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Polar bears are already drowning in climate change
Mar 4th
http://youtu.be/IDt3a21sa-g
Population Size Declines In southern portions of their range, like Hudson Bay, Canada, there is no sea ice during the summer, and the polar bears must live on land until the Bay freezes in the fall, whereupon they can again hunt on the ice. While on land during the summer, these bears eat little or nothing. In just 20 years the ice-free period in Hudson Bay has increased by an average of 20 days, cutting short polar bears’ seal hunting season by nearly three weeks. The ice is freezing later in the fall, but it is the earlier spring ice melt that is especially difficult for the bears. They have a narrower timeframe in which to hunt during the critical season when seal pups are born.
As a result, average bear weight has dropped by 15 percent, causing reproduction rates to decline. The Hudson Bay population is down more than 20 percent. Retreating Sea Ice Platforms The retreat of ice has implications beyond the obvious habitat loss. Remaining ice is farther from shore, making it less accessible. The larger gap of open water between the ice and land also contributes to rougher wave conditions, making the bears’ swim from shore to sea ice more hazardous. In 2004, biologists discovered four drowned polar bears in the Beaufort Sea, and suspect the actual number of drowned bears may have been considerably greater. Never before observed, biologists attributed the drowning to a combination of retreating ice and rougher seas.
- FEATURED LINKS How are polar bears handling one of the lowest sea ice years on record? Science Solid: America’s Polar Bears on Thin Ice
Scarcity of Food Exacerbating the problems of the loss of hunting areas, it is expected that the shrinking polar ice cap will also cause a decline in polar bears’ prey — seals. The reduction in ice platforms near productive areas for the fish that the seals eat affects their nutritional status and reproduction rates. Polar bears are going hungry for longer periods of time, resulting in cannibalistic behavior. Although it has long been known polar bears will kill for dominance or kill cubs so they can breed with the female, outright predation for food was previously unobserved by biologists. Polar Bear Status In 2008, the polar bear was listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act primarily because of the decline of its primary habitat: sea ice. The Secretary of Interior listed the polar bear as threatened but restricted the Endangered Species Act’s protections and thus the polar bear’s future is still very much in jeopardy. The polar bear is the proverbial “canary in the coal mine” of the serious threat global warming poses to wildlife species around the world, unless we take immediate and significant action to reduce global warming pollution.
MBB: Buffs choke down the stretch
Mar 1st
Buffs Falter In 75-64 Pac-12 Loss
by B.G. Brooks
SALT LAKE CITY – For the Colorado men’s basketball team, the start of second halves has become the beginning of the end. The Buffaloes’ all-too-familiar script for failure played out again Saturday in a 75-64 Pac-12 Conference loss to Utah.
After a 30-30 halftime tie, the Utes outscored the Buffs 15-2 to open the second half and take a 45-32 lead. But that was a mere continuation of the last stages of the first 20 minutes. Over those final 4-plus minutes and the first 7-plus of the second half, Utah outscored its visitors from the other side of the Rockies 23-2.
And Senior Day at the Jon M. Huntsman Center was all but a wrap.
“Right now second halves are baffling when it comes to the Buffs,” coach Tad Boyle said. “This is three out of the last four games when you go back to UCLA . . . same way. They just had their way with us offensively in the second half – Arizona and now Utah. It happens once you think, OK, maybe somebody got hot, it’s an aberration. But it’s not . . . we’ve got to look at ourselves in the mirror and understand that right now we’re not good enough in the second half defensively.”
In an 88-61 home loss to No. 4 Arizona last weekend, the Buffs allowed the Wildcats to shoot 84.9 percent from the field in the second half. Saturday, the Utes made 70.8 percent of their second-half field goal attempts. Utah also outrebounded CU by three after losing the board battle by 18 in Boulder in the Buffs’ 79-75 overtime win.
Boyle called that a “big swing,” but pointed to porous defense as a culprit for even the slightest board advantage. “There’s not a lot of rebounds to be had,” he said. “That’s why it gets down to defense. When you’re taking the ball out of the next 70 or 85 percent of the time – holy cow, you better be making a lot of shots. I don’t think there’s an offense out there in college basketball to overcome those numbers.”
The Buffs (20-9, 9-7) closed to within nine points twice in the final 10 minutes Saturday but came no closer as the Utes (19-9, 8-8) improved to 18-2 at home this season. The Utes have now won 21 of 24 at the Huntsman Center dating to last season.
Jordan Loveridge and Delon Wright led Utah with 21 points each, while CU had two players in double figures – Josh Scott with 17 and Xavier Johnson with 10. Askia Booker finished with four points, a pair of first-half free throws and one field goal in the second half.
