Tag Archives: advocacy

Polar bears became global warming icons because biologists promoted a narrative of doom since 1999: it didn’t happen ‘by accident’

Posted on September 1, 2022 | Comments Off on Polar bears became global warming icons because biologists promoted a narrative of doom since 1999: it didn’t happen ‘by accident’

“The polar bear became an ‘accidental icon’ of climate change“, claims a recent CBC Radio interview with ardent global warming promoter and polar bear catastrophist Andrew Derocher. Derocher’s insistence that the polar bear became a climate change icon “by accident” is historical revisionism. While such a statement may be attractive now that polar bears are not dying in droves as he and his colleagues predicted in 2007, that doesn’t make it true.

In the summer of 1999, polar bear biologist Ian Stirling helped produce a short doomsday film spectacular for the biggest news outlet in Canada at the time, in which he hyped his ‘climate warming’ fears about Hudson Bay polar bears, yet we are expected to believe Derocher that on September 4, 2000, Time Magazine put polar bears on its “Arctic Meltdown” cover because they ‘just happened’ to hear about an academic paper Stirling had written the year before.

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Posted in Advocacy, Conservation Status, Population, Sea ice habitat

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Wandering polar bears are the new starving bears falsely blamed on climate change: Déjà vu

Posted on May 12, 2022 | Comments Off on Wandering polar bears are the new starving bears falsely blamed on climate change: Déjà vu

I said last year that wandering polar bears appeared to be the new ‘starving’ polar bears that were formerly the go-to victims falsely blamed on lack of ice due to climate change and here we are again. Polar bear specialists and their cheer leaders so seldom disappoint.

Although not one of the Canadian news outlets that reported on the fat polar bear that was shot after unexpectedly showing up on the Gaspé peninsula two weeks ago blamed this incident on global warming, a few days later The Guardian in the UK stepped up.

Of course it did. My own report of the incident is here, from 1 May 2022, in case you missed it (with sea ice charts, as always).

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Posted in Advocacy, Polar bear attacks, Sea ice habitat

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Dispelling the doomsday propaganda in DisneyNature’s new polar bear ‘documentary’

Posted on April 20, 2022 | Comments Off on Dispelling the doomsday propaganda in DisneyNature’s new polar bear ‘documentary’

In a move that echoes the collaboration of activist organization World Wildlife Fund (WWF) with Netflix that brought us Sir David Attenborough’s walrus deception in ‘Our Planet’ that I chronicled in my latest book, ‘Fallen Icon’, streaming service DisneyNature has joined with activist organization Polar Bears International (PBI) to create a polar bear ‘documentary’ (called ‘Polar Bear’) that we can tell is propaganda because they’ve chosen to release the “cute and worrying” film on Earth Day (Friday 22 April 2022). In fact, the two films have a producer in common: Alastair Fothergill.

In the case of ‘Our Planet’, WWF bankrolled the film series for Netflix to ensure the content they desired; in ‘Polar Bear’, the tables are turned: DisneyNature is paying PBI for their assistance getting the polar bear film shots and providing their biased content, via money they are calling a research grant. I think you know by now what to expect. However, here are the facts about polar bear conditions in Svalbard, where the film was shot, and some good news from Western Hudson Bay this year, courtesy of Mike Reimer and his team at Churchill Wild. In short, there is still no climate emergency for polar bears: the hype is based on old models that failed spectacularly and new ones which depend on old data and totally improbable climate scenarios (Crockford 2017, 2019; Hausfather and Peters 2020; Molnar et al. 2020).

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Posted in Advocacy, Population, Sea ice habitat

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

Posted on February 16, 2022 | Comments Off on 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.

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Posted in Advocacy, science, Sea ice habitat

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

Posted on February 10, 2022 | Comments Off on 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:

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

Posted on February 1, 2022 | Comments Off on 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):

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Posted in Advocacy, Conservation Status, Population, Sea ice habitat, Summary

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A literary review of my polar bear attack thriller, with all the condescending attitude you’d expect

Posted on July 27, 2021 | Comments Off on A literary review of my polar bear attack thriller, with all the condescending attitude you’d expect

For your amusement, I present a book review of Eaten from an Austrian academic specializing in contemporary literature by the name of Michael Fuchs. I came across his book chapter last week, buried deep within Google offerings, while looking for something else. I laughed all the way through it.

Here is the abstract:

“This chapter draws on Margaret Atwood’s vision of Canada as a Gothic space, examining how contemporary texts continue to invoke imagery of human and animal as antagonists competing for the same space. Fuchs analyzes a corpus of three “bear horror” fictions, the horror film Backcountry (2014) and two novels, The Bear (2014) by Claire Cameron and Susan J. Crockford’s near-future polar bear-themed Eaten (2015). It argues that animal predation on humans provides a powerful symbolic vehicle for bridging the human–animal divide, as it overrides the theory of human exceptionalism, offering a critical view of the entanglement of humans and nonhumans in the Anthropocene.”

A friend that I shared the essay with commented:

“My favourite sentence (new word of the day, class, please use “diegetic” in a sentence):

“These constant slippages between ontological levels puzzle the reader in ways similar to how Anna is confused by the goings-on in the diegetic reality.” [pg. 263]

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Posted in Advocacy, Book review, Polar bear attacks, Sea ice habitat

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Polar bear survival contradictions: sea ice decline vs. documented harm

Posted on July 15, 2020 | Comments Off on Polar bear survival contradictions: sea ice decline vs. documented harm

Here I take a detailed look at sea ice and polar bear population health information available for Western Hudson Bay and the Southern Beaufort compared to the Barents and Chukchi Seas. Data from the first two regions – but especially Western Hudson Bay – are used repeatedly to proclaim that a pronounced decline in summer sea ice since 1979 has caused harm to the health of global polar bear populations even though data from the second two regions strongly contradict such a conclusion, as I’ve pointed out in my fully referenced book, The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened.

Polar bear_standing_web_shutterstock_1630907296

These contradictions mean that studies from Western Hudson Bay and the Southern Beaufort should not be used to extrapolate to the rest of the Arctic with regard to how polar bears are responding to reduced summer sea ice. The plea to ‘Save Our Sea Ice‘ for the sake of polar bear survival is a climate change marketing slogan, not a scientific assessment.

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People go to Churchill to see polar bears in the wild and PBI controls the info they get

Posted on September 18, 2019 | Comments Off on People go to Churchill to see polar bears in the wild and PBI controls the info they get

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.

tundra buggy and bear_Frontiers North_wikipedia

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.

Population size estimate graph chapter 10

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.

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Media and USGS biologist sensationalize recent report of a polar bear encounter in Alaska

Posted on August 12, 2019 | Comments Off on Media and USGS biologist sensationalize recent report of a polar bear encounter in Alaska

It’s been a slow summer for polar bear news to hype, so we shouldn’t be surprised that a local report that polar bears this summer have descended on the town of Kaktovik, Alaska one week earlier than 2017 has morphed into an international story that makes a 2016 research report sound like this year’s news, with headlines trumpeting: “polar bear encounters are increasing” due to a longer open water period. Nevertheless, it was reported just two weeks ago that Alaska has not had a polar bear attack since 1993.

polar_bear-US FWS_young bear Alaska maybe Kaktovik no date

This is a particularly blatant example of how the media skew polar bear ‘news’ for public consumption, aided by scientists with a particular message to sell. Not surprisingly, a number of essential facts have been left out of this sensationized account, in part because the polar bear specialist the media consulted left those facts out of his statement.  This is the sort of bias displayed by polar bear specialists that I discuss in my new book, The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened.

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