Pirate's Cove

This means doom, of course

As sea ice melts amid global warming, 35,000 walrus crowd the shores of Alaska

In days of yore, the life of a Pacific walrus was idyllic. Blubbery and social, these 1 1/2 ton beasts laid on sea ice, holding court. Their favorite food, shellfish, was just a short trip down to the ocean floor. Sure, it’s cold down there, but these tusked giants can slow their heartbeats to withstand polar temperatures.  If there was a squabble, it was likely about love or love lost.

This harmony has now been threatened by climate change. Due to global warming, the sea ice favored by walrus has disappeared — and now, in northwest Alaska, more than 35,000 walrus have come ashore seeking refuge.

“The walruses are hauling out on land in a spectacle that has become all too common in six of the last eight years as a consequence of climate-induced warming,” said a release from the U.S. Geological Survey. “Summer sea ice is retreating far north of the shallow continental shelf waters of the Chukchi Sea in U.S. and Russian waters, a condition that did not occur a decade ago.  To keep up with their normal resting periods between feeding bouts to the seafloor, walruses have simply hauled out onto shore.”

“Those animals have essentially run out of offshore sea ice, and have no other choice but to come ashore,” Chadwick Jay, a research ecologist in Alaska with the U.S. Geological Survey, told the Guardian.

Obviously, this never happened before. We’ve never watched nature programs with huge numbers of walruses (and other types of seals, seal lions, etc) hauled on to the beach. Hey, maybe they were huddle for warmth. And, perhaps the story is “blatant nonsense”

Zoologist Dr. Susan Crockford: Mass haulouts of Pacific walrus and stampede deaths are not new, not due to low ice cover – ‘The attempts by WWF and others to link this event to global warming is self-serving nonsense that has nothing to do with science…this is blatant nonsense and those who support or encourage this interpretation are misinforming the public.’

‘The Pacific walrus remains abundant, numbering at least 200,000 by some accounts, double the number in the 1950s’

‘Dating back to at least the 1604, there have been reports of large walrus gatherings or haulouts.’ – ‘Walrus haulouts are not unusual and have long been recognized and islands have been set aside for such gatherings.’

Walruses known to migrate away from ice in late summer & fall: “In the non-reproductive season (late summer and fall) walruses tend to migrate away from the ice and form massive aggregations of tens of thousands of individuals on rocky beaches or outcrops.”

As Anthony Watts notes

Because -there’s no other possible explanation- global warming must be to blame.

In the unenlightened old days, the appearance of 35,000 walrus would have been a cause for optimism, evidence that the species was doing well. But in this age of post normal science, such an event has to be interpreted as a portent of global warming – and so, by definition, it must be spooky and bad.

It’s more evidence that the Church Of Gore will do and say anything to keep their cult going.

BTW, even if this was happening because of global warming, it in no way would prove anthropogenic causation, just something that has happened during Holocene warm periods.

Crossed at Right Wing News.