gary
Underweight polar bears....
Submitted by Dutch Man on Mon, 08/08/2011 - 6:13pm.
....and an obesity epidemic in America. Seems to me that more global warming is needed to keep those cold-loving bears up there and away from our fat, slow moving children.
By the way, did everyone hear the joke about the arctic bear who couldn't decide if he was depressed or happy? ...Turns out he was just bipolar. hahahahaha.
So long and thanks for all the fish
Submitted by CobraMan on Mon, 08/08/2011 - 6:36pm.
"Back now at 7:50 with a horrifying and deadly polar bear attack in Norway, the victims, a group of teenagers on a wildlife adventure camping trip.."
So, class, what did this camping trip teach us? Invade the territory of a carnivore, and, well, you're lunch! And to think the bastard children of the Vikings (do you really think the Vikings invaded for gold? The only plundering that occurred was the one committed against the mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives of anyone who got in the way.) have forgotten this basic truth. Eric the Red would be ashamed!
The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States. The US Constitution
Unless you're a fetus. The US Supreme Court
Or Anwar al-Awlaki.
Next time, maybe the
Submitted by Boudin on Mon, 08/08/2011 - 6:39pm.
African Savanna would be in order?
At least they learned something.
Submitted by CobraMan on Mon, 08/08/2011 - 6:43pm.
No one could ever accuse them of misunderstanding the term "wildlife" anymore. They found out just what a "wildlife adventure" really means. What did the guy on Faces of Death say? Oh, that's right: Here Bear. Nice Bear.
The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States. The US Constitution
Unless you're a fetus. The US Supreme Court
Or Anwar al-Awlaki.
I think they misunderstood what the meaning of
Submitted by Boudin on Mon, 08/08/2011 - 6:51pm.
"We will see the Bears after lunch", meant? Obviously they had their lunches confused.
Sorry, really not like me to make fun of a tragedy like this. But nbc is so pathetic, it kinda feels justified
The real tragedy
Submitted by CobraMan on Mon, 08/08/2011 - 7:04pm.
The real tragedy is that they had to learn the lesson the hard way. Didn't ANYONE ever consider just what "wild" means? I mean, really, this wasn't a trip to the local petting zoo. Leave it to the Brits to dumb-down their own children. They could have at least waited until after the salmon run was over and the bears were, you know, well-fed and far less aggressive. But, no, they decided to go in the middle of that run, when the Bears are at their most aggressive behavior pattern. That's just STUPID!
The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States. The US Constitution
Unless you're a fetus. The US Supreme Court
Or Anwar al-Awlaki.
There's got to be...
Submitted by HelenS on Mon, 08/08/2011 - 7:15pm.
There's got to be a racist element to this somewhere. Everything is either racism or climate change. But this was clearly a white on white crime so not sure yet where the racism is but will keep digging.
Details at 11.
Or whenever.
Me - "The libs/dems of today are the Quislings of former years - the cowards who would vote a fraud into office in exchange for handouts from the devil."
Bull crap!
Submitted by Emil on Mon, 08/08/2011 - 9:02pm.
Every year hundreds of polar bears invade the town of Churchill in Manitoba, Canada because they ice has melted and the seals they feed on are out to sea. They are very hungry! This happens every year. It has nothing to do with global warming!
→ Polar Bears have self-respect
Submitted by Cool Arrow on Mon, 08/08/2011 - 9:06pm.
Unlike this fellow from Montana.
It's a very short, but poignant tale you need to read.
Holy Cow,
Submitted by Boudin on Mon, 08/08/2011 - 9:12pm.
Wait before you take a sip
More bull crap!
Submitted by Emil on Mon, 08/08/2011 - 9:10pm.
It is summer in the Northern hemisphere! The ice pack retreats, and the seals the polar bears eat go out to sea till the ice pack returns in the winter. This puts the bears on a starvation diet. This happens every year as it has for hundreds of thousands of years. It has nothing to do with global warming. Of course the fraudulent lying warmists and their media accomplices will push the global warming fraud on the world and use this as evidence it hasn't happened before.
Polar bears are extremely
Submitted by TerryWest on Mon, 08/08/2011 - 10:53pm.
Polar bears are extremely dangerous and will attack without notice,
NBC's Martin Fletcher's report could give the faulse impression that if well fed and global warming wasn't a factor the Polar bear would not have attacked!
Rather then using the tragedy to push a disputable agenda an oppurtunity was missed to educate re these massive land carnivores, clearly there is a need to do so!
Could have been worse
Submitted by DiesIrae on Mon, 08/08/2011 - 11:29pm.
Well at least they didn't blame the bear's actions on right wing extremists or the Tea Party ...
Just wait an Al_F-ing_Gore Min...
Submitted by AMR1960 on Mon, 08/08/2011 - 11:39pm.
One Polar Bear starves to death?
That sounds more like nature with it's winners & losers,
Than Global Warming. It's not hundreds of Bears starving...it's just one!
_____________________
Long Live...THE REPUBLIC !
Has any of these liberal,
Submitted by jessieH on Mon, 08/08/2011 - 11:59pm.
Has any of these liberal, socialists ever heard of the Darwin Awards? They see global warming, I see an idiot.