Author Archives: susanjcrockford

New Chukchi Sea polar bear survey – exciting preliminary results

Posted on March 10, 2013 | Comments Off on New Chukchi Sea polar bear survey – exciting preliminary results

Back in October, I wrote about US Fish & Wildlife biologist Eric Regehr comments about a recent survey of Chukchi Sea polar bears, the results of which are still not published. Since then, I’ve been able to track down a bit of information.

This project appears to have run for five years, from 2008 to 2011. The work was confined to the eastern (US) portion of the Chukchi, see maps below (Polar Bear News 2010; Rode and Regehr 2010). Researchers were doing mark-recapture work with helicopters, putting radio collars on some females and radio ear tags on a few males. They worked primarily in March and April (mating season for polar bears), operating entirely on the offshore sea ice – working, I might add, on bears that technically speaking do not exist, since the official population estimate for this region is “zero” (they are not included in the global estimate of 20,000-25,000, see pdf here,, discussed here).

Figure 1. Chukchi Sea – getting you oriented. Note the location of Kotzebue Sound, northeast of the Bering Strait. Map from Wikipedia.

Figure 1. Chukchi Sea – getting you oriented. Note the location of Kotzebue Sound, northeast of the Bering Strait. Map from Wikipedia.

In 2012, US Fish & Wildlife biologist Eric Regehr told reporter Jill Burke at Alaska Dispatch that they found the bears were “reproducing well and maintaining good body condition.” I’ve finally found some details regarding what he meant by that statement (although no final reports or peer-reviewed papers are out, see footnote below).

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US proposal to ban polar bear trade FAILS

Posted on March 7, 2013 | Comments Off on US proposal to ban polar bear trade FAILS

Just in, the BBC reports (Matt McGrath): [UPDATE FOLLOWS]

A proposal by the US to ban cross-border trade in polar bears and their parts was defeated on Thursday at an international meeting.

The result marks a victory for Canada’s indigenous Inuit people over their bigger neighbour to the south.

Delegates at the Cites meeting in Thailand rejected the proposal to change the bear’s status from a species whose trade is regulated, not banned.

A similar proposal was defeated three years ago at the last Cites meeting.

The latest plan fell far short of the two-thirds needed to pass the Bangkok conference. It garnered 38 votes in favour, 42 against and 46 abstentions.

Sanity and good science prevailed.

See the full story here.

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Stirling and Derocher’s sea ice trick – omitting facts to make polar bears appear endangered

Posted on March 6, 2013 | Comments Off on Stirling and Derocher’s sea ice trick – omitting facts to make polar bears appear endangered

Polar bear biologists Ian Stirling and Andrew Derocher continue to insist that western Hudson Bay (WHB) polar bears are already showing negative effects of reduced sea ice due to global warming. In their 2012 summary paper (Stirling and Derocher 2012), they updated someone else’s graph of global sea ice (to 2011) but used a graph for Hudson Bay (HB) ice breakup dates that ended in 2007. However, we know from other evidence that at least one of those years (2009) would have required extending the scale of the breakup date graph upwards and flattened the slope of the trend line. Updating the HB breakup date graph would not have supported Stirling and Derocher’s premise that polar bears in WHB are starving due to increasingly earlier sea ice breakup, so they simply left the data out (see Fig. 1).

In other fields, this is called fraud.

Is it fraud here? You decide.

I’ve expressed my outrage about this before (here and here), because we know from news reports that in 2009, breakup of Hudson Bay sea ice was unusually late: the Port of Churchill (in WHB) did not open for ship traffic until Aug. 12, a full three weeks later than average (July 21) – and the latest opening of the Port since records began in 1974.

I try not to keep thinking of Stirling and Derocher’s unscientific behaviour but was reminded of it again on Monday (March 4) when I attended a lecture at the University of Victoria given by paleoclimatologist Michael Mann. To my disbelief, Mann tried to argue that global temperatures predicted by NASA scientist James Hansen in 1988 have “closely resembled” actual temperatures since then – by presenting a graph of actual temperatures (observations) that ended in 2005, despite the fact that recent temperatures have not risen at the rate depicted in his graph (see previous post, #8). He did say, as an aside, that “you could argue that if the data were extended out to the present, the line might more closely resemble scenario C [a flat line]” but then continued with his story that observations were matching the ever-rising-temperatures of Hansen’s scenario B (see Figure 2 below).

For both parties – Stirling/Derocher and Mann – the recent data points left off their graphs did not fit their narrative: sea ice in Hudson Bay is not on a steady, precipitous decline and global temperatures have not continued to rise as predicted by Hansen in 1988. The graphs look like science, but they are not.

