Tag Archives: climate change

Attenborough twisted the truth about dying walrus: why believe him on climate change?

Posted on February 23, 2021 | Comments Off on Attenborough twisted the truth about dying walrus: why believe him on climate change?

Sir David Attenborough hid the truth about hundreds of walrus falling off Siberian cliffs to their deaths a few years ago – he insisted this was due to climate change, but we now know he was well aware the tusked beasts fell because they were being stalked by predatory polar bears. Since he was willing to tell outright falsehoods about dying walrus to powerful elites at the 2019 World Economic Forum, I expect he’d say anything to advance his agenda with members of the UN Security Council.

Headline quotes from Attenborough’s address to the UN Security Council today:

“Climate change a threat to global security”

Climate change could, within a lifetime, destroy “entire cities and societies“

“Climate change is biggest threat modern humans have ever faced”

In other words, lots of emotional hyperbole from a showman who wants to leave a legacy. This is not the dispassionate science we require to make sensible decisions about the future. Attenborough spouted contrived nonsense about walrus and now spouts contrived nonsense about climate change.

UPDATE 25 February 2021: UN Security Council rejects the notion that climate change is a global security issue (Politico, 24 Feb 2021), with Russia and India objecting strenuously. H/T GWPF.

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Posted in Advocacy, Sea ice habitat, walrus

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Fact: polar bears are thriving despite sea ice loss according to the scientific literature

Posted on February 19, 2021 | Comments Off on Fact: polar bears are thriving despite sea ice loss according to the scientific literature

Is Facebook now an expert on polar bear conservation status? Apparently they have decreed themselves the last word for online content. There is a plan afoot to label anything that says polar bears are not being harmed by recent sea ice declines as ‘disinformation’ – but on whose authority? Thanks to Josh for the cartoon below.

A new section of the Climate Science Information Center, launching alongside the labelling trial, debunks common myths such as the false claim that polar bear populations are not suffering due to global heating, or the widespread belief that excess carbon emissions help plant life. Facebook is working with climate communication experts from around the world, including at the University of Cambridge, to produce the content.

Ah, they’re consulting ‘climate communication experts‘! Those experts surely must be up on all the latest papers and not trusting the word of obviously biased conservations organizations like the WWF or PBI whose real reason for existence is the generation of as much money in donations as possible?

The peer reviewed literature supports the claim that polar bears are currently thriving despite recent ice declines – especially in the Chukchi and Barents Seas – regardless of what computer model predictions say about what might happen in the future. This is a fact, not a ‘myth’. See my paper from 2017 and my 2019 book for most of the citations (Crockford 2017, 2019) and others in the reference list below. Check them out yourself before you believe Facebook. Ask me for any paper you’d like to see via the ‘contact me’ form and I’ll send it along. Also, look for my State of the Polar Bear Report 2020 next week.

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

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Top six polar bear stories of 2020

Posted on December 31, 2020 | Comments Off on Top six polar bear stories of 2020

Here are the six most important polar bear stories I wrote about in 2020 that are worth reading if you missed them.

 

These posts cover new evidence that polar bears are thriving (including more populations stable or increasing) despite recent declines in summer sea ice blamed on climate change, an explanation of why the simplistic ‘less ice, fewer bears’ is false and a short post that shows a much-publicized new model predicting future extinction of polar bears is scientifically implausible. Honourable mention goes to a story refuting the claim that Alaskan polar bear cubs are at risk from oil exploration in coastal Wildlife Refuge.

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

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Polar bear research on hold in Western Hudson Bay due to COVID-19 restrictions

Posted on October 23, 2020 | Comments Off on Polar bear research on hold in Western Hudson Bay due to COVID-19 restrictions

After spring polar bear research was cancelled in Western Hudson Bay (and pretty much everywhere else) this year because of Covid 19 concerns, it now transpires that fall research is out as well. Travel restrictions implemented by government departments and university administrations (not the health department) apparently mean fall programs to assess the health and status of polar bears in Western Hudson Bay have been put on hold.

Triplet litter of polar bear cubs spotted in Wakusp National Park, Western Hudson Bay. 23 October 2020. Courtesy Explore.org.

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Posted in Advocacy, Population, science, Sea ice habitat

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Is the demise of polar bears being exaggerated to keep extinction panic alive?

Posted on July 25, 2020 | Comments Off on Is the demise of polar bears being exaggerated to keep extinction panic alive?

An excellent summary of recent points I’ve made in my latest book and on this blog about the recent push to keep polar bear extinction panic alive with a new model of impending doom was published two days ago in the Spectator UK by columnist Ross Clark (23 July 2020, in Coffee House).

Svalbard polar bear fall 2015_Aars

Excerpt below:

“Wouldn’t it be nice if we could debate climate change for five minutes without hearing about polar bears or being subjected to footage of them perched precariously on a melting ice floe? But that is a little too much to expect. Polar bears have become the pin-ups of climate change, the poor creatures who are supposed to jolt us out of thinking about abstract concepts and make us weep that our own selfishness is condemning these magnificent animals to a painful and hungry end.”

