On Aug 31, 2008, at 8:40 AM, Matt Johnston wrote: > > On 31 Aug 2008, at 13:35, Arno Hautala wrote: > >> On 31 Aug 2008, at 05:09, Matt Johnston wrote: >> >>> On 31 Aug 2008, at 01:16, Chuck Bennett wrote: >>>> >>>> "In the Davis Strait area, a 140,000-square kilometre region, the >>>> polar bear population has grown from 850 in the mid-1980s to 2,100 >>>> today. >>>> >>> 2100 is a lot then? >>> >>> As opposed to nearly 7 billion humans. >> >> >> And cockroaches probably exceed that number by a similar order of >> magnitude and no one is making noise about putting humans on the >> list. >> I don't think raw numbers alone are good for anything here. I think >> you'd need to take other factors into consideration. Things like >> historical population sizes and their change over time. If hunting >> limits were just increased, a first glance seems to imply that they >> aren't really all that endangered, or even threatened. >> >> Then again maybe those limits were changed for other reasons >> unrelated >> to relative over-population. > > Yeah, so what's the population needed to survive a single population > crash that could wipe out the species.
You might as well ask the same thing about white tail dear or black bear. "Endangered" has a specific definition. If the population is growing, hunting is allowed and well managed, it simply cannot be endangered. Therefore, Polar bears are not endangered. There or 25 to 30 thousand of then around the entire Arctic circle. The limited hunting is well managed to about 1,000 yearly. Between 500 and 600 of these are taken by Inuit and traditional people. The population simply is not going down in fact Quoted directly from the Senate Report "The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service estimates that the polar bear population is currently at 20,000 to 25,000 bears, up from as low as 5,000-10,000 bears in the 1950s and 1960s. A 2002 U.S. Geological Survey of wildlife in the Arctic Refuge Coastal Plain noted that the polar bear populations “may now be near historic highs.” The alarm about the future of polar bear decline is based on speculative computer model predictions many decades in the future. And the methodology of these computer models is being challenged by many scientists and forecasting experts." "Canadian biologist Dr. Mitchell Taylor, the director of wildlife research with the Arctic government of Nunavut: “Of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct, or even appear to be affected at present,” Taylor said. “It is just silly to predict the demise of polar bears in 25 years based on media-assisted hysteria" What part about "near historic highs" qualifies them as "Endangered" This is obviously political not scientific. Oh, and as I side note Polar Bears have been around as a distinct species for at least 100,000 years. That means they survived the last interglacial period (non man made big time global warming) so why would they not survive this, man made or not? =c= _______________________________________________ OSX-Nutters mailing list | [email protected] http://lists.tit-wank.com/mailman/listinfo/osx-nutters List hosted at http://cat5.org/
