NPR's Latest Climate Change Impact: Deadly Grizzly Bear Attacks

April 19th, 2011 6:58 AM

National Public Radio clearly believes people need to be frightened into dramatic "climate change" legislation. On Saturday night's All Things Considered, NPR publicized an article by a writer for Men's Journal -- hardly a scientific publication -- insisting that global warming's causing deadly grizzly bear attacks at Yellowstone National Park.

Instead of finding a scientist, NPR offered an expert with these credentials: "Paul Solotaroff is a contributing editor at Men's Journal and Rolling Stone. He has written features for Vanity Fair, GQ, Vogue, and the New York Times Magazine, and he was nominated for a National Magazine Award in 2004. His work has been included in Best American Sports Writing." (His most recent book, published last summer, was titled The Body Shop: Parties, Pills, and Pumping Iron -- Or, My Life In the Age of Muscle.) Here's how it unfolded:

NOAH ADAMS, anchor: In Yellowstone, the whitebark pine trees are affected by the increase in temperature. The whitebark seeds are a basic food for the grizzly bears. Last year, grizzlies attacked several visitors, killing two. Paul Solotaroff writes about it in the April issue of Men's Journal. He believes there's a definite connection.

PAUL SOLOTAROFF: About five, six years ago, arborists begin to notice that these extraordinary trees that have for many, many thousands of years survived winters of 50, 60 below, suddenly were dying and not dying by the handful, but dying by the stand, eaten alive by something called mountain pine beetles.

ADAMS: So the beetles, they can - it's not hot enough so they can go to work.

SOLOTAROFF: They can go to work and they can now spend the winter inside these trees, hatch their larvae, survive the winter themselves and attack the trees they've set up shop in and then fly to new trees and eat them alive as well.

ADAMS: Now, tell us about the attacks on the campers in Yellowstone. How many people were killed? How many were injured? What was going on there?

SOLOTAROFF: Well, there hadn't been a bear-caused fatality in two and a half decades in Yellowstone. And over the course of six weeks, two people were killed. One, a most unfortunate episode in which a botanist was wandering in an area that had just been visited by grizzly bear study team and they'd found a grizzly and they've knocked them out to take hair samples, tooth samples and the like. And they didn't post signs, warning that they were there and it was a bear that had been sedated. And so this poor guy wandered into a clearing, and there he found the bear waking up. And the bear killed him and ran away.

And then six weeks later, a tragically thin mother bear and her three cubs wandered onto a campsite where they smelled cooking fish and they attacked several campers, and then finally wound up killing and devouring an EMT from Michigan.

Naturally, lefties at the blog Firedoglake think everyone should read this man's article. NPR couldn't get enough, asking Solatoroff to tell scary stories (perhaps they made a campfire in the studio?) about grizzly bears attacking hunters:

ADAMS: You have a very scary sentence in your article about the hunger of the bears. It is this: So desperate have they become that they run toward gunfire, having learned that hunters leave gut piles after a kill.

SOLOTAROFF: Yeah. It isn't just a lack of whitebark and those fleshy seeds. I mean, bears need to eat 13, 14,000 calories a day to maintain body weight and also fatten up for the four or five months to go to sleep. And if it were only the pine nuts that have become scarce, they probably be able to find a compensating food source.

The problem is that the fish are dying as well. The streams have gotten so warm, because the summers are longer. The runoff from snow is skinnier. Meaning that by July and August, the fish are dying of heat stroke essentially. And so bears who could depend upon cutthroat trout and brown trout and rainbow trout to pan out their protein diet are now going hungry in trout streams as well. And it's this kind of, you know, deprivation that is turning bears increasingly desperate.

The only skepticism in the story was the official response from the National Park Service:

ADAMS: Now, about global warming, we contacted the Park Service. They say there have indeed been bear attacks in the park and, yes, there is a pine beetle infestation, but that these issues are too broad scientifically to connect directly to climate change. How do you feel about that?

SOLOTAROFF: It's nonsense. Every reasonable scientist, every reasonable arborist, agrees that there is a very tightly-knit connection between the availability of food supply and the behavior of these bears.

Bears are starving, you know? The bear that was captured after killing the EMT from Michigan was grossly underweight as were her three cubs. But what is driving these bears into populated places is hunger, and that hunger derives entirely from the ripple effects of the warming of the last 10 years and the significant but more gradual warming of the last 30 years in the American Northwest. 

Any NPR listener should be deeply impressed by the author of the Age of Muscle memoir who made it through all the parties and pills that he knows exactly how to diagnose all the ripple effects of global warming.