PENNSYLVANIA — While the impacts of climate change are cumulative and sometimes incremental to the point of obscurity, there’s no escaping the realities of the warmest winter in the recorded history of eastern Pennsylvania.
Chief among those consequences: a phenomonom termed “ecological mismatch” by researchers that happens when plants and animals are no longer synchronous on their seasonal cycles.
Specifically, what is essentially the early arrival of spring changes when certain plants bloom. Some blooms will appear early in Pennsylvania this year, and could potentially have already died off by the time the pollinators think it’s time for them to arrive.
The pizzly bear is an animal that was first found in the wild in 2006, however, what exactly is a pizzly bear?
A Pizzly bear or Grolar Bear, is an offspring of a Polar and Grizzly bear. These bears have been found in the wild and some in captivity. The reason for the hybrid is do to not only climate change yet the destruction of their habitats.
When Was The First Pizzly Bear Discovered? The history of the pizzly bear goes all the way back to 1936, due to an accident at a zoo. The zoo was the United States National Zoo in Washington DC. At the zoo, a male polar bear and a female grizzly bear got together and mated.
The male polar bear made its way into the female grizzly bear’s enclosure. They soon mated, with the result being that the female had three cubs. These three cubs grew to adulthood, later mating themselves.
This incident proved two things. The first was that polar bears and grizzly bears could mate. Secondly, it also proved that the offspring could mate, which many hybrid animals could not do. Many hybrid animals are born sterile and are unable to create any offspring.
The first Pizzly/Grolar Bear in the wild was discovered in 2006, and confirmed with DNA-Testing. The bear was found near Sachs Harbour, in the Northwest Territories on the Banks Island.
How Many Pizzly Bears Are There? There have been eight pizzly or grolar bears either killed by hunters or live-captured. These eight species identified include four first-generation pizzly bears with a 50:50 split between a grizzly and polar bears. One female polar bear was the mother of all four first generation pizzly bears.
The second set of hybrids identified included four backcross individuals with a mix of 75:25 in favor of grizzly bears. It is believed that a single hybrid (F1) female is the mother of all four of these backcross individuals.
After the first pizzly identified in 2006, the next was a suspected polar bear killed in 2010. The father of this bear was a grizzly bear, and the mother was a polar bear. All of the offspring relate to a single female polar bear.
Due to the restricted areas where grizzly bears and polar bears overlap in the wild, the numbers are likely to be low. This is backed up by Robert Rockwell, an ecologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Rockwell says that he doesn’t think there is much pressure for grizzly bears and polar bears to interbreed, stating, “I think the numbers are such that a hybrid would be pretty rare.”
The Habitat of the Grizzly Bears are in the Northern parts of Canada and Alaska. Grizzly bears have been seen as far north as the banks Island and Victoria Island. Grizzlies have also been seen in the province of Nunavut for approximately 50 years or more. These habitats overlap the polar bears, and due to this Grizzlies have roamed into the Polars hunting grounds and feed on the Seals and fish, that polar bears have killed.
Outside of the breeding season usually Grizzlies and Polars are hostile towards each other. When breeding season does happen they are less hostile and more receptive towards one another.
The reason Grizzlies are traveling so far for resources is do to overhunting by people of their food source, and destruction of their habitat, on top of climate change making their prey migrate.
Polar bears are endangered due to the climate change making their habitat unlivable, with melting ice and rising waters mixing with unsalted melted ice, their prey has moved on. Some polars have been caught stuck out at sea on floating glaciers a few kilometers away from their home. Which in turn causes them to starve. Some Polar bears have gone as far as to rummage through towns garbage for food and wind up being killed by civilians.
As for the hybrids they too are endangered due to so few being around and produced by the Polar and Grizzlies. According to the Endangered Species Act, hybrid animals are afforded the same protection in the wild as original species.
Is Hybridization Good or Bad For A Species? In the early 1990s, there were less than 25 Florida panthers in the wild. The USFWS imported eight female cougars from Texas, allowing them to mate with the panthers. Due to this, the population of Florida panthers in the wild has now risen to 160.
However, in the arctic areas, this interference can have some severe consequences. According to Nat Wildlife Preserves and EDA experts, in an environment that is already stretched to its limits. The ecological roles many of these bears play will more than likely have the hybrid animals in said area suffer from starvation, poaching, and otherwise killing each other off for territory.
There are very few options to help these animals, one option is to move the hybrids to a different location and keep trackers on them for study and survivability. Other options is to try and cull the climate change by reducing pollution and ozone repair. Yet this will take years, more than we probably have. As people we also need to remember Animal Lives are important, and must do everything we can do deter poachers/hunters from dwindling the animal population. One day I do hope we can provide sanctuary for all animal kind where people don’t have the ability to destroy.
Glaciers are melting faster, losing 31% more snow and ice per year than they did 15 years earlier, according to three-dimensional satellite measurements of all the world’s mountain glaciers.
Scientists blame human-caused climate change.
Using 20 years of recently declassified satellite data, scientists calculated that the world’s 220,000 mountain glaciers are losing more than 328 billion tons (298 billion metric tons) of ice and snow per year since 2015, according to a study in Wednesday’s journal Nature. That’s enough melt flowing into the world’s rising oceans to put Switzerland under almost 24 feet (7.2 meters) of water each year.
