This is week 15 for most polar bears onshore near Churchill in Western Hudson Bay, which means they have been onshore for almost 4 months. Still, photos being circulated are still showing bears in excellent condition and we are just waiting to see if freeze-up this year is as early as it has been for the last two years.
Comments Off on Polar bear activity picks up in Churchill as W Hudson Bay freeze-up time approaches
Posted in Life History, Sea ice habitat
Tagged Alert Program, body condition, Churchill, fat bears, freeze-up, migration, polar bear, sea ice, western hudson bay
Misplaced eco-anxiety that kids have about polar bears starts with activist biologists like Steven Amstrup, spokesperson for an organization devoted to raising climate change alarm – and media outlets like The Guardian who help them spread fears unsupported by scientific evidence.
Fat healthy polar bear male at Kaktovik, Alaska in the Southern Beaufort Sea, September 2019, Ed Boudreau photo, with permission.
You can’t get much more over the top than these statements from Amstrup today but read carefully: it’s either opinion or factual aspects of polar bear life (“we know that the bears aren’t feeding”) made to sound like new, terrifying developments that can be blamed on climate change. Continue reading
Comments Off on Activist biologist filled with eco-anxiety shares unfounded fear of polar bear catastrophe
Posted in Advocacy, Conservation Status, Life History, Population, Sea ice habitat
Tagged Alaska, Amstrup, Beaufort, catastrophe, Chukchi Sea, eco-anxiety, polar bear, Polar Bears International, population decline, predictions, sea ice, shrinking sea ice
Unbelievably wrong: A psychologist has told parents to assure their children that rising sea levels might be an immediate threat to polar bears – but not to kids in the UK. She says this is “putting things into perspective” for anxious kids but is horrifyingly and almost laughably far off the mark.
The amount of ignorance about polar bears from those who still consider the species an appropriate icon for catastrophic climate change never seems to end.
Comments Off on New polar bear horror emerges out of advice to parents on eco-anxiety in kids
Posted in Advocacy, Conservation Status, Sea ice habitat, Summary, Uncategorized
Tagged climate anxiety, concerns, eco-anxiety, extinction, Greta Thunburg, kids, polar bear, sea ice, sea level, sick with worry, threatened
We are told the Arctic is warming twice as fast as anywhere else in the world, yet as the internet reverberates with shrill, almost-the-lowest-ice-extent-ever stories, polar bears, Pacific walrus, and the most common ice seal species (ringed and bearded seals, as well as harp seals), are all thriving. Two new videos published by the GWPF on polar bears and walrus confront this conundrum and the conclusion is clear: if there is no climate emergency for polar bears, there is no climate emergency anywhere.
Comments Off on No climate emergency for polar bears or walrus means no climate emergency period
Posted in Advocacy, Conservation Status, Sea ice habitat, Summary
Tagged Arctic, climate change, climate emergency, Eemian, geology, global warming, GWPF, history, ice age, interglacial, LGM, polar bear, sea ice, youtube video
Polar Bears International is the non-profit organization that virtually rules the town of Churchill when it comes to informing naïve tourists about polar bears. A million-dollar donation last year guaranteed the creation of a new building to permanently display PBI-generated information in downtown Churchill – previously limited to those visitors wealthy or influential enough to ride Tundra Buggies run by Frontiers North.
PBI is an organization dedicated to the promotion of climate change rhetoric that currently purports to present unbiased scientific information about polar bears and climate change. It was founded by a retired marketing director and “polar bear enthusiast” in 2002 but its current leader is ‘chief scientist’ Steven Amstrup. Amstrup was almost single-handedly responsible for the failed survival model that got polar bears classified as ‘threatened’ under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) in the US (Crockford 2017, Crockford 2019; Crockford and Geist 2018).
Amstrup’s model predicted that 2/3 of the world’s polar bears would be gone if sea ice got as low as it has been since 2007 but it was spectacularly wrong: polar bears are healthier and more numerous than 50 years ago.
Global polar bear population size estimates to 2018. From Chapter 10 of The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened (Crockford 2019).
Amstrup presented his firmly-held opinions as if they were scientific facts but observations have shown his guesses were incorrect. But he refuses to acknowledge this and PBI continues to spead a message of impending doom [my bold]:
“This year’s polar bear season is going to be big for our team, perhaps our biggest yet. Not only do we have an amazing schedule of Tundra Connections webcasts and live chats, but we’re also working with an array of media to tell stories and spread awareness about polar bears and the threats they face in a warming Arctic. This is especially important following another summer of massive sea ice loss in the Arctic and amidst overwhelming global momentum pressuring world leaders to address the climate crisis.”
Below is an excerpt from an interesting story from 2010 on how PBI controls the ‘polar-bears-are-doomed/save-our-sea-ice‘ narrative presented to the media and innocent tourists who just come to see polar bears in the wild.
Comments Off on People go to Churchill to see polar bears in the wild and PBI controls the info they get
Posted in Advocacy, Conservation Status, Sea ice habitat
Tagged activist, advocacy, Amstrup, canary in the coal mine, Churchill, climate change, ESA, extinction, icon, PBI, polar bear, Polar Bears International, predictions, propaganda, sea ice, threatened, tourists
These four images of thin or emaciated polar bears falsely blamed on climate change have scared kids like Greta Thunburg to death: the four white lies that scarred a generation.
If you see kids marching with signs like the one below – from a protest earlier this year in Montreal – you know they have seen the white lies that have been spread online. Note the poster starving bear below compared to the real-life on from 2015 above.
