Environment Forum

Coke’s new look: polar-bear white

Coca-Cola has one of the most recognizable brands on the planet: the red can with the white letters. World Wildlife Fund has an equally eye-catching logo: a black-and-white panda. This week, the two are joining forces to change the Coke can’s look from red to white. It’s meant to raise awareness and money to find a safe haven for polar bears, listed as a threatened species because their icy Arctic habitat is melting under their paws due to climate change.

In a project called Arctic Home, Coke plans to turn 1.4 billion of its soft-drink cans white for the first time in its history, replacing the familiar red with an image of a mother polar bear and two cubs making their way across the Arctic. There will also be white bottle caps on other drinks the company sells. The new look is to show up on store shelves from November 1 through February 2012.

The whole point is to raise money to protect a far-north area where summer sea ice will probably persist the longest, WWF and Coke said in a statement. The Arctic Home plan is to work with local residents to manage as much as 500,000 square miles of territory to provide a home for polar bears.

Coke and polar bears are something of a classic combination, according to the company’s Katie Bayne, who said in a statement that the big white bears were first introduced in the beverage-maker’s advertising in 1922. But the color change is more than tin-deep. Coca-Cola is making an initial $2 million donation to World Wildlife Fund to support polar bear conservation work. Those who buy the white cans can text the package code to 357357 to make individual donations of $1, or donate online at ArcticHome.com. The company plans to match all donations made with a package code by March 15 up to $1 million.

“Polar bears inspire the imagination,” Carter Roberts, CEO and president of WWF, said in a statement. “They’re massive, powerful, beautiful and they live nowhere else except the Arctic. Their lives are intimately bound up with sea ice, which is now melting at an alarming rate. By working with Coca-Cola, we can raise the profile of polar bears and what they’re facing, and most importantly, engage people to work with us, to help protect their home.”

Photo credits: REUTERS/Geoff York/World Wildlife Fund (World Wildlife Fund photograph taken along the western shore of Hudson Bay in November 2010 shows a female polar bear with two cubs near Churchill, Canada, in this image released to Reuters on February 9, 2011.

New Coke cans (World Wildlife Fund/Coca-Cola)

Is Earth due for a mass extinction?

It has all the signs of a sick good-news/bad-news tale. The bad news is that Earth may be ripe for a mass extinction, where 75 percent or more of the life on the planet vanishes forever.

The good news is it’s unlikely to happen for at least three more centuries.

Scientists writing in the journal Nature warn that we could be on the brink of a mass extinction, the kind of species loss that has happened just five times in the last 540 million years.

“If you look only at the critically endangered mammals–those where the risk of extinction is at least 50 percent within three of their generations–and assume that their time will run out and they will be extinct in 1,000 years, that puts us clearly outside any range of normal and tells us that we are moving into the mass extinction realm,” Anthony Barnosky, an integrative biologist at the University of California at Berkeley said in a statement about the study he co-wrote.

Are humans to blame? Possibly.

“A modern global mass extinction is a largely unaddressed hazard of climate change and human activities,” said H. Richard Lane of the National Science Foundation, which funded the research.

If the species that are now considered critically endangered, endangered and vulnerable actually went extinct, and that rate of extinction continued, the sixth mass extinction could arrive in three to 22 centuries, Barnosky said.

Gulf of Mexico oil spill prompts worries about Arctic drilling

With the spotlight shining on the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and on the executives sizzling in the hot seat on Capitol Hill, environmental advocates are looking north.

They’re worried that Shell Oil will start drilling in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska before the U.S. government reports on BP’s Deepwater Horizon drill rig disaster. And the environmental groups are not comforted by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s reassurances that no new drilling will take place until the government report is completed by May 28.

“The May 28 report deadline still leaves ample time should the Department of the Interior choose to allow this ill-advised drilling to move forward in extreme Arctic conditions, where spill response faces additional challenges of sea ice, seas of up to 20 feet, darkness and a virtual lack of infrastructure from which to stage a response,” the environmental groups — Alaska Wilderness League, Center for Biological Diversity, Defenders of Wildlife, Earthjustice, Sierra Club and The Wilderness Society — said in a statement.

The Chukchi Sea is home to polar bears, which are already under pressure due to melting summer sea ice in the Arctic. The big white bears are listed as a U.S. threatened species due to the expected continued effects of climate change in the area.

Shell plans to move into the area around July 1, and get to the places where it wants to drill exploratory wells by July 4 if ice permits. They plan to leave for the year by October 31.

An analysis of Shell’s exploration drilling plan by the Pew Environment Group says that provisions for cleanup in the event of a Chukchi Sea oil spill are inadequate and too distant from the prospective drill site. Marilyn Heiman, the former director of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Commission and now with the  Pew group’s U.S. Arctic program, quoted the Shell exploration drilling plan as saying that “a large oil spill, such as a crude oil release from a blowout, is extremely rare and not considered a reasonably foreseeable impact.”  Heiman said the U.S. Minerals Management Service’s environmental assessment also dismissed the probability of this kind of blowout and spill as “insignificant.” A blowout at BP’s well off the Louisiana coast is the source of the oil spill there.

