Polar Bears, Halloween And South Florida: A Couple Of Weird Global Warming News Items

Global warming has helped change migration
routes for polar bears, prompting a Canadian town
to ban door to door trick or treating.  

Global warming, or concerns about it, keep taking on odd manifestations in the news.

Lately, I'm hearing about polar bear scares, Halloween, and maybe the 51st state of South Florida.

Let's start with the Halloween polar bears.

Way up north in Canada, in the little town of Arviat, on the cold northwest short of Hudson Bay, the kids won't be going door to door trick or treating on Halloween.

Instead of fake ghosts and goblins scaring the kids, and the whole town, it's real live polar bears.

Polar bears never used to be a problem in Arviat, although they've always lived in the region. However, there's a lot less ice near the western shore of Hudson Bay then there was years ago.

The polar bears used to migrate this time of year on that ice, because the seals they eat are on the edge of that ice. But since it's not there anymore, they migrate through, or at least much closer to the town of Arviat these days, says Eric Holthaus, writing in Slate.

Hudson Bay has warmed by about three degrees Celsius since the 1990s, and scientists blame most of the hotter Hudson Bay on global warming.

An article in Men's Journal says many people in Arviat are afraid of being mauled by these hungry bears, and there have been a number of close misses already.

From Slate:

"'Picture 1,200 kids going door to door in Arviat in the middle of polar bear season,' Steve England, the town's senior administrative officer, told the CBC. 'It's a pretty obvious conclusion of what tragedies could come out of that.'"

So, the kids of Arviat will have a Halloween party indoors at a community center this year, which frankly isn't as great in my mind as trick or treating.

Nobody will dress up as a seal for Halloween in Arviat this year, that's for sure. And it's a weird thing to say, but the town's Halloween has been cancelled, or at least modified, because of global warming.

Now, we'll leave the Great White North for the palm trees and tropical breezes of South Florida.

High tide in Miami: Sea level rise means
high tide now often reaches the streets,
 even when there is no storm.  

The city of South Miami, which is of course in South Florida, passed a resolution recently calling for Florida to be split into two states, with the nation's 51st state becoming South Florida, says the Sun Sentinel newspaper. 

South Miami's Vice Mayor, Walter Harris, said lawmakers in Florida's state capitol of Tallahassee isn't providing South Florida with proper representation or addressing its concerns when it comes to rising sea levels.

South Florida is on very low ground and rising sea levels have already started to cause flooding during normal tides. There hasn't been a hurricane there in years, so what happens when a storm surge blasts in with the higher seas?

They're going to have to figure out how to deal with rising sea levels, and some people in South Florida think the state isn't doing enough.

"It's very apparent that the attitude of the northern part of the state is that they would just love to saw the state in half and just let us float off into the Caribbean," said South Miami Mayor Philip Stoddard. "They've made that abundantly clear every possible opportunity and I would love to give them the opportunity to do that."

Part of the frustration in South Florida probably has to do with Republican Gov. Rick Scott, who won't even say whether he believes humans are contributing to climate change and sea level rise. Scott is locked in a tight race for re-election against Charlie Crist, who does say humans are changing the climate and we have to adapt to the changes it's causing.

So yes, climate change is now affecting politics in any number of ways.

Like other little secessionist or state-splitting rumblings in the United States (See: California, Texas, Vermont) I don't think this South Florida idea will go far.