Here’s a trip down memory lane for Arctic sea ice at the end of July, which as far as I can see provides no evidence that a very low sea ice disaster is in the cards for polar bears this year.

Here’s a trip down memory lane for Arctic sea ice at the end of July, which as far as I can see provides no evidence that a very low sea ice disaster is in the cards for polar bears this year.
Comments Off on Polar bear habitat update for end July 2021 compared to previous years
Posted in Life History, Sea ice habitat
Tagged Arctic, breakup, catastrophe, Hudson Bay, ice-free, polar bear, sea ice, tracking
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.
Comments Off on Alaska waters with no sea ice are not a problem for Pacific walrus or polar bears
Posted in Advocacy, Sea ice habitat, walrus
Tagged Alaska, Chuckchi Sea, climate change, decline, facts, ice loss, ice-free, Point Lay, polar bear, sea ice, walrus
Polar bear specialists Andrew Derocher and Steven Amstrup recently spent inordinate energy trying to refute the opinion piece I’d written for the Financial Post in celebration of International Polar Bear Day last month, ignoring my fully referenced State of the Polar Bear Report for 2017 that was released the same day (Crockford 2018) and the scientific manuscript I’d posted last year at PeerJ Preprints (Crockford 2017).
Their responses use misdirection and strawman arguments to make points. Such an approach would not work with the scientific community in a public review of my paper at PeerJ, but it’s perfect spin for the self-proclaimed “fact-checking” organization called Climate Feedback. The result is a wildly ineffective rebuttal of my scientific conclusion that Amstrup’s 2007 polar bear survival model has failed miserably.
This is Part 2 of my expose, see Part 1 here.
Continue reading
Comments Off on Amstrup & colleages can’t refute my critique of their 2007 polar bear survival model, Part 2
Posted in Conservation Status, Population, Sea ice habitat, Summary
Tagged Amstrup, bearded seal, Beaufort, Chukchi Sea, Climate Feedback, damage control, Derocher, ESA, fact checker, failed predictions, ice-free, observations, polar bear, predictions, ringed seal, sea ice, spin, spring, Stirling, summer, survival, thick ice, threatened
Now that all bears are ashore for the season, the folks at the Polar Bear Alert program in Churchill note in their report for week 7 (21-27 August, 2017) that the bears ashore are in excellent condition (confirming reports on the first bears ashore in July):
Rather marked contrast to the pessimistic spin on conditions from the field a few months ago:
[yes, a few bears fail to make it through the winter, especially young bears; but that has always been the case — it’s not a sign of human-caused global warming catastrophe]
Last week’s problem bear report also confirmed news from the Churchill Polar Bears website a few weeks ago that showed several images of very fat bears:
See below for last year’s report for week 7 and this year’s report for week 8 (28 August-3 September). Western Hudson Bay polar bears that come ashore near Churchill, Manitoba are starting their third month on land this week, out of the five months or so they have spent ashore in recent years (about 3 weeks more than in the 1980s, no longer than they did in 2004 — conditions have not been getting worse).
Comments Off on Problem bear reports confirm Churchill polar bears are in excellent condition
Posted in Life History, Sea ice habitat
Tagged alert, Churchill, Hudson Bay, ice-free, onshore, polar bear, problem bears, sea ice, summer, western hudson bay
Churchill, Manitoba’s Polar Bear Alert Program is still reporting many fewer problems with polar bears onshore than it did last year at the same point in the ice-free season (week 5, 7-13 August):
Compare to week five last year (2016), when bears came ashore in excellent condition:
Although it’s been warmer than average recently (25.4 degrees C yesterday, expected to reach 29 degrees C today and 28 degrees C tomorrow), according to Environment Canada weather records, that’s not even close to an August record-breaker temperature for Churchill. Continue reading
Comments Off on Churchill polar bear reports still showing fewer problems than last year
Posted in History, Life History, Polar bear attacks
Tagged alert, attacks, Churchill, encounters, facts, heat wave, history, ice-free, jail, onshore, polar bear, problems, temperature
Polar bear populations in most of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago (CAA) must be booming, as they are elsewhere. That’s because the ‘experts’ were even more wrong in their predictions of future sea ice conditions than most people realize: they expected the CAA would remain choked with ice during a ‘nearly ice-free’ summer driven by human-caused global warming.
