So now global warming can reach through time?

**Posted by Phineas

I can’t wait to see how the Church of Anthropogenic Global Warming rationalizes this:

Polar bears split from ancient bears more than 4 million years ago, suggests ancient DNA and the gene maps of multiple bears.

The polar bear genome finding reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal contradicts earlier gene studies finding much more recent times for the ancestral split, within 600,000 years, between polar bears and grizzly bears, which can still mate and produce viable offspring.

What’s more, the report suggests that polar bear numbers have been on the decline for at least 500,000 years, driven by climate fluctuations.

Y’see, all that CO2 we’ve been dumping into the atmosphere is so powerful that it can cross time and space to induce climate change before it even existed!!!

You laugh, but I half-expect some cultist to seriously offer that explanation.

My take on the article is that natural, probably cyclic, climate change has expanded and contracted the polar bears’ range, sometimes reducing it considerably. In those times, more polar bears were forced to live on land and wound up mating with brown bears, a related species from which they split about 4-5 million years ago, but can still breed with. Hence, as we are in a gradual warming from the last ice age (and from the Little Ice Age that ended around 1850), their range is shrinking again, and there is some risk of them inter-breeding out of existence.

Perhaps, but, for now, their numbers seem to be rising.

Meanwhile the climate alarmists may need to get a new poster-animal.

via Jeff Emanuel

(Crossposted at Public Secrets)

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