When the arctic regions were tropical forests?
Polar bears evolved from a common ancestor with the grizzly bear about 200,000 years ago (Note: the common ancestor was probably nearly identical to the present grizzly bear). That means Polar Bears survived through the previous two periods of glaciation 130 and 10 thousand years ago as well as the warm interglacial periods. The poles (some of the land now occuring in the Arctic) were tropical probably over a hundred million years ago in the Mesozoic Age. (Note mammals have been around for around 200 million years) Environmentalists, and that includes many that are convinced AGW is a serious problem, tend to feel bad when Polar Bears suffer. As an animal lover, I certain don’t condone any mistreatment but the fact remains most polar bears die of starvation. If they survive is it generally by the skin of their teeth and they have a hard life. This is typical of all wild animals. The fact remains that polar bears are doing fine and they are only endangered in the minds of alarmists.
Climate is a product of the environment. Tens of millions of years ago, the continents were in different positions. There were different mountain ranges, different ocean currents, more volcanic activity, a slightly different set orbital variations. I’m not sure how useful it is to compare today’s climate with one millions years ago. When “[the land land that is now part of the] arctic regions were tropical” there were no polar bears, no human civilizations (were there even mammals?). Also, it’s not clear that the equator was ever “the cooler region.” There has been evidence of glacier activity on land that is currently near the equator hundreds of millions of years ago, causing some to hypothesize a “snowball earth.” But because of plate tectonics and continental drift, these glacial fields were probably located at a different latitude way back when. It’s clear that you have no understanding of the time frames involved that we are discussing here. So much has changed over the past few
The current ice age started ~2.6 million years ago with interglacial periods each ~100,000 years we are currently in the middle of one of those. Bears as a species evolved ~4 million years ago, the Polar Bear as a sub species only appeared ~200,000 years ago, they are descended from Brown Bears. As such they evolved to live and survive in the Arctic pack ice and since they appeared there has been pack ice in the Arctic. Technically arctic regions didn’t have tropical forest they had temperate forest, small parts of this type of forest still exist in central Tasmania, Australia.
