New study that claims it can directly link GHG emissions to polar bear cub survival is poppycock

Posted on August 31, 2023 | Comments Off on New study that claims it can directly link GHG emissions to polar bear cub survival is poppycock

A global warming miracle has happened. While no scientist worldwide has ever drawn a straight line between greenhouse gas emissions and population declines in a species considered at risk due to climate change, a new paper just published in Science Magazine claims to have performed this unlikely feat for polar bears. It’s called “Unlock the Endangered Species Act to address GHG emissions.”

Note this analysis has not been peer reviewed: as a “Policy Forum” contribution, it’s considered by the journal to be a public interest commentary, not a research paper.

One might be forgiven for asking whether this work represents solid, reproducible science or simply well-timed, sciency-looking rhetoric ready-made for the litigious Center for Biological Diversity to pressure the US government to increase protections for polar bears before the 2024 US election. It is surely no coincidence that this paper made its appearance near the seasonal low for Arctic sea ice as well as during the 15-year anniversary of the ESA listing of polar bears as ‘threatened’ and the 50th anniversary of the ESA itself.

Moreover, knowing this paper was in the pipeline might explain why the 2022 government report on the most recent Western Hudson Bay polar bear decline, which I discussed yesterday, has been kept secret for so long: the results of that report are cited in this new Science paper as supporting evidence that sea ice declines are responsible for recent population declines, which Reuters said in December was clearly not the case for the period 2017-2021.

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W. Hudson Bay polar bear numbers declined 27% in 2021 but not because of missing ice: secret paper

Posted on August 30, 2023 | Comments Off on W. Hudson Bay polar bear numbers declined 27% in 2021 but not because of missing ice: secret paper

As will become apparent tomorrow, Western Hudson Bay polar bear numbers apparently declined 27% between 2017 and 2021 but not because of sea ice loss. This fact, gleaned from a secret government report leaked to the media, emerged just before Christmas last year and spread around the world. I commented on it here at the time.

It will also be apparent tomorrow why that government report is still unavailable. Thursdays are when the big two science magazines publish their papers, which means associated news stores promoting preferred narratives are embargoed until then. Stay tuned.

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“10k dead penguin chicks” more animal tragedy porn used to advance global warming agenda

Posted on August 27, 2023 | Comments Off on “10k dead penguin chicks” more animal tragedy porn used to advance global warming agenda

Like the 2017 video of the National Geographic starving polar bear, the 2022 deaths of emperor penguin deaths promoted last week is emotional blackmail. Both are examples of preposterous fear-mongering pushed by activist scientists and the media for political purposes. Don’t fall for it.

Despite the hype last week over the newly published paper by Peter Fretwell and colleagues, there is no plausible ecological rationale for proposing that that a single season’s reproductive failure in four small colonies of emperor penguin (Aptenodytes fosteri), due to La Nina conditions — phenomena unrelated to carbon dioxide emissions — are signs of a future “quasi-extinction” of the species, as proposed in the BAS video here. None of the estimated 282,150 breeding pairs of adult emperors were lost in 2022 off the Antarctic Peninsula and chicks born in several dozen other emperor colonies around the Antarctic continent survived, which means this was a tiny bump in the road rather than a catastrophe for the species.

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Activists try to reboot Pacific walrus as climate change icons just as numbers reach a new high

Posted on August 20, 2023 | Comments Off on Activists try to reboot Pacific walrus as climate change icons just as numbers reach a new high

Activists have again resorted to using documentary film to promote Pacific walrus haulout deaths as contrived “proof” of gruesome climate change impacts even as evidence emerges that walrus numbers are higher than at any other time since the late 1970s. Oops! Busted by facts yet again!

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Conservation officers misleading the public about polar bear problems in Churchill

Posted on August 16, 2023 | Comments Off on Conservation officers misleading the public about polar bear problems in Churchill

Canadian government-funded media outlet CBC ran a story this morning about problem polar bears in the town of Churchill, Manitoba, the self-described “Polar Bear Capital of the World” that contains some very misleading statements from Manitoba Conservation officers.

Breakup of sea ice on Hudson Bay was earlier this year than it has been in more than a decade (17 June) and some people are trying to hype the significance of this phenomenon to support a tenuous link to human-caused climate change, even though bears out on the ice this spring were reportedly in good condition and one of the problem bears captured on 8 August was also in good condition (a male weighing 910 lbs, photo above). Unfortunately, reports for similar early breakup years in the early 2000s have not been made public. However, I’ve been keeping track of these Polar Bear Alert Program Reports since 2015 and have read the available literature about their history: these records simply do not corroborate the statements in this CBC account.