Map presented by Wang and Overland (2012: Fig 3) shows what these experts thought a ‘nearly ice-free’ summer would look like, which they expected to occur by 2030 or so.
Look at the map from Wang and Overland (2012) above, which is what they thought a ‘nearly ice-free’ summer would look like in the year 2030 or so.
Wang and Overland used the same models used by USGS biologists to predict the future survival of polar bears based on habitat loss (Amstrup et al. 2007; Atwood et al. 2016; Durner et al. 2007, 2009). Note the thick ice in the CAA — what USGS experts call the ‘Archipelago’ sea ice ecoregion (denoted by white in the map), indicating ice about 1 metre thick (2-3 feet) — expected to remain at the height of summer in 2030.
The problem is that ice in this region has been largely absent most summers since 2006, even though overall ice extent has been much more extensive than expected for a ‘nearly ice-free’ summer, as I show below.
This is not another “worse than we thought” moment (Amstrup et al. 2007) — this is sea ice models so wrong as to be useless: failed models used to inform future polar bear survival models that got the bears declared ‘threatened’ with extinction in the US in 2008 (Crockford 2017).
It also means polar bears are almost certainly doing much better than recent population counts indicate, since only one subpopulation out of the six in the CAA has recently been assessed. But since polar bear specialists have consistently underestimated the adaptability of this species and the resilience of the Arctic ecosystem to respond to changing conditions, it’s hard to take any of their hyperbole about the future of polar bears seriously. Continue reading
Comments Off on Experts’ vision of an ice-free summer is already wrong & benefitting polar bears
Posted in Conservation Status, Population, Sea ice habitat
Tagged Canadian Arctic Archipelago, Crockford, first year ice, Gulf of Boothia, ice-free, IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group, IUCN Red List, Kane Basin, Lancaster Sound, multiyear ice, Northwest Passage, PBSG, predictions, sea ice, wrong
Ringed seal biologist Steven Ferguson, in a statement to a reporter from the Winnipeg Free Press, made one of the boldest predictions I’ve ever heard:
“Hudson Bay could experience its first free winter within 5-10 years.”
You heard it here, folks. It appears Ferguson thinks Hudson Bay was never ice-free in winter even during the Eemian Interglacial, when the Bering Sea was ice-free in winter – something that has not come close happening in recent years (Polyak et al. 2010:1769).
Sounds like a bit of ill-advised grandstanding to me.
Comments Off on Hudson Bay could be ice-free in winter within 5-10 years, says seal researcher
Posted in Life History, Sea ice habitat
Tagged crystal ball, Ferguson, Hudson Bay, ice-free, population decline, population size, predictions, ringed seals, winter ice
It’s still based on the same flawed ecological premise as all previous models – it assumes that sea ice was a naturally stable habitat until human-caused global warming came along. It also uses slight-of-hand maneuvers to correlate declining summer sea ice and declining polar bear population numbers.
Just because they keep repeating the same hype doesn’t make it true.
Continue reading
Comments Off on USGS promotes another flawed polar bear model: GHG emissions still “primary threat”
Posted in Advocacy, Conservation Status, Sea ice habitat
Tagged activist, AGW, Amstrup, Arctic, Atwood, climate warming, decline, ecoregions, emissions, extinction, fallacy, flawed, global warming, greenhouse gas, ice-free, models, polar bear, polarbearscience, population, press release, science, sea ice, sea ice loss, summer, thick spring ice, threat, threatened, USGS, variation
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