Since the BP spill in the Gulf, the Minerals Management Service has asked Shell for additional safety information by May 18, but that may not be enough to allay the environmental groups’ fears. They want the Obama administration to cancel this summer’s plans for Arctic oil exploration.

Of science and stuffed polar bears in Antarctica

The U.S. Nathaniel B. Palmer research vessel has just set off for Antarctica where it will deploy a tiny unmanned yellow submarine beneath an ice shelf to seek clues to rising world sea levels, and carry out a series of other research projects. See story here.

Palmer was an explorer and seal hunter who was among the first people to spot Antarctica in 1820 — part of the Antarctic peninsula is named after him.

The 94-metre ship, operated for the National Science Foundation, has been in Punta Arenas at the southern tip of Chile preparing for the voyage.

Chief scientist for the mission, Stan Jacobs of Columbia University, took time out to show Reuters TV’s Stuart McDill and me around the spotless red and yellow vessel (bridge shown right) just as the final preparations were being made.

Safety first — we had to wear lifejackets just to climb up the gangway (there was even a net to catch us before we hit the water if we fell off) and hard hats on deck. Noisy cranes were busy loading supplies.

Going on a trip to the Antarctica sounds like a dream to many people — for polar researchers it is a fantastic chance to make discoveries for instance about whether the continent is starting to thaw because of global warming, something that could raise world sea levels.

But there are a lot of hardships too.

Of fingerprints and polar bear whiskers

 What do human fingerprints and polar bear “whisker prints” have in common?

You probably guessed — both give away identity.

Jane Waterman, a Canadian biologist at the University of Central Florida, is asking any tourist who takes a photo of a polar bear around Churchill, Canada, to send it to her to help study the bears. Here’s her website.

Polar bears look pretty much the same to most people — big, white and to be avoided.

But the ”whisker prints”, the pattern of dark dots around the mouth, are unique and Waterman hopes that snapshots taken around Churchill will build a record of what the bears get up to. Bears are in trouble because global warming is melting their icy Arctic homes.

The pictures above show the same bear — taken in two different years along with a pattern of whisker prints that proved it was one and the same.

“A special computer program, with software similar to NASA’s algorithm for mapping stars, identifies each bear by that print and will allow Waterman and her students to track the declining population,” a statement said.

Poor polar bears, but what about the people?

                                             Native Alaskan artists visited New York this week with a message not so much about art, nor a species that’s struggling as rising temperatures melt its habitat from under its paws.

“With so much attention on polar bears, where’s the concern about the people? What about fellow Americans?” said Alvin Amason, an artist and member of the coastal Alutiiq people, who lives in Anchorage.

Amason and other Alaskan artists hit New York to celebrate the opening of the Alaska House , a nonprofit cultural center that aims to teach people about the challenges and opportunities the state faces.

Not only are temperatures rising faster in the Alaska and the Arctic than in southern parts of the world, but residents in remote regions the 49th U.S. state are facing food and fuel costs that are surging faster too.

And the melting of coastal ice means they can no longer hunt on shore for walrus and other animals that provide them with ivory and bones for carvings.

Now the artists have to hunt by boat, but surging fuel costs in those remote areas are making it harder. “If someone gets $5,000 for a carving from a western buyer, he’s not thinking of spending it on a vacation, he’s spending it on boat fuel and heating oil and food, ” said Amason.

Perry Eaton, a fellow Alutiiq artist, said residents in native communities in and around the Arctic Circle in Alaska are moving in droves to the cities in search of other types of work.

Global warming research getting more dangerous?

 Talk about occupational hazards.Five Wildlife Conservation Society scientists studying the effects of global warming on shorebirds in Arctic Alaska had to be airlifted away from their remote camp late last month because of the appearance of another species whose life is changing as warming helps erode shores and melt sea ice. The researchers said a polar bear stuck on land forced them to evacuate their camp north of the remote Teshekpuk Lake on the Beaufort Sea –leaving food and tents behind.  The carnivorous bears would normally be out on sea ice this time of year. But with recent warming the ice is miles from shore and polar bears, which were recently listed as “threatened” under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, are becoming increasingly trapped on land well away from their usual seal prey, said Dr. Steve Zack, who leads Arctic studies for WCS ”We had no idea how hungry they’d be and thus how ornery they’d be,” Zack, who made the decision for the researchers to evacuate even though they had been trained in bear safety, told me by his mobile phone from his current base near Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. ”Where there’s one polar bear there are usually more,” he said, adding that government scientists have seen 32 polar bears stuck on shore this year, up from only one or two in previous years. In subsequent fly-overs over the abandoned camp, the team discovered that bears had eaten all of the food left by the researchers and destroyed two $500 tents. ”It was an ironic circumstance that studying climate change issues for our shorebirds put us in harm’s way with climate change effects on polar bears,” said Zack.  Image by Mark Maftei, WCS