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Climate activists are silent on polar bears because their doom-mongering blew up in their faces

Posted on August 8, 2023 | Comments Off on Climate activists are silent on polar bears because their doom-mongering blew up in their faces

A Grist article last week pandered to activist polar bear specialists over their failed climate change agenda as it tried to minimize why the climate movement doesn’t talk about polar bears anymore. Apparently, the Arctic icon has “largely fallen out of fashion” through “overexposure” resulting in polar bear images invoking “cynicism and fatigue.” But that isn’t really true, is it?

While there is an admission that the over-hyped lies about starving bears promoted by National Geographic in 2017 and 2018 were a factor, there is no mention in the article of the well-known, documented evidence of scientists’ own failed assumptions that polar bears require summer sea ice for survival have had any impact on public opinion (Amstrup et al. 2007; Crockford 2015, 2019, 2022, 2023; Lippold et al. 2019; Rode et al. 2021).

Thriving populations in the Chukchi Sea and elsewhere amid low summer ice levels have busted the myth that polar bears need ice year-round.

Andrew Derocher was also allowed to repeat, unchallenged, the ridiculous narrative he and his activist supporters have peddled before, that insists the polar bear had become a climate change icon by accident rather than design, a lie I addressed in detail last year. Some excerpts from that 2022 post are copied below.

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Repeat of 2013 high-profile Sierra Club polar bear attack, this time with Inuit victims

Posted on July 30, 2023 | Comments Off on Repeat of 2013 high-profile Sierra Club polar bear attack, this time with Inuit victims

Almost 10 years later to the day, another polar bear attack resulting in serious injury has taken place in the northern Labrador/Quebec region of Eastern Canada. Remember the Sierra Club lawyer snatched, tent and all, in the middle of the night on 24 July 2013, in an almost-fatal attack that was reported around the world, see here and here? This time virtually the same thing happened to two Inuuk campers on July 26, in the same general area, as reported last week by Nunavut News. This will undoubtedly renew concerns that Davis Strait Inuit have raised about their safety in the face of high population numbers of polar bears (Tomaselli et al. 2022).

Sea ice conditions were similar in both attacks. In 2013, the attacking bear appeared to be a fully adult male in good condition that had been watching the hiking party since the previous day but this year the predatory bear was described as a small “young adult” animal, suggesting it could have been a 3-4 year old female or perhaps a 2 year old male.

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Polar bear habitat around Svalbard Norway above average despite high temps in N. Atlantic

Posted on July 26, 2023 | Comments Off on Polar bear habitat around Svalbard Norway above average despite high temps in N. Atlantic

Sea ice extent for Svalbard was above average yesterday and has been since 17 July, despite “record-breaking” sea surface temperatures in June.

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More Barents Sea polar bear habitat at mid-July 2023 than in 2012 despite more atmospheric CO2

Posted on July 17, 2023 | Comments Off on More Barents Sea polar bear habitat at mid-July 2023 than in 2012 despite more atmospheric CO2

Despite more CO2 in the atmosphere (424 vs. 392, for June), there was more sea ice cover in the Barents Sea at mid-July this year than there was in 2012.

This region has seen about 6 times the amount of summer sea ice loss as any other region of the Arctic (Regehr et al. 2016): Barents Sea bears now have a longer ice-free season than the famous Western Hudson Bay bears that we hear so much about.

Yet contrary to predictions, which insisted that protracted poor ice conditions in summer would inevitably result in catastrophic rates of starvation and death (Amstrup et al. 2007; Crockford 2017, 2019), polar bears in the Svalbard region have so far not had any documented any harm to their health or population size. In fact, field data show bears in Svalbard are in better condition than they were in the late 1990s (Lippold et al. 2019), almost certainly due to the documented increase in primary productivity that has resulted from longer ice-free summers since 2003 (Frey et al. 2022; Crockford 2023).

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Hudson Bay sea ice loss has not accelerated since 2014: in fact, summer ice cover has improved

Posted on July 14, 2023 | Comments Off on Hudson Bay sea ice loss has not accelerated since 2014: in fact, summer ice cover has improved

This is an early breakup year for Hudson Bay but sea ice loss has not been accelerating. While some Western Hudson Bay bears have been on land for weeks, others are still out on melting remnants of sea ice, much of it invisible to satellites. This is only the third year since 2014 that the bay has had less than usual amounts of ice, which means most years since then have had normal or nearly normal ice coverage, similar to the 1980s. Hardly the ever-worsening catastrophe of sea ice loss story being spun in the media for Western Hudson Bay polar bears.

From the tracking map above, out of the 38 visible tags or collars on bears at 11 July 2023, 16 bears (42%) were on land and 22 (58%) were still out on the sea ice. That’s virtually identical to the 40/60 percent split last week when there was even more ice.

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