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CITES Secretariat recommends rejecting US proposal to ban polar bear trade

Posted on March 2, 2013 | Comments Off on CITES Secretariat recommends rejecting US proposal to ban polar bear trade

I missed this somehow when I discussed the upcoming (March 3-14) CITES vote on banning polar bear trade (here). But a recent story in the Nunatsiaq News (excerpt below) alerted me to this recommendation by the CITES Secretariat, which rather echoes my December post, “did the PBSG game the polar bear listing process” as well as my last post,  “Ten good reasons not to worry about polar bears”:

Re: Proposal 3 Ursus maritimus (Polar bear) – Transfer from Appendix II to Appendix I
(CoP16 Doc. 7, Annex 2-p. 10 back up here)

Recommendation by the Secretariat

In accordance with the criteria in Annex 1 and the guidelines in Annex 5 of Resolution Conf. 9.24 (Rev. CoP15), the global population of Ursus maritimus does not appear to be small, the area of distribution of this species extends over several million square kilometers and is not restricted and there is insufficient evidence to show that the species has undergone a marked decline in the population size in the wild (when applying the definitions, explanations and guidelines in Annex 5). Whilst the guidelines provide for population declines to be projected by extrapolation to infer likely future values, in this instance such a projection is heavily dependent on estimates of future sea ice coverage which vary widely. An Appendix I listing would not appear to be a measure proportionate to the anticipated risk to the species at this time.

Based on the available information at the time of writing (late January 2013), the Secretariat recommends that this proposal be rejected.

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Ten good reasons not to worry about polar bears

Posted on February 26, 2013 | Comments Off on Ten good reasons not to worry about polar bears

IMPORTANT UPDATE March 13, 2013 Benny Peiser over at the Global Warming Policy Foundation has just posted an essay by well-known author Matt Ridley, entitled “We should be listening to Susan Crockford” which is included as a foreword to a pdf of this very post (“Ten good reasons not to worry about polar bears”), suitable for sharing. I encourage you to have a look.

[Update September 28, 2013: See also this follow-up post “Polar bears have not been harmed by sea ice declines in summer — the evidence.”]

Polar Bear-Cubs-Canada_Wallpaper

PB logo colouredThis year marks the 40th anniversary of the signing of an international agreement to protect polar bears from commercial and unregulated sport hunting. The devastating decades of uncontrolled slaughter across the Arctic, including the Bering Sea, finally came to an end. And so in honor of International Polar Bear Day (Wed. February 27) – and because some activists are calling 2013 The Year of the Polar Bear – I’ve made a summary of reasons not to worry about polar bears, with links to supporting data. I hope you find it a useful resource for tuning out the cries of doom and gloom about the future of polar bears and celebrating their current success.

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Where were the appeals to feed starving polar bears in 1974?

Posted on February 21, 2013 | Comments Off on Where were the appeals to feed starving polar bears in 1974?

The so-called “policy paper” that polar bear biologist Andrew Derocher has been promoting over the last few weeks, which I commented on briefly when the press release came out, is still grabbing headlines. Online news outlets continue to run stories on this bizarre discussion of what officials might decide to do 40 years from now if global warming causes Western Hudson Bay polar bears to spend 6 months on land (Molnar et al. 2010), causing some of those polar bears to starve (see here, here, and here) – as if this is something likely to happen within the next couple of years.

But forget imagined future starvation: where was the media attention on the plight of starving polar bears back in 1974  and 1975 when polar bears were actually starving in large numbers in the eastern Beaufort Sea?

At least two of the co-authors of the paper getting all the attention – Drs. Ian Stirling and Nick Lunn – witnessed polar bears starving in the Beaufort in 1974 because of an especially cold winter and said nothing – even though polar bear populations worldwide at the time were already low due to the wanton slaughter of previous decades. Did Stirling and Lunn humanely euthanize the bears they saw starving? Contact the media? [If they did, I’d like to know.] Appeal to governments to make a plan in case it happened again? Apparently not, because it did happen again, at least twice in the following two decades – with no attendant hue and cry then either. No, those Beaufort Sea bears starved to death, time and time again, without a word to the media from Ian Stirling and Nick Lunn.
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Belugas as food for hungry polar bears

Posted on February 19, 2013 | Comments Off on Belugas as food for hungry polar bears

Here’s a refreshing change from the litany of cries to “save the killer whales” we heard last month when a few killer whales got temporarily trapped in the ice of Hudson Bay, which I commented about at the time. A story with an entirely different tone emerged last week, with updates today, about beluga whales trapped in the ice on Hudson Bay (see maps and photos below) that came without emotional pleading. It’s a story of life in the Arctic. Continue reading

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The ancient polar bear hunters of Zhokhov Island, Siberia

Posted on February 18, 2013 | Comments Off on The ancient polar bear hunters of Zhokhov Island, Siberia

It’s hard to imagine ancient people successfully hunting polar bears in any numbers – armed as they were with the simplest of bone and stone weapons. Archaeological evidence supports the impression that ancient Arctic hunters rarely took polar bears – there are a few polar bear bones, but not many, in most archaeological sites across the Arctic that were occupied over the last 10,000 years (see my Annotated Map of Ancient Polar Bear Remains of the World).

