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.
Posted onSeptember 1, 2019|Comments Off on Walruses climbing cliffs and falling off them are natural events: 1994 video from Alaska
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.
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. pdfhere.
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).
For this group of radical protesters, ‘the truth‘ is a narrative that serves their traffic-disrupting purposes. Since many gullible people – young and old – were horrified by the Netflix claim that hundreds of walruses in the western Arctic had hurled themselves off a cliff because of human-caused climate change, Extinction Rebellion plan to exploit this emotional connection during upcoming protests, apparently believing that what Attenborough told them was a fact. But in accepting docu-drama content without question, they are rejecting the best available science produced in 2017 by biologists who determined that Pacific walrus are not being harmed by the effects of climate change and are not threatened with extinction.
Posted onAugust 17, 2019|Comments Off on Blacklist by Nature follows defamation by BioScience: journals reject ethics of science
Along with hundreds of other people – 385 to be exact – I have been blacklisted [#181] by the science journal Nature Communications in a recently-published abysmal paper by three authors from University of California Merced, after I and a number of others were publicly defamed by a squadron of authors in a similarly-stupid paper less than two years ago in the general interest journal BioScience. This obsession that scientists-with-a-message have about silencing peers with other viewpoints (rather than constructing and communicating a winning argument themselves) is vile and utterly counter to what real science is about. Not surprisingly, they positively fawn over media stars like Al Gore and Greta Thunberg who have no science background but willingly repeat the accepted message of climate-change-doom.
Now we have two stupid papers that purport to uphold the sanctity of one particular view of climate change: the Harvey et al. “absolutely the stupidest paper I have ever seen published” (Curry 2017) – which we all truly thought could not be matched – and now the Petersen et al. “worst paper published in a reputable journal” (Curry, 2019).
Judith Curry: “Apart from the rank stupidity of this article and the irresponsibility of Nature in publishing this, this paper does substantial harm to climate science.”
Jo Nova: “Skeptics get banned, rejected, blocked and sacked from the mainstream media yet somehow Nature has a paper on Skeptics getting too much media. Believers don’t have to be an expert to control the news agenda, just a Greenpeace activist, or a teenage girl. Skeptics on the other hand, can be Nobel Prize winners, but the BBC won’t even phone them.”
UPDATE 18 Aug. 2019: Additional commentary on this new paper (new or previously overlooked in my initial story); do cruise the comments, some additional gems of analysis there:
ADDED 20 Aug 2019: See this scathing letter to the Editor of Nature Communications by President of the National Association of Scholars, Peter Wood. (15 Aug 2019). In part, he states:
“Nature Communications has published an article which forwards the technology of censorship in pursuit of political activism, but which does not even pretend to forward scientific knowledge.” Continue reading
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Posted onAugust 7, 2019|Comments Off on Alaska waters with no sea ice are not a problem for Pacific walrus or polar bears
One of two alarming headlines that caught my eye this week was the ‘news’ on Monday that the waters off Alaska were now ice-free because of climate change, courtesy a story in the online media outlet Mashable that was later picked up by The Weather Channel and the UK mainstream paper The Independent. In addition, a large number of mainstream news outlets, including the New York Times and Newsweek, have reported that walruses came ashore this year at Point Lay, Alaska two weeks earlier than any year since 2007.
No one claimed this late July onshore movement of walruses was the beginning of the end of walruses but it was still blamed on human-caused climate change because it was associated with the aforementioned ice loss in Alaska.
Neither event was truly ‘news’. Moreover, neither an ice-free Alaska in early August or walruses onshore two weeks earlier than 2017 will have any negative impact on local polar bear or walrus populations, whether due to human-caused climate change or natural variation. Well-fed polar bears everywhere are quite capable of going 4-5 months without food in the summer and a few thousand walruses at Point Lay will feed happily from this shore-based haulout for a few days to a few weeks as they have done many summers since 2007 before moving on to other Chukchi Sea beach locations – although the ‘leaving’ events never seem to get any media attention. Walruses will haul out on beaches in Alaska and Russia until the ice returns in October.
Posted onJuly 11, 2019|Comments Off on Polar bears are thriving despite global warming: this short essay explains why
This essay explains in simple terms why so many people still believe that polar bears are in peril when nothing could be further from the truth: it is an essential lesson that shatters the basis of the shameful indoctrination of young school children and undermines the baseless claims of activist protestors. It was written and translated into French for a special climate change feature issue (July) of the monthly French magazine Valeurs Actuelles (reviewed here) and reprinted by the French hunting magazine Chasses Internationales. It has also been translated into German for a dedicated climate change issue (11 July) of the Swiss weekly magazine Die Weltwoche.
I have added a couple of figures to illustrate this English version of the essay.
Posted onJune 17, 2019|Comments Off on Skinny polar bear far inland in Siberia not due to sea ice loss but a rare normal event
A thin polar bear has wandered more than 1000km south of the Kara Sea into the Siberian town of Norilsk, which has happened at least once before in the 1970s. It is reminiscent of a similar incident this past winter in Alaska and there is no reason to blame this on lack of sea ice.
From the Siberian Times earlier today (17 June 2019) comes the report that a bear that did not get enough to eat this spring (due to any number of reasons, including competition from larger, stronger bears) and went looking for easier food sources. No mention is made that this incident should be blamed on global warming.
Update 18 June 2019: Lack of any evidence that this incident was due to lack of sea ice didn’t stop Reuters from implying this was indeed the case, a theme picked up by the UKTelegraph, the BBC, and The Guardian.
Posted onJune 5, 2019|Comments Off on Today: Talking with Glenn Beck later this morning about the Netflix walrus fiasco
At 11:30 am ET, I will be talking to Glenn Beck on his radio program about the lies and misinformation that Netflix and WWF are spreading via their ‘Our Planet’ documentary sequence on Pacific walrus, aided and abetted by narrator Sir David Attenborough.
See my previous posts on this issue here and here. The video I produced with help from the Global Warming Policy Foundation last month is copied below:
I will post a link to the podcast as soon as I am able.
Comments Off on Today: Talking with Glenn Beck later this morning about the Netflix walrus fiasco
Posted onMay 17, 2019|Comments Off on Video exposé of the groundless Netflix bid to elevate walrus to climate change icon
Last month, Netflix and WWF released a collaborative nature documentary that contained an egregiously: that Pacific walrus are being forced ashore by global warming where they suffer staggering population losses. But this is a story the film producers and WWF concocted for their own purposes, not a statement supported by scientific fact.
Over the last month, pointed questions have been asked about what really happened in Siberia while the film crew was there – and what didn’t. Scientific documents support the conclusion that Pacific walrus are currently thriving, have not been harmed by recent sea ice losses, and are not expected to be harmed in the foreseeable future, see here, here, here, and here. This new video explains it all.
Netflix, Attenborough and cliff-falling walruses: The making of a false climate icon
Watch polar bear habitat reform in the Canadian Arctic: “last 10 days” Canadian Ice Service animation (works anytime) HERE.
See Quote archive for details.
polarbearscience 
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