A broad band of sea ice is jammed up against the western shore of Hudson Bay, hanging on despite warm mid-July temperatures. Its unusual thickness suggests it won’t be gone anytime soon, which means most Western Hudson Bay polar bears will likely remain offshore for at least a few more weeks.
The dark blue in the “departure from normal” chart below shows just how unusual this phenomenon is for the northern reaches of Hudson Bay:
Comments Off on W. Hudson Bay sea ice not going away anytime soon as polar bears sit tight offshore
Posted in Life History, Sea ice habitat
Tagged behavioral plasticity, Churchill, Hudson Bay, problem bears, resilience, sea ice
Polar bear habitat for June — the last month of spring in the Arctic — is still within 2 standard deviations of the long-term average despite sea ice experts’ predictions that catastrophic declines can be expected any year now.
The Arctic sea ice cover in June 2024 retreated at a below average pace, leading to a larger total sea ice extent for the month than in recent years. NSIDC, 3 July 2024
Oddly, the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) employees who wrote up the sea ice summary for June felt it appropriate to bring up a recently-published prediction of impending doom for Southern Hudson Bay polar bears based on a sea ice prediction (Stroeve et al. 2024), which I covered here. The inclusion of this topic is a naked promotion of the Stroeve sea ice modelling paper which not only doesn’t fit the reality of this year’s sea ice conditions but their discussion doesn’t include a single piece of evidence that Southern Hudson Bay polar bears came off the ice earlier than usual.
Continue readingComments Off on Last month of Arctic spring fails to bring sea ice to its knees, even in Southern Hudson Bay
Posted in Advocacy, Life History, Sea ice habitat
Tagged behavioral plasticity, body condition, breakup, Hudson Bay, melting ice, polar bear, Southern Hudson Bay, spring
We are just into the 2024 sea ice melt season in the Arctic with no signs of any big, dramatic changes despite claims that 2023 was the warmest year on record (since 1850). There is still abundant sea ice habitat for polar bears ahead of the summer months (July-September) when Arctic ice melts back considerably.
Polar bears in Western Hudson Bay are still on the ice despite vast open water levels normally signaling “breakup” has happened: the wind-driven ice is packed tight against the western shore and the bears are still on it.
Continue readingComments Off on Arctic sea ice at the summer solstice: more polar bear habitat than 2022 after hottest year on record
Posted in Life History, Sea ice habitat
Tagged breakup, compressed ice, Derocher, hottest year, Hudson Bay, late spring, polar bear, sea ice, summer, thickness
A new collaboration by sea ice and polar bear specialists that predicts a catastrophic future for polar bears in Hudson Bay (Stroeve et al. 2024) can be dismissed as yet another bit of utterly useless fearmongering for two reasons: 1) it’s a model projection that uses widely discredited SSP5-8.5 “business as usual” climate scenarios for its predictions; and 2) it’s based on the false premise that Western and Southern Hudson Bay polar bears have already suffered harm from reduced sea ice blamed on fossil fuel-caused global warming.
The fact that recently-deceased Ian Stirling was a prominent co-author should come as no surprise: his irrational promotion of the idea that future “climate warming” could doom polar bears to near-extinction – even after recording and publishing evidence to the contrary – will go down in history as an appalling violation of scientific principles.
Adding to the dubious validity of the paper: lead author Julienne Stroeve’s 2007 paper predicting summer sea ice decline by 2050 was proven wrong by actual data by the time it was published (Stroeve et al. 2007, 2014) and a more recent update failed to foresee the recent 17-year stall in decline. And co-author Steve Ferguson, a seal biologists, rashly stated in 2016 that Hudson Bay could be ice-free in winter as early as 2021 [which, needless to say, never came close to fruition].
I’d say if Southern Hudson Bay polar bears might be extirpated as soon as 2030, as the paper’s co-author Alex Crawford suggests, the global temperature and ice melt had better get a move on: a survey showed the SH population was thriving in 2021 and Hudson Bay sea ice hasn’t hit any kind of death spiral in the three years since.
Continue readingComments Off on New Hudson Bay sea ice modelling paper is more utterly useless fearmongering about polar bears
Posted in Advocacy
Tagged global temperature, global warming, Hudson Bay, ice thickness, model, Paris Agreement, polar bear, prediction, sea ice, snow depth, Stirling, York
Sea ice experts at the US National Snow and Ice Data Center just confirmed my suspicion that the huge area of open water in eastern Hudson Bay during May this year was caused by winds, not ice melt. In other words, it’s a rare occurrence but not a sign of extra-early sea ice melt caused by global warming.
Money quote: “Unusual strong and persistent winds from the east caused the low extent.”
Continue readingComments Off on Huge area of open water on Hudson Bay created by wind, not ice melt, NSIDC experts confirm
Posted in Sea ice habitat
Tagged Hudson Bay, late spring, May, polar bear, sea ice
Over the last 10 years, Hudson Bay polar bears have morphed from being the “most at risk” across the Arctic to the “least at risk.” Who would have thought?
