Posted on 01/27/2014 5:22:48 AM PST by Zakeet
A group of researchers say they have established a new biomarker for how stressed polar bears are about climate change.
Last year, a team reported that fluctuations in climate and ice cover are closely related to stress among polar bears in East Greenland as indicated by levels of the stress hormone cortisol in hair samples. The team is hopeful this type of analysis will be beneficial once others learn that it can now be done with much greater reliability.
"Nobody else has done this so far," says Jerrold Meyer of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who calls himself a behavioral endocrinologist. "We've not only been one of the key developers of the technique but we have also have worked very hard to demonstrate its reliability and validity. In collaboration with Melinda Novak, chair of the psychology department, we were among the first to show in a major controlled study that a prolonged or major life stress does lead to a demonstrable increase in cortisol in hair. Now we're making the technique available to others and we hope it spurs new collaborations with our lab."
(Excerpt) Read more at science20.com ...
You mean old Freepers need to quit opposing the Carbon Tax ... so I can afford to get psychological counseling ... to cope with my stress induced by global warming!
Maybe the bears were stressed by warmists chasing them around with tweezers.
Maybe the polar bears are stressed out by all of the greenies following them around taking hair samples.
Can’t these guys go fix income inequality or something?
Dang you beat me. Great minds think alike.
This should ease their stress.But with all that ice up there it'll be tough getting it to them.
“Now we’re making the technique available to others and we hope it spurs new collaborations with our lab.”
In street lingo, Show us the money!
More Marxism will cure this.
Pray America is Waking
Climate change looks very chic in black
Next time al gore puts his gun to his head like in nam he better pull the trigger and do us all a favor.
“Cant these guys go fix income inequality or something?”......
Not until there is a grant to do the study. There is no “free lunch” when stuff is really important like you suggest. We have to remember that the polar bear study relates to “global warming” and we all know how important that is. (sarc)
Fly a helicopter over the Arctic Circle and dart the bears with Prozac. All on the taxpayers’ dime, of course.
So in other words, the researchers wanted a grant to study cortisol levels in polar bear hair, and in order to increase their chances of getting funding, they decided to tie their study to a climate change issue.
If you read the article, all it says is that they have been able to prove that cortisol in hair can be correlated with stress.
There appears to be nothing in the study that actually relates to climate change per se.
It seems to be pure spin that all polar bear stress could be related to climate change.
Liberal nitwits...it’s whats for dinner!
I’m guessing the polar bears are hibernating now which should be fairly relaxing.
23-25,000 bears today, 5,000 25 years ago. This article is a crock of crap!
Well, hopefully they’ll find a fix for this. Because Polar Bear Stress was something that was keeping me up at night.
They compared hair samples from recent bear kills to those killed in the 1800s and found higher stress levels. Obviously it must be global warming./s This is the worst kind of pseudoscientific idiocy.
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