60 Minutes & polar bears - come in sucker

Tim Blair comments: Science-minded readers may be asking: where was the control bear? You know, a bear all chubbed-up with baby seals and such, so we can test its non-starving reaction to an invading Tara Brown. Short of returning her to the bear-infested ice flats, Science demands that Tara be lowered into a polar bear enclosure at the nearest zoo.

Andrew Bolt has some fun with a very dumb 60 Minutes reporter.

60 Minutes has never heard of bears getting stroppy with intruders. So when one polar bear - always such friendly, harmless, Disneyfied little cuties - gets cross with Tara Brown, we know what’s behind this craziness, don’t we?

Why, it’s our old evil genius, global warming.

As 60 Minutes puts it:

If you still have any lingering doubts about global warming, stick around. We’re off to the Arctic, where Tara Brown found all the proof she needed that there’s something drastically wrong with the world’s weather. It came in the shape of a very large, very hungry polar bear - an angry predator, with us as its prey. Stranded in the middle of nowhere with a three-metre, 300kg bear on the attack is a frightening experience. It’s also a graphic lesson in what happens when we mess with nature. As global temperatures rise, the ice cap melts and the polar bears’ hunting grounds disappear. Now they’re starving, desperate for food - so desperate even humans look appetising.

I haven't watched 60 Minutes as a matter of principle for many years. The worst and lowest kind of flashy but shallow and insubstantial tabloid "journalism".

The silly woman obviously hasn't bothered to do any research on polar bears at all. No wonder she's surprised and shocked that a very large carnivore might want to eat a soft and tasty journalist! Polar bears will eat anything that comes their way, including berries when the opportunity presents itself.

Put simply, they are the top predators in the Arctic and have always hunted humans when they could.

They evolved from omnivorous brown bears only within the last 10,000 years or so, (a period of time that has seen several warm periods come and go), and retain much of the behavior of brown bears.

Good grief, is this how dumb people have become?

Anyway, Andrew dispels some of the myths surrounding polar bears. Read his entire post, but here's a teaser:

Alaska’s polar bear population is stable, and Taylor’s research shows that the Canadian polar bear population has increased 25 percent from 12,000 to 15,000 during the past decade with 11 of Canada’s 13 polar bear populations stable or increasing in number. Where polar bear weight and numbers are declining, Taylor thinks too many bears competing for food, rather than arctic warming, is the cause.