That’s probably because the experts now have to admit that polar bear numbers have not declined since 2004 and bears have been in good body condition since at least 2016. Southern Hudson Bay bears have apparently increased in number since 2016. How ironic is it that the photo above, taken in Hudson Bay — the only Arctic region where trees grow — was used to illustrate a recent Mother Jones article promoting a new prediction of future Arctic summer sea ice loss that’s said to pose a threat to polar bear survival.
Continue readingComments Off on Hudson Bay polar bears now considered most likely to survive future sea ice loss
Posted in Population, science, Sea ice habitat, Summary
Tagged Hudson Bay, polar bear, prediction, sea ice
Is it a coincidence that a paper reporting the results of a no-news study on polar bears, but which predicts future starvation due to climate change, was published two weeks to the day ahead of a climate change marketing event made up by the activist organization Polar Bears International? I doubt it.
And do I think the high-profile journal Nature Communications would not only agree to publish such a useless bit of propaganda but also rig the timing to advance the climate change emergency narrative? Silly question. And the media worldwide are of course lapping it up, happy for an excuse to promote the perils of climate change, see here, here, and here using images of fat polar bears. Image above is from the BBC headline, 13 February 2024.
They believe this strategy is effective because they think the public is stupid, but they are deluding themselves. Most people are now laughing at their obvious acts of desperation.
Continue readingComments Off on When polar bears die, they die of starvation: new Nature paper is propaganda, not news
Posted in Advocacy, Conservation Status, Sea ice habitat
Tagged breakup, climate change, freeze-up, global warming, Hudson Bay, sea ice, terrestrial foods
As this year draws to a close, it is worth noting that over the last 12 months — and contrary to predictions and headlines, including claims about “the warmest year ever” — polar bears have not been reported dying, starving, or eating each other in large numbers, or relentlessly attacking people. On top of that, summer sea ice coverage in the Arctic has stalled for the last 17 years, not melted out in a death spiral of rotten ice.
Except for the lying and obfuscation that most of us have come to expect, I’ve mostly been left to reiterate that polar bears are not “canaries in the coal mine” indicators of climate change and to point out that Arctic sea ice extent and polar bear survival are not inextricably tied. For example, in some specific areas of interest, like Western Hudson Bay, there has not been a consistent decline in sea ice over the last few decades and bears are not attacking people at increased rates because they are desperately hungry. In other areas, like the Svalbard area of the western Barents Sea, sea ice has declined dramatically in recent years yet polar bears have not been attacking people more than usual.
Contradictions and failed predictions abound.
All in all, a rather boring year for the anticipated implosion of polar bear health and survival, despite my constant tracking of publicly-available information. That said, I would like to take this opportunity to thank you all again for your continued support, and especially those who have donated hard-earned cash over the last few months: your support makes it possible for me to continue my work keeping polar bear science honest. Together, we have made a difference and I know it’s worth the fight. Because if we let evidence-based science die without challenge, we lose our ability to make sense of the world.
All the best for 2024 to you all.
Continue readingComments Off on Polar bears and sea ice fail to implode in 2023 as predicted, with special thanks for your support
Posted in Advocacy, Polar bear attacks, Sea ice habitat, Summary
Tagged attacks, breakup, conflicts, contradictions, ecology, extent, freeze-up, Hudson Bay, predictions, problem bears, productivity, sea ice, Svalbard
Today the Town of Churchill finally published the final problem bear reports of the season, which presents an opportunity to do a quick comparison to recent years.
This season lasted 24 weeks, the longest I can remember but apparently only the 5th longest on record. There were a total of 265 incidents by the end of November, more than 100 less than the most recent late-freeze-up year of 2016, which didn’t end until the first week of December (after bears had spent 22 weeks onshore). However, two recent years when freeze-up didn’t come until the end of November (2017 and 2020) had far fewer incidents (more than 100 less each compared to this year).
Continue readingComments Off on Churchill end-of-season problem polar bear reports finally published
Posted in Life History, Polar bear attacks, Sea ice habitat
Tagged bear attacks, Churchill, freeze-up, Hudson Bay, polar bear, problem bears, sea ice, western hudson bay
For months, the media has been bleating about the poor polar bears of Churchill suffering from lack of sea ice blamed on human-caused climate change during the so-called ‘hottest year’ on record: in April, July, August, November, and December.
However, while breakup of sea ice on Hudson Bay was indeed early this year and freeze-up came later than usual, Western Hudson polar bears apparently spent only the fifth-longest time on land since 1979, according to a polar bear specialist. How is that even possible, given that sea ice conditions should be getting worse and worse as CO2 levels increase and average global temperatures rise? As I’ve pointed out before, it is apparent that Arctic sea ice is not closely coupled to CO2 levels (as the ‘experts’ claim), which makes me wonder if there is any ecologically-relevant correlation between CO2 and sea ice at all.
Money quote from Geoff York, from Polar Bears International: “As of Nov. 28 this year, the bears in western Hudson Bay had spent 164 days on shore, he said. That’s tied for the fifth-longest amount of time the bears have spent off the ice since 1979.” CBC, 9 December 2023 [my bold]
Continue readingComments Off on Despite hand-wringing about Churchill polar bears this year, 2023 wasn’t their worst summer
Posted in Advocacy, Life History, Sea ice habitat
Tagged breakup, Churchill, freeze-up, hottest year, Hudson Bay, polar bear, western hudson bay
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