Tag Archives: fear-mongering

Polar bear habitat update and attempts to spoil the good news for kids

The trolls are out in force at Amazon, posting negative reviews of my new book, Polar Bear Facts & Myths – they just hate it when credible scientists won’t promote a message of doom. It seems folks of this ilk truly want children to have nightmares about drowning, starving polar bears; they encourage kids to frantically turn out lights in a vain attempt to “Save The Sea Ice” while unbeknownst to them, the polar bears and seals prosper.

I expect those same fear-mongers will really hate my next book, due to be released early next week, because it presents the evidence in a way all readers will understand with the references to back it up. Polar bears and ringed seals are thriving despite recent losses of summer sea ice and there is seemingly a huge body of activists and scientists who don’t want people to know that simple fact.

Coming soon    Polar Bears: Outstanding Survivors of Climate Change

Back to polar bear habitat news, here is the sea ice map for 30 December 2016: Hudson Bay iced-over and lots of ice moving down southern Davis Strait:

Sea ice extent Canada 2016 Dec30_CIS.gif

Compare to last year at this time, when polar bears did not die off in droves anywhere in Canada (or we would have heard about it) – remember that 2/3 of the word’s polar bears live in Canada:

canadian-arctic-dec-30-2015_cis

USGS polar bear researchers publish their rebuttal to 2015 IUCN Red List assessment

Surprise! US Geological Survey polar bear specialists have just published another opinion-based model that concludes – yet again – that there is no hope for polar bears of the future unless the world drastically reduces fossil fuel use. This appears to be the Amstrup-led rebuttal to the hated 2015 IUCN Red List polar bear assessment I have been expecting, written in tandem with the Red List document by two of the same co-authors (Steve Amstrup and Todd Atwood).

Kaktovik female w cub_21 September 2015 USDA_med

Really, no surprises here – just more of the same overwrought fear-mongering about polar bears that we’ve been hearing from USGS since 2007. I saw Atwood and Amstrup last week in a British-made TV film that expressed the same sentiments (The Great Polar Bear Feast – it oddly featured dozens of fat/very fat Kaktovik polar bears while mostly USGS ‘experts’ talked about impending starvation). On camera, Atwood and Amstrup were almost indistinguishable in their statements of doom, and even though the film aired 6 months ago in the UK, it has so far not garnered the angst it seems to have intended.

Some folks may be even more convinced than ever by this new PR strategy [TV movie plus a published paper] that the polar bears are all going to die unless we (not they) change our wicked ways and stop using fossil fuels, but chances are that many more will detect the desperation in their escalated pitch and continue to refuse to buy what they are so frantically trying to sell.

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Center for Biological Diversity provides a public disservice on polar bear status

Media agency Aljazeera gave free advertizing the other day (June 16, 2014, “New TV ads focus on plight of polar bears in warming world, by Renee Lewis) to the Center for Biological Diversity’s TV fear-mongering campaign about polar bears.

USFWS photo

USFWS photo

With unmitigated gall, it’s being billed as a “public service announcement.”
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