The Washington Post has continued its climate change hysteria with a report claiming that polar bears upset by climate change are more likely to attack and eat human beings.
The report, entitled ‘Polar bears hurt by climate change are more likely to turn to a new food source — humans,’ cited a new study claiming that “the higher global temperatures go, the researchers said, the more likely polar bears are to interact with humans — and possibly attack and eat them.”
Their findings are based on a study published in the Wildlife Society Bulletin, which claims a “perfect storm” is brewing in which polar bears will increase their appetite for human flesh.
WaPo points out that “the greatest number of polar bear attacks occurred in the partial decade of 2010 — 2014, which was characterized by historically low summer sea ice extent and long ice-free periods.”
It fails to mention however that due to improvements in technology, more people can explore Arctic temperatures, where polar bears almost exclusively live, thus increasing the likelihood of attacks.
Furthermore, due to the apparent melting of ice in which they normally hunt seals, polar bears are now being forced inland, meaning they could turn to human meals instead.
However, veteran zoologist Susan Crockford dismissed the findings, writing on her blog that she had been left “speechless” by the “skewed data” used in the study.
“By attempting to generate information that could be assessed with statistical methods, the authors ended up with data that is so skewed and incomplete that it fails to provide a plausible assessment of the risk to humans of attacks by polar bears,” she wrote.
“The paper also focuses much attention on the potential for increases in polar bear attacks on humans due to sea ice loss (blamed on global warming) but ignores totally the increased risk stemming from the larger proportion of adult males that now exist in protected populations.”
The last publicized incident of a polar bear killing a human was in 2011 when British school boy Horatio Chapple was mauled to death while on school’s exploration trip near a glacier on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen. Four other people were injured in the incident.
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