There is but one exception to this pattern: Zhokhov Island in the East Siberian Sea, Russia (see Fig. 1 below). Almost four hundred polar bear bones were recovered from two of the 13 semi-subterranian houses discovered on the island, well-preserved by permafrost for over 8,200 years. It is by far the largest – and the oldest – collection of polar bear bones left by human hunters anywhere in the world and it is described in a fascinating paper published in 1996 by Vladimir Pitul’ko and Aleksey Kasparov [contact me if you’d like to see it].

Zhokhov Island is situated just above 760N latitude and so has about the same length “winter’s night” as the northern tip of Novaya Zemlya, where William Barents and his crew spent the winter of 1596/97 (see previous post here ) – about 2 months, from early November to early February. The average January temperature today in the archipelago of the New Siberian Islands is −280C to −310C.

The East Siberian Islands are included in the Laptev Sea subpopulation of polar bears, the only Russian region that contributes a count (800-1,200 bears) to the global population estimate, based on an aerial survey conducted in 1993 (see previous post here).

Figure 1. Map of the New Siberian Islands off Siberia, with tiny Zhokhov Island circled. Map from Wikipedia

Figure 1. Map of the New Siberian Islands off Siberia, with tiny Zhokhov Island circled. Map from Wikipedia

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Goldilocks in the Bering Sea: Less sea ice is bad and more ice is bad

Posted on February 14, 2013 | Comments Off on Goldilocks in the Bering Sea: Less sea ice is bad and more ice is bad

This article from yesterday about sea ice in the Bering Sea is priceless: while we are still being told that below average ice coverage (common 10-20 years ago) is a sign of global warming that means the end of polar bears sometime in the future, it turns out that too much ice is bad, less ice is friendlier and lots of ice is hopefully something that we’ll never see again.

From the article:

After a 2012 Bering Sea snow crab season that saw unusually severe sea ice inhibit fishermen’s efforts to catch almost 89 million pounds of the shellfish, 2013 is shaping up to be much friendlier.

According to Kathleen Cole, a forecaster with the National Weather Service ice desk, this winter was unlikely to match 2012, even before it began. Despite some recent rumors of encroaching ice into the Bering Sea fishery, the situation is better than last year, she said.

“We’re just not going to have a year like last year. It’s going to be, by no means, that bad,” she said. “Last year was something that we’d never seen before, and hopefully something that we’ll never see again.”

Sea ice is still well above average in the Bering Sea this year – as it has been for 7 of the last 10 years. See the ice extent map from NSIDC from yesterday below and my previous post from December 2012: Now that Bering Sea ice cover is high again, variability is normal (note that polar bears of the Bering Sea are considered part of the “Chukchi Sea” subpopulation, which we know practically nothing about, see previous post here). Continue reading →

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Misleading “State of the Polar Bear” graphic cost advocate scientists more than US$50,000

Posted on February 10, 2013 | Comments Off on Misleading “State of the Polar Bear” graphic cost advocate scientists more than US$50,000

UPDATE FEBRUARY 19, 2014 – The misleading “State of the Polar Bear” graphic is now GONE (as of January 31, 2014). A new 2013 status table is offered by the PBSG here. It has detailed text explanations and harvest information, with references, hyperlinked to each subpopulation entry (“Press the subpopulation hyperlink and more information will appear“) and may have replaced the “State of the Polar Bear” graphic that the PBSG commissioned for upwards of US$50,000, although the PBSG website says it is being “updated” [A pdf copy of the 2013 colour table is here, and my commentary on it is here.] I have left the original post as is, below.

I’ve had some time to do a little digging regarding the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG) State of the Polar Bear web graphic. It turns out this fancy but misleading document was designed by a US company called Periscopic (Portland, Oregon) at a cost of US$50, 000-70,000. So apparently, rather than put $70,000 towards much-needed polar bear research, the PBSG chose to use the money to tell people, in a slightly different way, that it thinks polar bears are doomed. [see UPDATE: April 1 2013]

Just to refresh your memory, last month I pointed out that this fancy summary “tool,” which sits prominently on the home page of the PBSG website, suggests that there are now 22,600-32,000 polar bears worldwide, when tallied by nation (when you add up the individual population estimates provided on each of the two maps on this web “tool” (without clicking through to more detail), you get two different numbers that have no resemblance to the “official” estimate of 20,000-25,000: the page “Nations” gives totals by country that add up to 22,600-32,000 and the numbers given on the “Subpopulations” page (when you hover your mouse over each of the 19 regions) add up to only 13,036 – a far cry from 20,000-25,000 official estimate).

A few days later, I got a response to the email I’d sent to Norwegian polar bear biologist Dag Vongraven, who said it was his job to supervise work on this summary. But, he said, he had “not yet had time to review all details in it as well as I should.” So it seems that without a careful review of the final product, the graphic was posted on the home page of the PBSG website (sometime in October 2012).

It turns out there had been a discussion at the 2009 PBSG meeting, documented in its official report (Obbard et al. 2010:11, Fig. 1 below), about their intention to hire Periscopic as part of on-going PBSG website developments supervised by Vongraven. Several PBSG members agreed this would be a good idea and offered to help by providing data. Continue reading

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