Polar Bears Are Thriving

If polar bears could talk I'm sure they'd object to being propaganda props.
When polar bears die, they die of starvation: new Nature paper is propaganda, not news
Posted on February 13, 2024 | Comments Offon When polar bears die, they die of starvation: new Nature paper is propaganda, not news
Is it a coincidence that a paper reporting the results of a no-news study on polar bears, but which predicts future starvation due to climate change, was published two weeks to the day ahead of a climate change marketing event made up by the activist organization Polar Bears International? I doubt it.


And do I think the high-profile journal Nature Communications would not only agree to publish such a useless bit of propaganda but also rig the timing to advance the climate change emergency narrative? Silly question. And the media worldwide are of course lapping it up, happy for an excuse to promote the perils of climate change, see here, here, and here using images of fat polar bears. Image above is from the BBC headline, 13 February 2024.

They believe this strategy is effective because they think the public is stupid, but they are deluding themselves. Most people are now laughing at their obvious acts of desperation.

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The consensus narrative fosters misunderstanding of polar bears at a quite basic level.
NY Times pushes an implausible story of polar bear evolution and what makes a species
Posted on February 20, 2024 | Comments Offon NY Times pushes an implausible story of polar bear evolution and what makes a species
Carl Zimmer over at the New York Times penned a misleading story of speciation, using the polar bear as an example. It explains polar bear evolution based on a genetic interpretation that ignores the fossil record, bear behaviour, and geological history. [h/t Kip Hanson].


In my opinion, this kind of ‘science communication’ is more misleading than enlightening because it fails to alert readers to the fact that the topic is actually more complicated and gives the impression that the author considers readers too stupid to understand a more accurate explanation.

Polar Bear Evolution does a better job for those who are really interested in the process: it doesn’t hide the complicated nature of speciation or polar bear evolution. It doesn’t pretend to present “the truth” but explains how a good scientist gets to a plausible explanation that best fits the evidence.

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Polar Bears are not thriving. This is a lie.

For threatened polar bears, the climate change diet is a losing proposition

With Arctic sea ice shrinking from climate change, many polar bears have to shift their diets to land during parts of the summer. A study looking at Hudson Bay polar bears tries to figure out if they can keep up their roly-poly figure, which is what’s needed and found that an overwhelming number of them are dropping the pounds no matter what they do to try to beef up their weight.



Some bears find a lot of food — berries, eggs, sea birds and even caribou antlers — but it takes so much effort, so many calories are burned trying to eat, that they end up losing weight and expending more energy than they take in, according to a study in Tuesday’s journal Nature Communications.


Other bears go into a stage of semi-hibernation, don’t do much, but they also shed the pounds, so either way doesn’t work, said study lead author Anthony Pagano, a U.S. Geological Survey wildlife biologist.


Researchers found that 19 of the 20 bears studied dropped an average of 47 pounds (21 kilograms) over three weeks of being studied in research that monitored their calorie intake, energy use and respiration in the wild. That’s losing about 7% of their body mass on average in just 21 days, the study concluded.

Polar bears try to keep up their weight in the summer after a spring when they feast and fatten prodigiously. In the area of the Hudson Bay where researchers studied, lack of sea ice has meant polar bears are on land three weeks longer than in the 1980s, Pagano said.

 

Sorry, but the only "lie" is in the Washington Post article you linked. It is based on a Nature Communications paper that is thoroughly deconstructed in #351 above. The "old boys network" of polar bear researchers have never forgiven Crockford for refuting their fundamental thesis and embarrassing them in her 2017 paper, linked here.
Crockford, S.J. 2017. Testing the hypothesis that routine sea ice coverage of 3-5 mkm2 results in a greater than 30% decline in population size of polar bears (Ursus maritimus). PeerJ Preprints 2 March 2017. Doi: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.2737v3 https://peerj.com/preprints/2737/

 

Without question.

 

He didn't read the link thus remains ignorant of what she talked about as he who doesn't realize Polar Bear counts remains high despite low summer sea ice of the previous 16 years.

Sea Ice cover in the Summer isn't important to Polar Bears because their main food starts leaving the area in late June to other regions not so dependent on ice cover.

 

Can anyone tell me what the polar bear population was in 1750? Or 1850? Or 1950? Or 2000? Or today? Hmmmm.

 

When I was a kid, it was well known that polar bears had been rapidly declining in number ever since the Inuit got decent hunting rifles, because they regarded the bears as dangerous pests to be killed on sight. In particular, once cheap military surplus rifles became commonplace in the Arctic after WW I, the bears were on their way to extinction. IIRC, their population bottomed at around 5K sometime around the 1960s, before they were protected. The population has increased by several times since then.

 

https://polarbearsinternational.org/news-media/articles/are-polar-bear-populations-increasing

https://arcticportal.org/ap-library/news/3270-polar-bear-population

All we have is wild ass guesses. That’s all we’ve ever had. I’m not a fan of basing climate policy on wild ass guesses. We have no baseline population. We have no current accurate population.

In a way, it was brilliant for folks like Gore to pick polar bears for their appeal to emotion tool. They can postulate without having to provide solid evidence to back up their assertions. But in the end it just makes them look stupid to folks who think critically.

 

It has been another good year for the bears.
State of the Polar Bear 2023: W. Hudson Bay polar bear numbers have not declined since 2004
Posted on February 27, 2024 | Comments Offon State of the Polar Bear 2023: W. Hudson Bay polar bear numbers have not declined since 2004
In my State of the Polar Bear 2023 report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, I discuss recent news relevant to polar bear conservation and science issues. The most startling of these is the revelation that Western Hudson Bay polar bear numbers have not declined since 2004.