Here I summarize the truth about all four of these starving polar bear images that have been used since 2009 to emotionally manipulate the public (especially young girls), into getting on board the climate change band wagon. Rational people have seen through the rhetoric and come to realize that climate change is virtually never the cause of starvation. However, some poor kids have been scared to death by these images and the stories of climate change catastrophe they inspired – they are very real victims of climate change messaging at its worst.
Comments Off on These starving polar bears falsely blamed on climate change have scared kids to death
Posted in Advocacy, Cannibalism, Conservation Status, Sea ice habitat, Summary
Tagged cannibalism, climate change, Greta Thunburg, National Geographic, polar bear, protest, sea ice, starving, tragedy porn, video, white lie
In this short interview clip with Friends of Science director Michelle Stirling, I talk about the drowning polar bears in Al Gore’s 2007 movie that he implied would lead to the extinction of the species. Except that it didn’t…
My new book, The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened, explains why.
Comments Off on Death by drowning: Al Gore told us this was the future of polar bears but it wasn’t
Posted in Advocacy, Conservation Status, Population, Sea ice habitat, Summary
Tagged Al Gore, drowning, extinction, facts, Friends of Science, Inconvenient Truth, open water, polar bear, sea ice
In this short interview clip with Friends of Science director Michelle Stirling, I talk about Polar Bear Facts & Myths (for kids 7 and up) and EATEN, my science-based polar bear attack thriller that’s appropriate for older teens and young adults. Both are available in paperback and ebook formats, while the paperback version of Polar Bear Facts & Myths is also available in French, German, Dutch, and Norwegian.
Polar Bears: Outstanding Survivors of Climate Change is also suitable for teens and young adults and is fully referenced.
Comments Off on Polar bear books for kids and young adults are the perfect antidote for climate anxiety
Posted in Book review, Life History, Population, Sea ice habitat
Tagged Eaten, facts, Facts and Myths, Friends of Science, interview, outstanding survivors, polar bear, science book, sea ice, video
Polar bear researcher Andrew Derocher says it takes four years of good sea ice conditions to recruit a polar bear from birth but implies that 2019 is the first year in decades that conditions for bears have been ‘good’ in Western Hudson Bay. He thinks he can get away with saying this because he hasn’t published any of the data on body weight and body condition he’s collected on these bears over the last 25 years (apparently, whatever funding agency pays for his research does not require him to publish the data he collects).
But independent observations such as dates of ice freeze-up in fall, ice breakup in summer, dates and condition of bears recorded onshore, suggest he’s blowing smoke: at least five out of five of the last sea ice seasons for WH bears have been good. That means we should be seeing more bears in the next official population count.
Comments Off on Western Hudson Bay polar bears in great shape after five good sea ice seasons
Posted in Advocacy, Conservation Status, Polar bear attacks, Sea ice habitat
Tagged body condition, breakup, Derocher, fat bears, freeze-up, Hudson Bay, polar bear, sea ice, thriving
US Fish and Wildlife officials in 1994 explain walruses falling to their deaths from a cliff at Cape Pierce in the southern Bering Sea (a haulout for adult males during the ice-free season). Explanation? Overcrowding (too many walruses)!
Hype from the Netflix/Attenborough ‘climate change is gonna destroy the world’ fearmongers earlier this year notwithstanding – or the media this summer trying to stir up climate change fever – the US Fish and Wildlife Service determined in October 2017 that the Pacific walrus is not being harmed by climate change and is not likely to be harmed within the foreseeable future (USFWS 2017). The IUCN Red List (2015) lists the Pacific walrus as ‘data deficient‘.
Large herds onshore are a sign of population health, not climate change, and walruses have come ashore in the Chukchi Sea during the ice-free season in summer and/or fall for more than 100 years (Crockford 2014; Fischbach et al. 2016; Lowrey 1985). Those are the relevant scientific facts.
Crockford, S. J. 2014a. On the Beach: Walrus Haulouts are Nothing New. Global Warming Policy Foundation Briefing Paper 11. Pdf here. http://www.thegwpf.org/susan-crockford-on-the-beach-2/
Crockford, S. J. 2014b.The Walrus Fuss: Walrus Haulouts are Nothing New https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwaAwsS2OOY 23 Oct 2014. [15,141 views at 31 Aug 2019]
Fischbach, A.S., Kochnev, A.A., Garlich-Miller, J.L., and Jay, C.V. 2016. Pacific walrus coastal haulout database, 1852–2016—Background report: U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 2016–1108. http://dx.doi.org/10.3133/ofr20161108. The online database is found here.
Lowry, L. 1985. “Pacific Walrus – Boom or Bust?” Alaska Fish & Game Magazine July/August: 2-5. pdf here.
MacCracken, J.G., Beatty, W.S., Garlich-Miller, J.L., Kissling, M.L and Snyder, J.A. 2017. Final Species Status Assessment for the Pacific Walrus (Odobenus rosmarus divergens), May 2017 (Version 1.0). US Fish & Wildlife Service, Anchorage, AK. Pdf here (8.6 mb).
USFWS 2017. “Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants; 12-Month Findings on Petitions to List 25 Species as Endangered or Threatened Species” [pdf] 4 October
Comments Off on Walruses climbing cliffs and falling off them are natural events: 1994 video from Alaska
Posted in Advocacy, Sea ice habitat, Summary, walrus
Tagged Alaska, cliffs, climate change, facts, falling, global warming, haulout, Netflix, video, walrus
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