Polar Bears Are Thriving

Bears just want to have fun.
Arctic sea ice at the summer solstice: more polar bear habitat than 2022 after hottest year on record
Posted on June 25, 2024 | Arctic sea ice at the summer solstice: more polar bear habitat than 2022 after hottest year on record
We are just into the 2024 sea ice melt season in the Arctic with no signs of any big, dramatic changes despite claims that 2023 was the warmest year on record (since 1850). There is still abundant sea ice habitat for polar bears ahead of the summer months (July-September) when Arctic ice melts back considerably.


Polar bears in Western Hudson Bay are still on the ice despite vast open water levels normally signaling “breakup” has happened: the wind-driven ice is packed tight against the western shore and the bears are still on it.

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I.e., since the coldest 500-year period in the last 10,000 years.

But realistically, the uncertain quality of the instruments, the inconsistencies in the measurement methodology, and the spotty coverage do not support claims about what the average global temperature was before the 1970s -- which was also right after an extended cooling phase. Claims of "hottest year on record" -- let alone absurd lies like, "hottest year ever" -- are therefore best taken with a large grain of salt. I have seen no credible empirical evidence -- none -- that current average global temperature is unambiguously higher than it was in the early 1940s. If you ask people in their 90s (and older!) who actually remember the early 1940s, they will often say it was warmer back then.

 

The ice won't cooperate with the alarmist narrative.
Last month of Arctic spring fails to bring sea ice to its knees, even in Southern Hudson Bay
Posted on July 11, 2024 | Last month of Arctic spring fails to bring sea ice to its knees, even in Southern Hudson Bay
Polar bear habitat for June — the last month of spring in the Arctic — is still within 2 standard deviations of the long-term average despite sea ice experts’ predictions that catastrophic declines can be expected any year now.


The Arctic sea ice cover in June 2024 retreated at a below average pace, leading to a larger total sea ice extent for the month than in recent years. NSIDC, 3 July 2024

Oddly, the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) employees who wrote up the sea ice summary for June felt it appropriate to bring up a recently-published prediction of impending doom for Southern Hudson Bay polar bears based on a sea ice prediction (Stroeve et al. 2024), which I covered here. The inclusion of this topic is a naked promotion of the Stroeve sea ice modelling paper which not only doesn’t fit the reality of this year’s sea ice conditions but their discussion doesn’t include a single piece of evidence that Southern Hudson Bay polar bears came off the ice earlier than usual.

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The bears have plenty of ice.
W. Hudson Bay sea ice not going away anytime soon as polar bears sit tight offshore
Posted on July 18, 2024 | W. Hudson Bay sea ice not going away anytime soon as polar bears sit tight offshore
A broad band of sea ice is jammed up against the western shore of Hudson Bay, hanging on despite warm mid-July temperatures. Its unusual thickness suggests it won’t be gone anytime soon, which means most Western Hudson Bay polar bears will likely remain offshore for at least a few more weeks.

The dark blue in the “departure from normal” chart below shows just how unusual this phenomenon is for the northern reaches of Hudson Bay:


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So now the problem is that there are too many bears.
Polar bear “boom” reported in East & Southwest Greenland comes with the usual problems
Posted on August 1, 2024 | Polar bear “boom” reported in East & Southwest Greenland comes with the usual problems
Reports over the last week of an unexpected abundance of polar bears onshore in East and Southwest Greenland have locals and tourists concerned. The former Prime Minister of Greenland claims the unusual number of bear sightings and problems with bears near communities (including an attack involving serious injury to a German researcher) are due to abundant sea ice offshore. This explanation is contrary to what polar bear specialists predict: i.e., that problems with bears occur when there is less ice than usual. None of the bears sighted have been described as thin or starving.


The Polar Bear Specialist Group has previously estimated that there are only about 650 bears in East Greenland, while a recent study estimated that an additional 234 bears lived in SE Greenland.

“Polar Bear Boom May Threaten Greenland Adventurers” (25 July 2024)

Polar bears don’t often show up in Southern or Western Greenland any more, but this year has been an exception. Only yesterday, two appeared near Nuuk, Greenland’s capital. And according to Aleqa Hammond, Greenland’s former Prime Minister, that’s just been the tip of the, well, iceberg.

“There are bears everywhere in West Greenland this year,” she told ExplorersWeb. “Quite a few have been way too close to towns in South Greenland this summer, too. Several polar bears have been shot in Qaqortoq, as the bears were literally in town.”

“Another polar bear shot in Ittoqqortoormiit” (25 July 2024)

Another polar bear has been observed – and shot as an emergency – in Ittoqqortoormiit on Thursday morning. This is confirmed by the head of duty at the Greenland Police, Jørgen Madsen, to Sermitsiaq.

It is the second time a polar bear has been shot in emergency situations in Ittoqqortoormiit this week. On Tuesday evening around 19:30, the police received a report about a polar bear that had been shot in an emergency.

Here, the police could say that the polar bear came close to a dog crate, and then headed directly for a soccer field where children are playing.

“Man Survives Polar Bear Attack in Greenland” (30 July 2024)

Last week, a polar bear attacked a German researcher in East Greenland. The researcher, part of a team on Traill Island, encountered the bear on Friday morning.



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Just bears being bears.
Fatal polar bear attack in Davis Strait last week: important details being withheld
Posted on August 13, 2024 | Fatal polar bear attack in Davis Strait last week: important details being withheld
A man was killed last week (August by two polar bears on a small island off the east coast of Baffin Island in Nunavut, multiple reports have confirmed — although precious few details have been provided, other than that one of the bears was killed immediately afterward. The name of the victim (an employee of a government radar site) has not been released, and no information on the condition of the bears or the circumstances of the attack have been provided. Major news outlets have had to pad their stories with details from previous attacks and other filler.