Freshman Dustin Thomas, who went scoreless in the teams’ first meeting last month in Boulder, hit a 3-pointer to open Saturday’s scoring and got CU’s first seven points as the Buffs took a 7-2 lead.
“I came out with confidence. I knew we had to jump on them early and I wanted to do what I could do for the team,” Thomas said.
CU led by as many as eight (30-22) before an 8-0 Utah run – courtesy of treys by Loveridge and Brandon Taylor – produced a 30-30 halftime tie. The Utes never led in the first half, and it was the first time this season the Buffs have been tied at intermission.
Then came another second-half swoon . . .
“We turned the ball over and we didn’t get stops. Those two things combined hurt; that’s the key to the second half,” Scott said, referring to CU’s five first-half turnovers and 11 in the second half. Utah converted those 16 miscues into 19 points.
Thomas said the Utes “just came out real aggressive” in the second half. “We didn’t come out and match their aggressiveness. We have to do that to every opponent we face; if we do that we’ll be all right. When we’re down we have to come together on the court instead of looking at each other.”
Another second-half failure, said Boyle, was not running the offense through Scott. Boyle said the Buffs might be understanding they have to play through Scott, not meaning that the 6-10 post must score on every possession, “But we have to play inside-out. When we do we’re pretty good. But the offensive struggles bleeding over into the defensive part of the floor has got to stop. We’re just not good enough defensively, though.”
CU finished the afternoon shooting 21-of-53 (39.6 percent) while Utah shot 59.6 percent from the field (28-of-47) – including the blistering 70.8 percent (17-of-24) in the final 20 minutes.
Among CU’s biggest first-half difficulties was finishing at the rim. The Buffs missed half a dozen point-blank attempts, enabling Utah to hold a 16-10 advantage in paint points and finish with a 38-22 advantage.
Booker finished the first half with only a pair of free throws and two fouls that sent him to the bench at the 7:12 mark. Also encountering first-half foul problems were Thomas and Johnson, who finished the game with four each.
Thomas said the early fouls on him, Booker and Johnson “hurt us a lot. We got up early in the first half and those fouls hurt. But we have to play through that.”
But with the score tied at 30 at intermission, the second 20 minutes (and the win) were there for the taking – and the Utes quickly took advantage. They scored the second half’s first nine points for a 39-30 lead. CU took a timeout to regroup with 17:26 to play, but promptly turned it over and Wright converted a traditional three-point play for the nine-point lead.
Scott called the turnovers “something we’ve talked about a lot. It’s inexcusable. We have to go back to the drawing board.” He also said Wright, the Pac-12 leader in steals, “got us a couple of times and made some easy baskets. I thought that was a key.”
CU finally got its first second-half points on a left-handed Scott hook with 16:20 left. But by then the Utes were up 39-32 and about to pull away for good.
Utah pushed its advantage to 45-32 on a straightaway 3-pointer by Loveridge with 13:52 to play and extended its lead to as many as 17 twice in the final 5 minutes.
Boyle said a lack of mental toughness continues to degrade the Buffs’ effort and that a glance at “every league in America” will show the top teams as the top defensive teams – and that’s where the Buffs are falling short.
“Our mental toughness – when things don’t go well for us on offense . . . it has to get better,” he said, adding a few corrections have to be made “to get it right. We don’t have to change the makeup . . . we’re not playing consistently enough and mentally tough enough.”
CU finishes out the regular season with road games next week at Stanford (Wednesday) and California (Saturday). The Pac-12 Tournament is March 12-15 in Las Vegas.
WBB: Swan and A-Wil weren’t enough to beat Huskies
Feb 15th
Husky’s backcourt unstoppable, but Buffs were in the game til the very end
BOULDER – Colorado’s Jamee Swan and Ashley Wilson hit career highpoints on Friday night, but a business-as-usual performance by Washington’s backcourt trumped them and the Buffaloes.
While Swan (25 points) and Wilson (15) were scoring career highs and Wilson was collecting her first career double-double with 10 rebounds, UW guards Kelsey Plum and Jazmine Davis were combining for 49 points to push the Huskies past the Buffs 87-80 at the Coors Events Center.
It wasn’t anything the Buffs hadn’t seen before – and they didn’t have many answers then either. In UW’s 81-71 Pac-12 Conference win last month in Seattle, they combined for 55 points, with Plum getting 35 and Davis 20.
On Friday night, Plum scored 25, Davis 24. They entered the game as the nation’s No. 2 top scoring backcourt, averaging 38.9 points.
