Siberian Bears Losing Sleep Over Global Warming

I think I can relate to these bears- last night it was too warm in my apartment to fall asleep. It's more than halfway into November, and with the heat turned off it still reached over 70 in the apartment (about 60 outside). I tossed and turned for quite a while, but then again I don't normally fall asleep for 6 months. I assume the bears in question are brown bears (the article didn't say), but the simple truth of it is that it's too warm for the bears to hibernate. Either they can't, or the weather is so warm they don't want to, so the bears and continuing to roam around when they should normally be asleep. This could cause quite a bit of trouble indeed.

Bears seem to be on a yearly eat/sleep cycle, where the six months following sleeping are devoted to adding as much fat as possible in order to not go hungry during their hibernation. Their diets seem to vary seasonally, as can be seen in their North American cousins. Fun fact- when there's an overabundance of salmon, NA grizzles only eat the brains and caviar, which are more calorie-rich than the rest of the fish. Yummy. This system seems to work pretty well, but bears staying up and being without much food can have grim consequences. Timothy Treadwell (as seen in the documentary Grizzly Man) was in Alaska in the "Grizzly Maze" after most of the bears had gone into hibernation. The bears that remained he was mostly unfamiliar with, many old and grumpy, unable to catch enough food. These are the really dangerous bears because they sometimes see people as an easy meal, being that they can't catch as much protein as they did in their younger days, and Timothy Treadwell most likely fell victim to one of these bears.

In any case, it appears that for the moment there's enough food for the bears so that they aren't going hungry. I have to wonder, however, how long the food will last and how long the conditions will be too warm for the bears to hibernate, because if the food runs out and the bears don't go to sleep, you could have bears starting to go after people or wandering into populated areas in search of garbage. I don't want to malign bears too much, because if they really preferred to eat people walks in the woods would be unsafe in many places, but they can be driven to attack and consume people at times, especially in desperation. They are one of the few animals that actually EAT people (sharks attack/bite, but rarely has a person actually been consumed), and a lack of food with insomiac bears could create some problems. Also consider that while awake the bears burn more calories than they would if asleep, so their stores will be burned up more quickly. This could mean that even if they do hibernate, they may have lost some much needed fat and need to wake up earlier to forage, and they will most certainly be hungry. The question will be is there enough food?

Like I said, I don't want to be an alarmist because at the moment the warm weather has also allowed there to be enough forage for the bears, but I just wonder how long it will last and how long the bears will stay awake. Human/predator trouble often crops up during times of stress on the predators food supply (i.e. after droughts there is an increase in Asiatic lion attacks on people), but if the people in Siberia are alert and manage the problem effectively (put out some extra food for bears at feeding stations in the woods) there shouldn't be much need to worry about human safety. Even so, I am very concerned for the environmental change and species survival over the long term is this trend continues. This is another case of how global warming is changing global ecology, and even though we like to think of ourselves outside of nature, but we surely are not.