Mystery surrounds death of Knut the celebrity polar bear at Berlin Zoo

Knut, the polar bear cub, has its first public appearance with his keeper Thomas Doerflein in the Berlin zoo and (inset), is seen floating in the pond on his enclosure after dying of unknown causes at the weekend.

BERLIN - Germany was in mourning yesterday for Knut, the celebrity polar bear that died mysteriously in Berlin Zoo on Saturday.

Hundreds of people, including many children, made their way to the zoo yesterday to leave flowers at the compound of Knut, 4, a bear that became a posterboy for global warming.

The news spread across the world through Twitter and Facebook. "We have had condolences from Australia, New Zealand and Honolulu," said Heiner Kloes, the zoo's chief bear keeper. He added that many German children had collapsed on hearing the news and that newspapers devoted pages advising parents how to break the news.

"Everyone is just in shock here," said Claudia Bienek, a spokeswoman for the zoo.

Visitors had watched on Saturday as Knut writhed in the moat of his compound, and then lay half submerged in the water.


"It had been a completely normal day," said Mr Kloes. "He had just been with the female bears. After they had been shut away, he strolled around the enclosure, appeared to suffer a spasm and slipped into the water, where he died."

A post-mortem examination is to be held today and authorities are considering holding a formal funeral to allow Berliners to say farewell. Whatever the cause of Knut's early death, it is expected to lead to a fierce debate about animals in zoos.

"Knut's short and distressed life shows us again that polar bears do not belong in zoos," said Wolfgang Apel, of the German animal protection association. Peta, another animal welfare group, said last year that Knut was suffering from severe behavioural disorders, and was unable to relate to other bears. There was even a suspicion that the bear could have depression or bipolar disorder.

Knut was rejected at birth by its mother, an East German circus bear, and hand reared at the zoo. The animal's popularity was used to highlight the disappearance of polar bears because of the melting Arctic ice caps. The bear made the cover of Vanity Fair, and generated millions for the zoo.

"He was a star," said Klaus Wowereit, the Mayor of Berlin last night (Sunday). "A star who died too early."

Read More

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/mystery-surrounds-death-of-knut-the-celebrity-polar-bear-at-berlin-zoo/story-e6frg6so-1226025378763

Coalition of Alaska Native groups to sue federal government over polar bear protection

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — A coalition of Alaska Native groups put the federal government on notice Monday that they intend to sue over a recovery plan for polar bears faced with diminishing sea ice and climate change.

The groups contend that the Department of Interior ignored their concerns when the agency designated coastal areas of the North Slope as critical habitat for polar bears.

The Arctic Slope Regional Corporation and the North Slope Borough are leading the coalition in sending a letter to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and providing 60-days notice of intention to sue.

The letter says critical habitat designation will not mitigate or remove climate change, which is the primary threat to polar bears. However, the designation will impair Alaska Natives' ability to benefit from their own resources, and that will cause Native communities to suffer, it says.

Polar bears were declared threatened in 2008 under the federal Endangered Species Act.

More than 187,000 square miles (484,000 square kilometres) in and near the Beaufort and Chukchi seas have been designated as polar bear critical habitat. The designation is required as part of a recovery plan.

North Slope Borough Mayor Edward S. Itta said the designation will restrict normal community growth in villages and threatens access to traditional subsistence hunting areas.

"The critical habitat designation does not get at the problem of melting sea ice, so it won't help the polar bear," he said. "As a solution, this completely misses the mark."

The state of Alaska has made similar arguments against the listing and also is suing to overturn it.

The state claims that climate models are unreliable and that polar bear populations have not crashed. It says the critical habitat designation will increase costs or even kill resource development projects that are important to Alaska.

The Interior Department, however, has looked at numerous peer-reviewed scientific U.S. Geological Survey reports. The most ominous says that changes in sea ice could result in the loss of two-thirds of the world's current polar bear population by 2050, including all of Alaska's.

Read More

http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5igKAs9QrWDYc__yGWcWBNVlDhnGg?docId=5680701

Hope For Polar Bears

Polar bears may be threatened, but they aren't yet doomed.