“Washington’s two guards were outstanding . . . they torched us,” said CU coach Linda Lappe. “They pretty much did whatever they wanted to do . . . Davis carried them in first half (with 14 points), Plum came alive in the second (with 18). They were tough for us to guard.”
Still, even with Plum-Davis running mostly unchecked, the Buffs (14-10, 4-9) stayed in contention, cutting a 10-point Huskies lead to three twice in the final 1:16 but failing take the rally any further.
After tying the score at 60-60 on a Swan put-back with 8:57 remaining, a 10-0 run pushed UW ahead by 10 (70-60). CU first closed to within three (81-78) on Jen Reese’s first four points of the night, then got to within three again (83-80) on a basket by Arielle Roberson, who finished with 14 points and nine rebounds.
But three points back was as close as the Buffs would get, and Wilson said the game was lost by CU’s inability to “get those crucial stops, whether it was keeping them from scoring or getting a defensive rebound . . . It all comes down to the same thing: we make a push and tie the game and then we have a mental lapse where we don’t get that stop or defensive rebound. It’s been like that all conference season long.”
Lappe said scoring that many points – CU was averaging 70.2 – should have rewarded her team with a win: “Anytime we score 80, that has to be a game where we find a way to win. But it just didn’t go the right way tonight . . . you can’t give up 87 points; there are very few games that we will win that way. We just didn’t do what it took on the defensive side.”
Swann, whose previous career high was 20 against Stanford, said the Buffs lost focus late: “I think it comes down to who wants it more and it just happens that they want it a little more than us and we lose focus.”
UW coach Mike Neighbors didn’t seem surprised by Swan’s productivity. “She was on the scouting report because we recruited the heck out of that kid,” he said. “We wanted her very badly . . . she got it really going and we didn’t have a lot to answer – 25 points in 18 minutes . . . I’m just glad she had five fouls (No. 5 came with 1:30 left) or otherwise she could have had 50 (points).”
UW (14-10, 7-6) outscored CU 34-26 in the paint, outrebounded the Buffs 45-38 and converted 13 CU turnovers into 18 points. CU’s bench outscored UW’s 36-19 – mainly on Swan’s contribution before she fouled out with 1:30 to play. The Buffs hurt themselves at the free throw line, converting only 21 of 33 attempts. The Huskies shot 46.7 percent from the field (28-for-60), the Buffs 40.9 percent (27-for-66).
CU jumped to a 9-2 lead but UW recovered quickly with an 11-2 run and took its first lead on a Plum 3-pointer with 15:01 left before intermission. Davis followed with trey on the Huskies’ next possession, giving them their largest advantage (16-11) of the first half.
The first half’s last 13 minutes produced six ties and 11 lead changes before Ashley Wilson hit one of two free throws with 22.1 seconds left to put CU up 40-39 at the break.
The Huskies took a 49-43 to open the second half, getting back-to-back treys by Davis and Talia Walton, the latter hitting her triple with 16:38 left in the game. The Buffs fought back, closing to 51-50 on a 3-pointer by Lexy Kresl with just over 13 minutes remaining.
But the Huskies answered with a 6-0 run on consecutive conventional three-point plays by Plum and Chantel Osahor to open a seven-point advantage – 57-50 – with 12:19 to play.
If CU was to make a move, it would have to be soon. Ashley Wilson and Swan made two free throws each to pull the Buffs to within 57-54. After Swan scored consecutive baskets to tie the score at 60-60, the Huskies got 3-pointers from Osahor – only her second in five games – and Mercedes Wetmore and two free throws each from Katie Collier and Plum to pull ahead 70-60.
It was UW’s largest lead of the night, but a runner by Plum in the lane put CU behind 11 (75-64) just over a minute later. The Buffs pulled to within five (76-71) on a trey by Ashley Wilson, then seven (81-74) on a triple by Kresl with 1:16 left.
Reese got her first points of the night on a jumper to bring CU to 81-76 with 1:06 remaining, then hit a pair of free throws 3 seconds later to cut the deficit to 81-78. A layup by Roberson made it 83-80 but the Huskies closed it out with four free throws by Aminah Williams in the final 22 seconds.
“It took some warriors to win and I was so proud of our kids up and down the bench,” Neighbors said. “We get 19 (points) and 12 (rebounds) off of our bench tonight. There’s been games where we’ve gotten zero and zero.”
CU returns to the CEC on Sunday afternoon (1:30 p.m., Pac-12 Networks) to play Washington State.
Contact: BG.Brooks@Colorado.EDU