The World in 2050_ Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future - Laurence C. Smith [2]
At first glance the creature looked well enough like a polar bear, albeit a small one. It was seven feet long and covered with creamy white fur. However, its back, paws, and nose were mottled with patches of brown. There were dark rings, like a panda’s, around its eyes. The creature’s face was flattened, with a humped back and long claws. In fact, it had many of the features of Ursus arctos horribilis, the North American grizzly bear.
Martell’s bear triggered an international sensation. Canadian wildlife officials seized the body and submitted DNA samples to a genetics lab to find out what it was. Tests confirmed the animal was indeed a half-breed, the product of a grizzly bear father and a polar bear mother.2 It was the first evidence of grizzly/polar bear copulation ever reported in the wild. News outlets announced the arrival of a “Hairy Hybrid”3 and the blogosphere erupted with either wonderment and proposed names—“pizzly?” “grizzlar?” “grolar bear?”—or outrage that the only known specimen had been shot dead. A “Save the Pizzly” Web site hawked T-shirts, coffee mugs, and stuffed dolls. Martell was subjected to angry criticism; in response he pointed out that the world would never have learned of the thing—whatever it was called—if not for his fine shot.
For this bizarre tryst even to have happened required that a grizzly wander far north into polar bear territory, a formerly rare phenomenon that biologists are now beginning to see more often. Journalists were quick to make a climate change connection: Was this, they wondered, a preview of nature’s response to global warming? But scientists like Ian Stirling, a leading polar bear biologist, were rightly skeptical of drawing strong conclusions from what was, after all, an isolated event. That changed in 2010, when a second specimen was shot. Tests confirmed it was the offspring of a hybrid mother; in other words, they are breeding .4 The coming decades will show whether Martell’s bear, now stuffed and snarling in his living room, is just the latest biological indicator among many that something big is going down on our planet.
If you enjoy watching wildlife in your backyard, perhaps you’ve noticed something. All around the world there are animals, plants, fish, and insects creeping to higher latitudes and elevations. From spittlebugs in California to butterflies in Spain and trees in New Zealand, it is a broad pattern that biologists are discovering. By 2003 a global inventory of this phenomenon found that on average, plants and animals are shifting their ranges about six kilometers toward the poles, and six meters higher in elevation, every decade. Over the past thirty years phenological cycles—the annual rhythm of plant flowering, bird migrations, birthing babies, and so on—have shifted earlier in the spring by more than four days per decade.5
If these numbers don’t sound large to you, they should. Imagine your lawn crawling north, away from your house, at a speed of five and one-half feet each day. Or that your birthday arrived ten hours sooner each year. That’s how fast these biological shifts are happening. Life-forms are migrating—and it’s going on right outside your window.
The 2006 pizzly story—like the record-shattering Atlantic hurricane season in 2005, or the strange weather patterns that rained out the Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver while burying the eastern U.S. seaboard with “Snowpocalypse” in 20106—is yet another example of something that might have been triggered by climate change or might not. Such events are eye-catching in the news of the day but not, taken in isolation, conclusive of anything. In contrast, while the painstaking statistical analyses of decades of field research on spittlebugs and trees may not rouse the daily news cycle, it does me. It is deeply important, a compelling discovery that provides real understanding about the future. It is a megatrend, and megatrends are what this book is all