Read the whole thing here.

PS. I noticed Clark refers to me as an anthropologist. I have requested a correction because I am a zoologist.

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Posted in academic freedom, Advocacy, Book promotion, Conservation Status, Population, Summary

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New model of predicted polar bear extinction is not scientifically plausible

Posted on July 20, 2020 | Comments Off on New model of predicted polar bear extinction is not scientifically plausible

Apparently, a prediction that polar bears could be nearly extinct by 2100 (which was first suggested back in 2007) is news today because there is a new model. As for all previous models, this prediction of future polar bear devastation depends on using the so-called ‘business as usual’ RCP8.5 climate scenario, which has been roundly criticized in recent years as totally implausible, which even the BBC has mentioned. This new model, published today as a pay-walled paper in Nature Climate Change, also did something I warned against in my last post: it uses polar bear data collected up to 2009 only from Western Hudson Bay – which is an outlier in many respects – to predict the response of bears worldwide. The lead author, Peter Molnar, is a former student of vocal polar bear catastrophist Andrew Derocher – who himself learned his trade from the king of polar bear calamity forecasts, Ian Stirling. Steven Amstrup, another co-author of this paper, provided the ‘expert opinion’ for the failed USGS polar bear extinction model featured in my book, The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened.

James Bay female and cub_Ontaro Govt

Well, these authors and their supporters got the headlines they crave, including coverage by outlets like the BBC and New York Times (see below) but I have to say that the combination of using out-of-date Western Hudson Bay information on when polar bears come ashore in summer and leave for the ice in fall (only to 2009) to make vague projections (‘possible’, ‘likely’, ‘very likely’) about all other subpopulations in addition to depending on the most extreme and now discredited RCP8.5 climate scenario (Hausfather and Peters 2020) for this newest polar bear survival model is all that’s needed to dismiss it as exaggerated-fear-mongering-by-proxy. Why would anyone believe that the output of this new model describes a plausible future for polar bears?

New York Times headline _climate change pushing pbs to extinction_20 July 2020
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New report: Change coming to the Canadian Arctic — but it’s no looming catastrophe

Posted on April 29, 2020 | Comments Off on New report: Change coming to the Canadian Arctic — but it’s no looming catastrophe

A review of a newly-released (22 April 2020, on Earth Day) report commissioned by Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans on the state of the Arctic seas published today in the National Post is a must read. It highlights the report’s emphasis that while the changes going on in our northern seas are indeed marked, they do not necessarily spell doom.

2019 DFO Arctic Report_Polar Bears from Summary document sent to media

Oddly, polar bears are primarily represented in the report by an overview account of the special case of Western Hudson Bay – an outlier among Canadian subpopulations – that puts special emphasis on the claimed decline in body condition blamed on recent sea ice changes that is not supported by any recent data (Crockford 2020).

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Claims polar bear cannibalism on the rise in Russian Arctic not supported by facts

Posted on February 26, 2020 | Comments Off on Claims polar bear cannibalism on the rise in Russian Arctic not supported by facts

The Guardian today expanded on a story published in the Moscow Times that quotes a Russian scientist claiming cannibalism among polar bears is on the rise in the Russian Arctic. However, the scientist offered no numbers to support this claim and there is no suggestion he had done a study on this phenomenon.

Cannibalism video 2015 Nat Geo_off Baffin Island

As I’ve said before, incidents of cannibalism cannot be said to be increasing because there is no scientific baseline for which recent occurrences can be compared. Scattered anecdotal reports of any behaviour cannot be touted as evidence for a trend even though they may be of interest and worth recording.

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Polar Bear Scare Unmasked: The Saga of a Toppled Global Warming Icon [another look]

Posted on February 20, 2020 | Comments Off on Polar Bear Scare Unmasked: The Saga of a Toppled Global Warming Icon [another look]

For almost twenty years, , we’ve endured the shrill media headlines, the hyperbole from conservation organizations, and the simplistic platitudes from scientists as summer sea ice declined dramatically while polar bear numbers rose. This video of mine from two years ago, which deconstructs the scare, is worth another look as International Polar Bear Day approaches with its associated ‘save the polar bear’ rhetoric.

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European outrage over my loss of adjunct status and video of my Dutch school lecture

Posted on December 17, 2019 | Comments Off on European outrage over my loss of adjunct status and video of my Dutch school lecture

I’ve been home for just over 3 weeks now but even with all the demands on my time from family, friends, colleagues, and the media that I had to put off while I was away, I didn’t want to miss setting down a few final thoughts about my speaking tour across Europe. See previous posts here and here.

Polar bear beer ISBJORN_Jan Erik OSLO 23 Oct 2019

Polar bear beer had a prominent place at the post-conference dinner in Oslo.

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