Ian Stirling, who laid the foundation for our understanding of polar bear ecology and almost single-handedly made the polar bear an icon of global warming, died last week in Edmonton at the age of 82 [my mistake in the headline: he would have turned 83 this September]. Stirling was said to have played a critical and calming diplomacy role at international Polar Bear Specialist Group meetings but over the last several decades, like so many other “conservationists,” he became an outspoken activist for what he called the “climate warming” issue.
It was sad for me to have witnessed a respected and dedicated biologist turn his back on science the way he did but I am also saddened by his passing. He truly did make a huge contribution to science but could have done so much more with the time he had.
An email from a close colleague of Ian’s from his Canadian Wildlife Service days was passed along to me:
Ian Stirling left for the big lead in the sky
I am sorry to inform you that Ian passed away early Tuesday morning, May 14, after a long battle with cancer. After his initial diagnosis with lymphoma five years ago, he was blessed to have a reprieve and period of good health before things changed and advanced to leukemia over the last year.
There will be more information coming soon about a memorial service, with a tentative date of 6 June afternoon.
For unexplained reasons, on X, Polar Bears International (PBI) announced Stirling’s date of death as 16 May. [Note: corrected to 14 May, as of 20 May]
Early Important Work
Stirling’s early work laid a foundation for our understanding of polar bear ecology and behaviour. He came to work at the Canadian Wildlife Service in 1970 as a newby to polar bears and the Arctic: the closest his previous experience had brought him to a polar animal had been his Ph.D. work on Antarctic Weddell seals.
In a short YouTube video he narrated in 2019, he says himself that those early years while he learned on-the-job about polar bears were tremendously important. Charged with observing bears in the Canadian Arctic as well as the unique situation that existed for bears and people in Churchill, Manitoba, immersed Stirling in the biology of polar bears.
The papers Stirling published from this time period are fascinating: I’ve learned much of what I know about polar bears from his work, which I’ve written about often. He learned, for example, that bears eat few seals during the summer and early fall, whether they have access to sea ice or not.
Among those many papers and reports are these:
Stirling, I. 1974. Midsummer observations on the behavior of wild polar bears (Ursus maritimus). Canadian Journal of Zoology 52: 1191-1198. http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/abs/10.1139/z74-157#.VR2zaOFmwS4
Smith, P., Stirling, I., Jonkel, C., and Juniper, I. 1975. Notes on the present status of the polar bear (Ursus maritimus) in Ungava Bay and northern Labrador. Canadian Wildlife Service Progress Notes 53. pdf here.
Stirling I, Jonkel C, Smith P, Robertson R, Cross D. 1977. The ecology of the polar bear (Ursus maritimus) along the western coast of Hudson Bay. Canadian Wildlife Service Occasional Paper No. 33. pdf here.
Kiliaan, H.P.L., Stirling, I., and Jonkel, C.J. 1978. Polar bears in the area of Jones Sound and Norwegian Bay. Canadian Wildlife Service Progress Notes 88. pdf here.
Stirling, I. and Kiliaan, H.P.L. 1980. Population ecology studies of the polar bear in northern Labrador. Canadian Wildlife Service Occasional Paper 42. pdf here.
Stirling, I., Calvert, W. and Andriashek, D. 1980. Population ecology studies of the polar bear in the area of southeastern Baffin Island. Canadian Wildlife Service Occasional Paper 44. pdf here.
Stirling, I. 1980. The biological importance of polynyas in the Canadian Arctic. Arctic 33:303-315. pdf here.
Stirling, I. and Cleator, H. (eds). 1981. Polynyas in the Canadian Arctic. Canadian Wildlife Service Occasional Paper 45. pdf here. [47MB large file]
Stirling, I. 1986. Research and management of polar bears Ursus maritimus. Polar Record 23:167-176. pdf here.
Stirling, I. and Øritsland, N. A. 1995. Relationships between estimates of ringed seal (Phoca hispida) and polar bear (Ursus maritimus) populations in the Canadian Arctic. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 52: 2594 – 2612. http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/abs/10.1139/f95-849#.VNep0y5v_gU
Stirling’s Polar Bear Problem
Along with colleagues at the Canadian Wildlife Service and his student, Andrew Derocher, Stirling were surprised to learn that polar bears sometimes experienced tough times, which particularly in the southeastern Beaufort Sea were clearly associated with very thick ice conditions in the spring.
I’ve often written about the problem Stirling and his students and colleagues had trying to explain why bears of Western Hudson Bay found the early 1980s to be particularly challenging. Bears were found close to starvation and cub survival dropped dramatically well before there were any notable changes to sea ice breakup and freeze-up dates.
These phenomena were never adequately explained because once Stirling found out about James Hansen’s theory that carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels was causing global temperatures to rise, he embraced the “global warming causes melting sea ice” concept rather than pursue independent research that might have explained what he was seeing with his own eyes.
See the following publications for details on Western Hudson Bay and Southeastern Beaufort Sea bears:
Stirling, I., Schweinsburg, R.E., Kolenasky, G.B., Juniper, I., Robertson, R.J., and Luttich, S. 1980. Proceedings of the 7th meeting of the Polar Bear Specialists Group IUCN/SSC, 30 January-1 February, 1979, Copenhagen, Denmark. Gland, Switzerland and Cambridge UK, IUCN., pg. 45-53. pdf of except here.