While Arctic sea ice will continue to retreat under the glare of rising global temperatures, the ice is unlikely to collapse in spectacular fashion, causing hope that, with aggressive greenhouse gas emissions cuts and wildlife management, polar bears may retain viable habitat into the next century, a team of scientists reports in a paper to be published tomorrow in Nature.

Several years ago, government scientists projected that two-thirds of the world's polar bears would go extinct by midcentury under current emissions scenarios, a finding that ultimately prompted the George W. Bush administration to list the bear as threatened. Those estimates, though uncertain in their specifics, remain unchanged by the current work, said Steven Amstrup, senior scientist at Polar Bears International and former biologist for the U.S. Geological Survey, who co-authored both studies.

However, what seems increasingly unlikely is that the retreat of summer sea ice -- the base for bears' pursuit of seals, their highway system and their mating grounds -- could cascade out of control. Rather, its decline is entirely contingent on controlling human emissions of greenhouse gases, Amstrup said.

"Conserving polar bears largely seems to be a matter of containing temperature rise," he said.

The notion that no "tipping point" exists for Arctic ice decline has spread in climate science for several years, supported by deeper examination of the North's physics. Initially, the media exaggerated fears that the loss of ice, which naturally reflects light, would expose more heat-absorbing water to the sun, causing runaway decline. However, scientists now widely believe this feedback is balanced by a host of other phenomena, like increased flows of hot air from the tropics, improved ice formation efficiency under thinning conditions and the region's general cloudiness.

The sea ice episode should be a cautionary tale, wrote Dirk Notz, a climatologist at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, last year. Melting thresholds likely exist for land-bound glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica, he said, and scientists should not risk their credibility by conflating those claims with Arctic sea ice. Most prominently, NASA climatologist James Hansen has included Arctic ice in his list of possible tipping points, along with melting permafrost, glacier melt and ecosystem collapse.

Despite the growing scientific awareness that ice loss has an inch-by-inch relationship to rising temperatures, though, the public has largely been left with the message that prospects were grim for polar bears, no matter what steps were taken to limit global warming, Amstrup said. That message was hardly a call to action and, more importantly from a scientific view, lacked validity.

"If people and leaders feel there's nothing they can do, they will do nothing," he said.

'Messy literature'

The projections published by Amstrup should be taken with a grain of salt, independent scientists said. Most models incorporating sea ice fall short of predicting the actual loss seen in the Arctic over the past several decades, and systems like cloud cover are not well understood. Indeed, over the past few years a sometimes acrimonious debate has arisen as to whether existing ice models were unintentionally introducing errors to compensate for errors.

However, despite these gross differences, there's one thing nearly every model agrees on: that there is a gradual relationship between rising temperatures and ice loss, said Michael Winton, an Arctic modeler at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab at Princeton University.

Arctic sea ice is a "messy literature," Winton said. Substantial natural variability is needed to match even the most sensitive models, like the one used in the Nature study, to observed changes, he said. "The outstanding question is, 'Are the models sufficiently sensitive? Are we missing something?'"

Given these uncertainties, it has been perplexing to scientists that the public seized on "tipping point" scenarios for sea ice, the one area where there is large agreement. Those fears, which peaked in 2007, were likely exacerbated by the stark retreat in sea ice that year. The Arctic lost more than 1.6 million square kilometers of ice, an area larger than Alaska; by September, sea ice covered half the area it had during the early 1950s.

However, since that shocking decline, the ice has modestly expanded during the summer, perhaps the best evidence that Arctic ice won't drop off a cliff, said Eric DeWeaver, a co-author on the Nature paper and physical climatologist at the National Science Foundation.

The 2007 loss was "spectacular," he said, but "one would not expect to see it very often."

Scientists do expect that ice fluctuations will become increasingly steep and difficult to predict, largely thanks to the floes' declining girth. Simply put, the thinner ice is more susceptible to the weather.

Sweltering summers will cause large retreats in sea ice, while chilly years will cause equally large increases. (The mid-1990s saw a one-year ice advance almost as large as the 2007 loss.) The era of Arctic ice impassively gliding through these variations is over.

Read More

http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2010/12/15/15greenwire-no-tipping-point-for-sea-ice-in-polar-bears-fu-29018.html