The annual melt rate from 2015 to 2019 is 78 billion more tons (71 billion metric tons) a year than it was from 2000 to 2004. Global thinning rates, different than volume of water lost, doubled in the last 20 years and “that’s enormous,” said Romain Hugonnet, a glaciologist at ETH Zurich and the University of Toulouse in France who led the study.
— Read on www.pbs.org/newshour/science/glaciers-are-melting-faster-than-they-did-15-years-ago-study-shows
President-elect Joe Biden has pledged to ban new oil and gas leasing on America’s federal public lands and waters on Day One of his administration.
Nearly a quarter of the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions come from public lands due to coal mining and oil and gas drilling. We can’t keep leasing public lands to the fossil fuel industry and have any chance of reducing emissions or seriously confronting the climate crisis.
And due to Trump’s executive orders of undermining the Environmental Protection Act, along with the Water Protection Act. Big companies such as BP and Keystone, are free to muddy our waters with chemicals. Whilst also spewing poisonous gases into our ozone layer.
Just because Biden pledged to halt and undo Trump’s actions doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll DO. Let’s make him keep his words. By using our voices and signature.
As rising global temperatures continue to melt the ice in Antarctica, scientists predict that we’ll face serious problems in the coming decades — from rising sea levels to devastating storms to temperatures rising even faster because there’s less ice to reflect heat.
Now, it turns out all those problems could be even worse than scientists predicted, according to research published in the journal Climate Dynamics. Existing models tended to predict ice melt based on average conditions over time, but accounting for fluctuating extremes paints a far more dire picture.
Accelerated Timeline
Climate models need to represent how chaotic weather patterns can be, study author and Penn State climate researcher Chris Forest argued in a press release. Accounting for those fluctuations, Forest’s work shows that the Antarctic ice sheet could retreat 20 years sooner than expected.
Factoring that in, the melting ice could raise the sea level by an additional 2.7 to 4.3 inches on top of the 10.6 to 14.9 inches that simpler models predict by the year 2100.
“We know ice sheets are melting as global temperatures increase, but uncertainties remain about how much and how fast that will happen,” Forest said in the release.
The Trump administration wants to make it easier for oil companies to drill in national forests by squashing environmental reviews, public comments periods, and any oversight by the US Forest Service.
wallup.net
This would spell disaster for forests and the climate. Putting more carbon emissions in the air and out of its natural forest storage is absolutely the last thing this world or communities need!
Oil and gas developers would then be able to clear huge swaths of forests for toxic well pads, roads, and pipelines without much oversight.
If we’re going to save our special places and tackle the climate crisis, we need to stop dangerous oil and gas production in ALL our public lands and waters.
We need our Rainforests, without them animals would be extinct, air would also be hard to come by. Trees and other plants are what give us Oxygen. Please think of our future, please sign the petition to stop oil and gas drilling in ALL our public lands and waters.
Amazon is the largest retailer in the world. We are all happy and grateful to have them especially when you don’t have the time or patience to go around shopping all the things you need. But unfortunately every time you order, tons of single use plastic arrives with your products.
Let’s ask the company to reduce the amount of plastic used and avoid it when it is not necessary.
Let’s ask them to stop using the plastic, bubble bags and switch to more eco friendly solutions.
We cannot afford to keep polluting our planet at this rate and everyone but especially large corporations have the moral obligation to lead by example.
Trophy hunters pose for vile souvenir snaps next to the polar bears they have just slaughtered on trips organised purely to satisfy their sickening blood lust.
Experts say this shocking animal tourism craze for the rich is on the rise with more than 5,000 of the magnificent creatures slayed for sport in Canada’s area of the Arctic Circle in recent years.
Even without the Trophy Hunter, the polar bear species have been declining for the past couple of years due to the IceCaps melting at an alarming rate. All thanks to global warming and man-made exacerbated climate change.
All of which needs to be reversed before nothing is left, except desolation.
(CNNReport ) A total of 261 bottlenose dolphins were found stranded between Louisiana and the Florida Panhandle, officials said.
Authorities discovered the dolphins between February 1 and May 31. A majority of them — 98% — were dead, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
That number is “three times the historical average in the northern gulf,” said Erin Fougères, a marine mammal stranding program administrator for NOAA.
2019 bottlenose dolphin stranding locations by month along the Northern Gulf of Mexico UME region. (Louisiana-Florida Panhandle)
According to NOAA: It is too early to determine any potential causes of the UME. Many of the dolphins recovered are very decomposed, limiting the ability to collect samples to determine cause of illness or death. In addition, a number of dolphins have stranded in remote locations, which limits the Stranding Network’s ability to examine or recover the carcass. Some of the stranded dolphins have had visible skin lesions that are consistent with freshwater exposure. Samples are being collected for testing.
In our opinion, it’s possible that the salinity of the ocean could be declining. Due to the polar caps melting at an alarming rate. Even now, as they Melt Polar bears have had to travel farther away from their natural habitat. Weeks ago a report was shared of a malnourished polar bear, entering suburban limits in search of food.
In 2018, the largest King Penguin colony experienced a rapid decline in population. Reports stated that only 60,000 breeding pairs are left when there used to be 500,000.
In our opinion, we truly believe this has to do with climate change and caps melting due to the climate change effect. As we know most of these animals food sources rely on salt, and those food sources eat algae, and plankton, a plant that lives in salt oceans. No salt equates to fewer food sources and the instability of the ecosystem.
The only correct course of action to take is to limit our carbon footprint. As well as switching to green technology. Only then can the planet fully heal.
Guardians Of Life 
You must be logged in to post a comment.