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The polar bear alarmists are trying to find a way to climb down from their doomsday predictions.
Hudson Bay polar bears now considered most likely to survive future sea ice loss
Posted on March 9, 2024 Hudson Bay polar bears now considered most likely to survive future sea ice loss
Over the last 10 years, Hudson Bay polar bears have morphed from being the “most at risk” across the Arctic to the “least at risk.” Who would have thought?


That’s probably because the experts now have to admit that polar bear numbers have not declined since 2004 and bears have been in good body condition since at least 2016. Southern Hudson Bay bears have apparently increased in number since 2016. How ironic is it that the photo above, taken in Hudson Bay — the only Arctic region where trees grow — was used to illustrate a recent Mother Jones article promoting a new prediction of future Arctic summer sea ice loss that’s said to pose a threat to polar bear survival.

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The alarmist climateers will try to massage any data to fit their narrative.
2024 Arctic sea ice maximum a whopping 14th below average following hottest year since 1850
Posted on March 25, 2024 | Comments Offon 2024 Arctic sea ice maximum a whopping 14th below average following hottest year since 1850
Officially, the maximum winter sea ice extent for 2024 was 15.01 mkm2, reached on 14 March. At an unimpressive “14th lowest” on record, this is astounding news for the winter following the “hottest year on record.” Undeterred, the US government headline writers at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) today went for “Arctic sea ice reaches a below-average maximum.” Note the long-term average (1981-2010) is only 15.65 mkm2 and 15.01 is within 2 standard deviations (see below, screencapped 14 March 2024).


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Now that is really funny since Hudson Bay loses ALL of their ice normally by early summer.

 

A "record" that not coincidentally begins at the end of a 30-year cooling trend....

Yes, what happened to "polar amplification"?

I.e., the "long-term" average is calculated on the basis of the 30 years following a 30-year cooling trend....

 

The bears of Svalbard paid a call.
A good year for Svalbard polar bears due to abundant sea ice coverage
Posted on April 2, 2024 | A good year for Svalbard polar bears due to abundant sea ice coverage
A sow and a pair of half-grown cubs recently paid a visit to the Polish Research Station in southwestern Svalbard without causing any more trouble than racing heart-rates, according to a report in The Guardian today.


Money quote from the leader of the expedition [my bold]:

This year the team had seen more polar bears than usual, he added. Usually there were around 20 bear sightings a year, but this year there had been close to 40 sightings since June and they expected to see more in their final three months.

“So far, we have not observed any clearly emaciated individuals. This year is probably a good year for Svalbard’s polar bears because there is a lot of sea ice here compared to recent years,” he said [The Guardian, 2 April 2024, see photo above].

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The alarmists can manipulate the narrative, but they can't indefinitely overcome contrary data.
Polar bears: They are going extinct!?
Peter Ridd
We are told that Polar Bears are on hugely threatened by climate change. But does the data support this proposition? . . .

". . . . There’s a very brave scientist who’s been blowing the whistle on this, and she’s suffered the consequences by being out of step with the scientific consensus. Her name is Susan Crockford, and her data is as simple as it is devastating: polar bear numbers have increased. Since the 1960s, the number of bears has not reduced; it may well have gone up quite significantly, perhaps even tripled. You can just see how that would make her very unpopular with the consensus group. As The Washington Post put it, nobody has done more to sink the claim that climate change is endangering polar bears than zoologist Susan Crockford. And she may have paid the price for it with her job. After 15 years as an adjunct assistant professor, Crockford said the University of Victoria rejected her renewal application without explanation in May, despite her high profile as a speaker and author stemming from her widely cited work on polar bears and dog domestication. Ms. Crockford accused officials at the Canadian university of bowing to outside pressure, the result of her research showing that polar bear populations are stable and even thriving, not plummeting as a result of shrinking Arctic sea ice.

Defying claims of the climate change movement, one reason that bear numbers have almost certainly rebounded is that there’s a lot less hunting than there was half a century ago. Now, some argue that the early estimate of bears in the sixties was not particularly accurate. But even if we accept this, where is the data to show that they’re in decline? This has been a hugely contentious issue and the subject of numerous fact checks, including one by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation after Mrs. Gina Rinehart, a very well-known Australian, quoted Crockford’s work. What was notable about the fact check was that while they took exception to the statement that the numbers were increased, they couldn’t present any evidence for a general decline in polar bear numbers. So, they’re effectively agreeing with Crockford. . . . "

 

Susan Crockford is a heroine of science.

Polar bears are going extinct? Actually, they’re not! A new video worth watching and sharing
Posted on April 28, 2024 | Comments Offon Polar bears are going extinct? Actually, they’re not! A new video worth watching and sharing
Great Barrier Reef specialist Peter Ridd has just published an excellent video about my work and the way I’ve been treated by the scientific community just for pointing out that polar bear populations have failed to respond as predicted to the recent decline in Arctic sea ice.

Dr. Ridd has been treated equally abominably, as he explains here.

Here’s the video: Polar bears: They are going extinct!? 27 April 2024 [length 6:57]

The report Peter refers to in the video is this one, which was published in February 2024:


Crockford, S.J. 2024. State of the Polar Bear 2023. Briefing Paper 67. Global Warming Policy Foundation, London. Download pdf here.

In other words, the polar bear catastrophe we were promised never happened. In case you missed it, I wrote a book about that. Polar bears across the Arctic are thriving: not just because their numbers have increased overall but because the field data collected from bears in regions that have had the most dramatic declines in summer sea ice, including the Barents Sea and the Chukchi Sea, show the bears are healthy and reproducing well.