A Svalbard sow and half-grown male cub that’s as big as she is.
However, an attack by two bears sounds suspiciously like the sow and half-grown cub involved in another fatal attack in 2018 in Foxe Basin, even though adult females with cubs are one of the least common perpetrators of serious attacks on people.

Why are officials not saying if this was yet another fatal assault by an adult female with a cub, even five days after the attack? Perhaps because they think it makes the bears “look bad” and strengthens the Nunavut case for recently including equal numbers of females and males in their hunting quotas? Time will tell.

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Lots of ice for the bears this year.
Western Hudson Bay sea ice breakup for polar bears like the 1980s for 3 of the last 5 yrs
Posted on August 13, 2024 | Western Hudson Bay sea ice breakup for polar bears like the 1980s for 3 of the last 5 yrs
The 1980s and early 1990s are said to have been the “good old days” for sea ice conditions and polar bears in Western Hudson Bay, with all tagged bears usually ashore by mid-to-late August. Then an abrupt step-change in sea ice breakup dates brought polar bears to shore an average of two weeks earlier in the late 1990s. From then until 2019, the only significant outlier to all tagged bears being ashore by about late July was 2009, which was such an unusually cold year that the last bears came ashore about August 20.


That pattern changed in 2020, when the last bears came off the ice as late as they had in 2009, on August 21. Something similar happened in 2022, when the last bears came off a small remnant of ice even later, about August 26. And this year, the bears may be moving ashore even later: there is even more ice remaining off WH and much of it is thick compacted ice that hasn’t melted much over the last few weeks, which means bears have been as late onshore as the 1980s for three out of the last five years.

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There are plenty of polar bears for tourists to see.

Western Hudson Bay polar bears waiting for the sea ice to freeze as tourists flock to watch
Posted on October 18, 2022
Should only be a few weeks more until the ice forms along the western shore of Hudson Bay, it’s already been snowing. But for the tourist outfitters around Churchill, this is their time to profit from those willing and able to spend big money to see polar bears up close.




from the Explore.org web cam, 18 October 2022
Those tourists are captive audiences for the global warming propaganda provided by activist organization Polar Bears International: it’s virtually impossible for anyone to escape the climate change doom-mongering in Churchill and that’s a real pity.

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Polar bears like less ice.
New Study Finds Arctic Warming, Declining Sea Ice May Be A ‘Benefit’ To Polar Bears And Ringed Seals
By Kenneth Richard on 5. November 2024

The polar bear plight has quietly disappeared from the catastrophic global warming narrative.
According to new research, the body condition of polar bears and ringed seals (their prey) has been stable to improving from 2008-2022 despite Arctic warming and sea ice decline during this period.

This is the opposite of what was predicted to happen, as it has been assumed intact sea ice is essential to polar bear health and survival.

“…polar bear body condition and recruitment during 2018-2022 were largely within or above observed annual means during 2008-2017.”

“A lack of trend in environmental and ecological variables or polar bear body condition…during 2008-2022 is suggestive that the Chukchi Sea polar bear population was likely stable during this time.”

“Studies in both the Chukchi Sea and adjacent southern Beaufort Sea have shown improved ringed seal body condition and pup production following and during years with lower spring or summer sea ice cover, earlier sea ice breakup, or thinner ice.”

“…an increase in the duration of open water during the summer and the associated increase in ocean productivity with warming may benefit polar bear prey species.”



Image Source: Rode et al., 2024

 

Canadian man leaps onto polar bear to defend wife during attack

https://amp-abc-net-au.cdn.ampproje...le/104696160?amp_js_v=0.1&amp_gsa=1#webview=1

Melting ice pushing polar bears inland.

 

Please see #384 above.
“According to new research, the body condition of polar bears and ringed seals (their prey) has been stable to improving from 2008-2022 despite Arctic warming and sea ice decline during this period.

This is the opposite of what was predicted to happen, as it has been assumed intact sea ice is essential to polar bear health and survival.”

 

Melting ice pushing polar bears inland.

 

To be filed under “So what?” The bears have thrived in the past through periods of less ice than the present. They are thriving now.
And btw, there are no data to support a claim of bears being pushed inland.

 

You mean no data that you would care less about?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2351989422003213?via=ihub


https://movementecologyjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40462-022-00351-4

 

Computer model output is not data.

 

No. Neither of the papers you referred to offered any empirical data showing polar bears moved inland due to warming climate (which in any case has little to do with CO2). You simply made it up.

 

Please see # 390 and #391.
Both the papers you cite are from the faction wedded to the theory "ice decline = polar bear decline." They have never recovered from Susan Crockford's destruction of their earlier predictions of polar bear doom.
In fact, in earlier eras, the bears thrived when there was no ice. They'll be fine.

 

That's not what I claimed that they said.

 

Attack the credentials of the paper, the journal or the author when you don't like the data. No counter arguement.

Straw man.

Melting ice pushing polar bears inland. I never suggested anything else.

 

Typical straw man arguments. Knew that would be the case... Won't bother checking again

 

That’s fine. Unless it’s tied to some other claim, the observation is unimportant.

 

They did not offer any credible empirical data that support your claim.

 

They are the same people who have relentlessly attacked Susan Crockford after she decisively refuted their polar bear doomsday claim. They are the ones with no counter argument.

 

No, you are just makin' $#!+ up again. Jack did not attack the credentials of the paper, journal, or authors, and no relevant empirical data were offered. What he pointed out was that the authors are engaged in a propaganda exercise, not genuine empirical science, and he was correct on that score.

That would describe the criers of polar bear doom after Susan Crockford conclusively refuted their claims.

Nope.

But there are no credible empirical data to support that claim.