Monthly Archives: February 2022

State of the Polar Bear 2021: polar bears continued to thrive

The current health and abundance of polar bears continues to be at odds with predictions that the species is suffering serious negative impacts from reduced summer sea ice blamed on human-caused climate change.

Continue reading

Accepted sea otter population estimate at 1911 as inaccurate as rejected polar bear estimate for 1960s

Sea otter specialists, without shame or apology, routinely use a benchmark figure of ‘about 2,000’ for the pre-protection population size of the species at 1911 based on extremely limited evidence yet polar bear specialists refuse to accept a benchmark figure for the 1960s despite the existence of eight published estimates made by experts at the time. Sea otters came much closer to extinction than polar bears did and are not out of the woods yet, for reasons that are not entirely understood (Doroff et al. 2021).

Andrew Derocher, 22 February 2022: ‘There never was a population estimate of global abundance in the 1960s.’

Derocher’s statement and those of his colleagues, discussed at length in The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened, makes them look biased and unprofessional. There is absolutely no rational scientific justification for holding this stance.

Continue reading

Mid-winter polar bear sea ice habitat is abundant & within range of long-term average

Ahead of International Polar Bear Day (27 February) this year, polar bear habitat is as abundant as it has been for decades. This is a tough time for polar bears, many of which will be finding it hard to find seals to eat, as newborn seals won’t be an available food resource for about a month in most areas. Thin and hungry bears are dangerous.

Sea ice charts below for the Arctic as a whole and by region.

Continue reading

David Attenborough and his ‘Great Reset’ WEF cronies hit a big Canadian roadblock

In this essay, I explain in simple terms why The Great Reset concept of the WEF (which not only includes a large climate change component but is also linked to Covid-19 restrictions) is conceptually unsound but so dangerous that it sparked a Canadian uprising that is spreading around the world.

Ottawa, Canada. 11 February 2022. Donna Laframboise, BigPicNews.

Update 19 Feb 2022: see below, from Canadian parliament when questions are asked about cabinet members ‘on board’ with WEF agenda.

Continue reading

Open response to a polar bear researcher who objected to me ‘attacking’ their colleagues

Last week, I got an email from a polar bear scientist I have interacted with a few times. Not one of the big names but aside from that, I’ll leave their identity private. The email was polite and I tried to respond in kind. I have copied it here because others may have had similar concerns.

Continue reading

Statement of polar bear population size estimates by polar bear scientists in 1965

Polar bear scientists in 1965 published a consensus statement on population size, with no caveats that these were ‘wild guesses’ or not to be taken seriously. They quoted some of the same authorities that I did when I suggested a plausible baseline figure. Andrew Derocher, Steven Amstrup and others who say there has never been population estimates for the 1960 or 1970s are not defending science, they are lying to protect their ‘polar bears are all gonna die because of climate change’ narrative. No other biologists do this, even those who insist the species they study are at risk from human-caused global warming. You should ask why.

This controversy is why archives like the one I created yesterday are so important: they make it impossible to re-write history as some insist on doing:

Continue reading

Archive of IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group status and meeting reports back to 1965

The IUCN/SCC Polar Bear Specialist Group have recently modernized their website, which apparently required them to remove all meeting reports and status documents going back to 1968. Since I had downloaded all of them for my own research, I have archived them here for anyone wishing to assess the accuracy of statements made by PGSG members about what they did or said in the past, or to understand the history of the organization. I did something similar a few years ago regarding the administrative reports used in 2007 to support the decision to list polar bears as ‘threatened’ under the US Endangered Species Act (ESA), which disappeared from the US Geological Survey website: they can now be found here.

Continue reading

Fact checkers defend activist scientists because they agree with them not because they are right

The so-called fact-checkers are out again trying to insist one side of a scientific debate is wrong and another is right because they happen to agree with one side. That’s advocacy, not science.

Here are some facts (check the links provided for additional references):

Continue reading