Excerpt from email from Frances Beinecke, President, Natural Resources Defense Council:
The Arctic spring in Greenland is coming two weeks earlier than it did in 1996 -- a rate of climate change that far outstrips warming trends seen elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere.
As the sea ice melts earlier and earlier each year, there have been more and more reports of starving polar bears being forced to resort to heart-breaking acts of desperation.
Only last summer, an adult bear -- his hip bones visible through his hide -- killed a polar bear cub for food in the first-ever eyewitness account of polar bear infanticide.
The scientists who observed this never-before-seen behavior linked the killing of the cub -- and other recent reports of polar bear cannibalism in Alaska's Beaufort Sea -- to "nutritional stress related to a longer ice-free period."
They also predicted that as the ice melt continues to accelerate, tragic incidents like these will become more frequent. This is the terrible and inexcusable toll that global warming is taking on the polar bear.
And our very best hope to prevent an even bigger tragedy is to start cutting our global warming pollution now.
So while you have this message in front of you -- please rally your friends in support of imperiled polar bears by sending SOS messages to as many people as you can at http://www.polarbearsos.org/tellfriends
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