Monthly Archives: November 2022

Five years ago today, activist scientists tried to silence me: I’m still here but I need your help

On 29 November 2017, I awoke to find derogatory articles featuring me and my work splashed across newspapers worldwide, part of a coordinated effort to promote a paper published in the journal BioScience. More followed. The paper was a vile attempt by 14 activist scientists to silence me and others, assisted in their unethical attack by an enthusiastic media. But it didn’t work.

I’m still here, in part because of your support, both intellectual and financial. I’ve continued to effectively challenge the baseless rhetoric that polar bears are helpless victims of human-caused global warming by providing fully referenced information without climate fear-mongering. I’ve run this blog for ten years, written numerous scientific reports, a peer-reviewed paper, and a raft of entertaining and informative books.

Now I need a bit more help.

I’ve decided to use this occasion to kick-start a donation drive to help cover production costs of my new polar bear evolution book. In many ways, your enthusiastic support over the years has led me to write this book: the complete story of polar bear evolution, including the role of hybridization, but without the baffling scientific jargon. It will put everything we know about polar bears into evolutionary context–not just the when and where but the why and how.

Nothing like this exists and I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. I’m on track for publication in early 2023.

I’m asking those of you with the means to help, to assist me in getting this important book across the finish line. Details below.

UPDATE 1 December 2022: GOAL REACHED! What an amazing community this is–$5210 raised in two days. I am truly grateful for your generosity and moral support. Your donations will ensure that this polar bear evolution book gets published quickly and looks professional. Heartfelt thanks to all who participated. I will announce the winners of the special incentive (see below) next Tuesday, 6 December.

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Polar bear specialist calls Hudson Bay freeze-up ‘late’ yet bears were moving offshore 2 weeks ago

Predictably, polar bear specialist Andrew Derocher has finally posted a tracking map of the Western Hudson Bay bears his team has fitted with collars and eartags–two weeks after bears were released from Churchill’s polar bear jail, which is the local signal that there is enough sea ice for bears to leave shore. As I reported two weeks ago, release of jailed bears happened this year on 10 November. And as I predicted in that post, by waiting so long after that event to post his map, Derocher can make it seem to his naive followers on Twitter that the bears are just starting to leave now (the last map he posted was on 11 November, when none of his bears had moved). He reinforces this by calling WH freeze-up “late”, when by all objective measures (including local informants reporting bears on the ice) it was as early as it had been in the 1980s (Castro de la Guardia et al. 2017).

Recall that fall is the second-most important feeding season for polar bears, due to the fact that seals are strongly attracted to newly-forming sea ice. It’s their chance to regain some or all of the weight lost over the summer, before the long winter fast begins (while bears indeed hunt when they can, they are not often successful during the depths of the Arctic winter: most bears are at their lowest weight by March).

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Eastern Canadian Arctic has much more sea ice than usual while Svalbard polar bears deal with less

Svalbard is still ice-free this fall, which it has been rather consistently for at least ten years but the amount of sea ice greater than ‘normal’ in the Eastern Canadian Arctic at this date is something to behold. Yet contrary to predictions, polar bears in Svalbard are thriving.

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Hudson Bay sea ice freeze-up in 2022 like the 1980s for the 5th time since 2015

This is the fifth year out of the last seven that enough sea ice has formed along the west coast of Hudson Bay by mid-November for bears to be able to head out to the ice, just as it did in the 1980s.

‘Green dot’ problem bear released from Churchill holding facility on 10 November 2022. Dorota Walkoski photo.

One of the independent polar bear guides on the ground near Churchill had this to say about the bears and freeze-up conditions this year:

“Bears started leaving on November 10; conservation emptied the jail on the 10th as well.”

‘The jail’ is the Churchill Polar Bear Alert Program’s ‘holding facility’. While the Alert program folks have not released a report for this week (gee, I wonder why?), nearby tourist outfit Great White Bear Tours not only confirmed the bears were released from jail but posted a picture of a ‘green dot bear’: the mark put on problem bears released from the holding facility to keep track of them. Bears are not released before there is ample ice along shore for them to move out. Great White Bear Tours have been tracking bears moving offshore.

This information suggests the average date for bears leaving shore will likely turn out to be 12-14 November, again earlier than the average for the 1980s (16 Nov +/- 5 days) (Castro de la Guardia et al. 2017). That makes five out of the last seven years (2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022) since 2015 that bears have left about the same time as they did in the 1980s.

While there are still be a few bears on the shore of Wapusk National Park that seem to be in no hurry to leave, a few stragglers doesn’t mean there isn’t ice available for hunting.

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Arctic sea ice tipping point nonsense at COP27 refuted by last seven years of data

David Attenborough and his cronies at Netflix devoted an entire documentary last year (‘Breaking Boundaries‘) on the nonsense notion that the world is facing a dire ‘tipping point’ where calamity is inevitable, with the Arctic being ‘Ground Zero’ for these effects. However, their sea ice model has already been falsified by the last seven years of data.

