global population | polarbearscience

Great Barrier Reef specialist Peter Ridd has just published an excellent video about my work and the way I’ve been treated by the scientific community just for pointing out that polar bear populations have failed to respond as predicted to the recent decline in Arctic sea ice.

Dr. Ridd has been treated equally abominably, as he explains here.

Here’s the video: Polar bears: They are going extinct!? 27 April 2024 [length 6:57]

The report Peter refers to in the video is this one, which was published in February 2024:

Crockford, S.J. 2024. State of the Polar Bear 2023. Briefing Paper 67. Global Warming Policy Foundation, London. Download pdf here.

In other words, the polar bear catastrophe we were promised never happened. In case you missed it, I wrote a book about that. Polar bears across the Arctic are thriving: not just because their numbers have increased overall but because the field data collected from bears in regions that have had the most dramatic declines in summer sea ice, including the Barents Sea and the Chukchi Sea, show the bears are healthy and reproducing well.

How many polar bears are there in the world? This was the primary question the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) had for the newly-formed Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG) back in 1968. Assessing the species global population size was part of the group’s mandate ahead of the 1973 international treaty to protect polar bears from wanton overhunting. For decades, this was an important objective for the scientists that made up the group.

However, about 15 years ago that goal disappeared. I contend it was abandoned because it had become incompatible with the PBSG claim that polar bears are ‘Vulnerable’ to extinction due to human-caused global warming. The group now insists that global population estimates cannot be used to determine if numbers have gone up or down: a Catch-22 that prevents public and scientific scrutiny. This is why they push back so hard when anyone suggests that global polar bear numbers have increased.