Derocher, A.E. and Stirling, I. 1992. The population dynamics of polar bears in western Hudson Bay. pg. 1150-1159 in D. R. McCullough and R. H. Barrett, eds. Wildlife 2001: Populations. Elsevier Sci. Publ., London, U.K. [abstract included below because this is a hard-to-access book chapter]
Abstract. Reproductive output of polar bears in western Hudson Bay declined through the 1980’s from higher levels in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Age of first reproduction increased slightly and the rate of litter production declined from 0.45 to 0.35 litters/female/year over the study, indicating that the reproductive interval had increased. Recruitment of cubs to autumn decreased from 0.71 to 0.53 cubs/female/year. Cub mortality increased from the early to late 1980’s. Litter size did not show any significant trend or significant annual variation due to an increase in loss of the whole litter. Mean body weights of females with cubs in the spring and autumn declined significantly. Weights of cubs in the spring did not decline, although weights of both female and male cubs declined over the study. The population is approximately 60% female, possibly due to the sex-biased harvest. Although estimates of population size are not available from the whole period over which we have weight and reproductive data, the changes in reproduction, weight, and cub mortality are consistent with the predictions of a densitydependent response to increasing population size. [my bold]
Derocher, A.E. and Stirling, I. 1995. Temporal variation in reproduction and body mass of polar bears in western Hudson Bay. Canadian Journal of Zoology 73:1657-1665. http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/abs/10.1139/z95-197
Ramsay, M.A. and Stirling, I. 1988. Reproductive biology and ecology of female polar bears (Ursus maritimus). Journal of Zoology London 214:601-624. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-7998.1988.tb03762.x/abstract
Stirling, I. 2002. Polar bears and seals in the eastern Beaufort Sea and Amundsen Gulf: a synthesis of population trends and ecological relationships over three decades. Arctic 55 (Suppl. 1):59-76. http://arctic.synergiesprairies.ca/arctic/index.php/arctic/issue/view/42
Stirling, I. and Lunn, N.J. 1997. Environmental fluctuations in arctic marine ecosystems as reflected by variability in reproduction of polar bears and ringed seals. In Ecology of Arctic Environments, Woodin, S.J. and Marquiss, M. (eds), pg. 167-181. Blackwell Science, UK.
Effects of Stirling’s activism
Through his influence as senior member of the polar bear biology field, by at least 1999, Stirling guided his students and colleagues in the pursuit of documenting “harm” to polar bears from short-term changes in sea ice, which involved them all ignoring data collected during the 1970s and early 1980s listed above. Here is the pivotal Stirling paper from 1999:
Stirling, I., Lunn, N.J. and Iacozza, J. 1999. Long-term trends in the population ecology of polar bears in Western Hudson Bay in relation to climate change. Arctic 52:294-306. pdf here.
In large part, I am convinced, this shift in focus was done to protect the jobs of those already employed in the field and ensure jobs would be eventually available for students in the pipeline. And once polar bear research devoted itself to the climate change narrative and predictions of imminent species extinction, the climate change narrative became dependent on polar bear research for validation.
However, it didn’t take long for it to become obvious that polar bears were more resilient than Stirling and his fellow conservationists assumed and the whole house of cards faced collapse. “The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened” was not just the title of my book: observations of thriving bears despite declining sea ice exposed the predictions of future extinction as nonsensical failures.
Note that we haven’t heard about “dramatically declining” Southern Beaufort polar bear numbers for years. And only last year, researchers were forced to admit that Western Hudson Bay polar bear numbers have not declined over the last two decades and neither has WH sea ice cover. In addition, contrary to predictions, bears in the Barents Seas have been doing extremely well despite the largest declines in summer sea ice faced by any population (~ 6X that experienced by Western Hudson Bay bears).
In desperation, the climate change narrative has dumped the polar bear as its icon and now depends on wildly implausible claims of catastrophic weather events and baseless future “tipping point” nonsense to support their agenda.
While they may not want to admit it, polar bear researchers have become largely irrelevant to this big picture pony onto which Stirling hitched their cart: the climate emergency folks have moved on without them.
Unfortunately, Ian Stirling wasted the last three decades of his career pursing a mirage. He had a wealth of knowledge we should all be grateful he shared. But we could have done without having it smeared with that veneer of scolding that we were collectively responsible for causing polar bears to starve to death, if not now then sometime in the future.
My Critique of Stirling Wasn’t Personal
My critique of the polar bear as global warming icon started with Stirling’s work because in 2012 he was the most vocal in his advocacy and the most well-known. Stirling had just published a book filled with “climate warming” doom-mongering that flew in the face of information he knew to be true — because he’d collected and published the data himself. Peddling such misinformation went against accepted scientific principles and I took umbrage at the offense.
But it was never a personal vendetta: for me, it was about setting the record straight about the science. However, to a man like Stirling who was not accustomed to facing any kind of criticism — let alone from a female colleague — it was perhaps not surprisingly that he took it personally. In retribution, Stirling was one of the 14 coauthors of the infamous 2018 BioScience paper used to try and shut me up for good. Unfortunately, not only did the paper fail to have its intended effect but it exposed both Stirling and colleague Steven Amstrup for their unscientific activism.
Some of my published work that addresses Stirling’s work:
Crockford, S.J. 2015. The Arctic Fallacy: Sea Ice Stability and the Polar Bear. Global Warming Policy Foundation Briefing Paper 16. London. Pdf here. Available at http://www.thegwpf.org/susan-crockford-the-arctic-fallacy-2/
Crockford, S.J. 2019. The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened. Global Warming Policy Foundation, London. Available in paperback and ebook formats.
Crockford, S.J. 2022. Fallen Icon: Sir David Attenborough and the Walrus Deception. Amazon Digital Services, Victoria. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0991796691
Crockford, S.J. 2023. Polar Bear Evolution: A Model for How New Species Arise. Amazon Digital Services, Victoria. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1778038328
Crockford, S.J. 2024. State of the Polar Bear 2023. Briefing Paper 67. Global Warming Policy Foundation, London. Download pdf here.
You must be logged in to post a comment.