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Polar bear habitat update: ice forming along Hudson Bay, Wrangel & Franz Josef Islands surrounded

Western Hudson Bay polar bears near Churchill will be able to leave shore within days, at most one week later than in the 1980s, although you wouldn’t know that from the climate change activists at Polar Bears International who have spent the last week promoting some egregiously false and misleading statements. PBI controls the narrative surrounding Western Hudson Bay bears through their partnership with the biggest polar bear tourist outfits in Churchill and online.

Yesterday, it was “See how the climate crisis is changing their world”.

Developing no slower than it did in 2007 (16 years of no change), Arctic sea ice is providing polar bears in southern regions with their second-most critical feeding opportunities while in areas like Wrangel Island and Franz Josef Land, they now have easy access to and from important summer refuge/maternity denning islands. And contrary to predictions of increased ‘conflict’ between polar bears and people around Churchill, there have been fewer problem bear reports there in recent years, this year included. In other words, there is no ‘climate crisis’ for polar bears, even in Western Hudson Bay, and recent models of a dire future for polar bears are based on totally implausible worst-case climate scenarios. Sea ice loss since 1979 has been so gradual that polar bears have been able to adapt, either through natural selection or changes in behaviour.

UPDATE 12 November 2022. One of the independents on the ground near Churchill had this to say about the bears and freeze-up conditions this year:

“Bears started leaving on November 10; conservation emptied the jail on the 10th as well.”

[the 10th was the day this post was originally published; ‘the jail’ is the Churchill Polar Bear Alert Program’s ‘holding facility’, see report below]. This information suggests the average date for bears leaving shore will likely turn out to be 12-14 November, again earlier than the average for the 1980s (16 Nov +/- 5 days). There may still be a few bears on the shore of Wapusk National Park that seem to be in no hurry to leave, but a few stragglers doesn’t mean there isn’t ice available for hunting.

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Polar bear triplet litter spotted near Churchill as ice starts to form along west coast of Hudson Bay

Polar bears, including a litter of triplet cubs (a sign of very good health), are gathering near Churchill, Manitoba where new ice is forming along the coast. This means the fall seal hunt will soon begin, depending on the winds (it might be a few days from now or a few weeks).

See below for some of the images of bears on the shore of Wapusk National Park taken by Explore.org video cams from Tundra Buggy-based cameras, as well as the most recent Churchill problem bear report.

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King Charles & David Attenborough parrot WWF activist nonsense they naively accept as ‘science’

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) was created in 1961 to raise funds for wildlife conservation and immediately recruited European royalty to help attract wealthy benefactors. At first it was a novel good cause and this is why Britain’s royal family, plus their close friend David Attenborough, have been loyal supporters for six decades. However, for more than twenty years, the WWF has not been the benevolent conservation organization that it was in the 1960s yet these powerful men support them with more vigor than ever.

Prince Philip was the first president of the WWF-UK but ended his association with the group when they morphed into a politicized activist organization lobbying for the limitation of fossil fuels to curb human-caused global warming. However, Prince Charles, now King Charles III, became even more involved in WWF propaganda machine and eventually initiated son William, now heir apparent, into doing the same.

When the WWF began falsely promoting itself as a scientific authority a dozen or so years ago, these naive elite boosters accepted it without question, parroting unsubstantiated WWF climate doomsday talking points at every opportunity. These men don’t speak with an authority of their own knowledge on this topic: they use their exalted positions to assist the WWF and others achieve their utopian dream: destroy for others the capitalism that created their own wealth and power.

It is clear now that many of the goals of the WWF are also shared by the World Economic Forum (WEF), and that these complement the vision the King and David Attenborough have for the future. They all want a return to a world with fewer people that live meager, circumscribed lives while the rich carry on their jet-setting ways. The King will lobby again for their collective vision of the world this Friday at Buckingham Palace.

Attenborough also spoke out on the topic in person a few weeks ago (see below) after years of making documentaries and public statements that make his position very clear. Attenborough became an official WWF ambassador in 2015, the same year that the WWF partnered with Netflix and the BBC to make their first documentary, ‘Our Planet’. The WWF’s warped perception of science prevailed in ‘Our Planet’, so it’s no wonder the documentary is full of misleading and deceptive information. The film featured the infamous falling walrus fiasco that is the focus of my book, Fallen Icon: Sir David Attenborough and the Walrus Deception.

I have copied an excerpt below about the WWF-Royalty-Attenborough connection as important background to understanding the power structure of the climate change and animal conservation agenda that is now being pushed hard in an emotionally manipulative manner. I have spent years showing that conditions in the natural world are not as bad as Attenborough and the WWF insist and so do not warrant extreme ‘solutions’ as proposed by King Charles, the WEF, and many who will attend the COP 27. I will continue resisting this utopian fantasy.

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