Another pronouncement from conservation activists at Polar Bears International taken without a single check of facts makes the BBC look ineffective and gullible.
The photo above of a ‘green dot’ bear was taken 10 November 2022 by a Churchill resident. Bears released from the ‘polar bear jail’ when there is enough sea ice for them to resume hunting are marked with a green dot.
Continue readingComments Off on No evidence for BBC claim that Churchill is simply getting too warm for polar bears
Posted in Advocacy, Uncategorized
Tagged activist, Amstrup, Churchil, models, PBI, polar bear, Polar Bears International, sea ice, western hudson bay
Western Hudson Bay polar bears near Churchill will be able to leave shore within days, at most one week later than in the 1980s, although you wouldn’t know that from the climate change activists at Polar Bears International who have spent the last week promoting some egregiously false and misleading statements. PBI controls the narrative surrounding Western Hudson Bay bears through their partnership with the biggest polar bear tourist outfits in Churchill and online.
Yesterday, it was “See how the climate crisis is changing their world”.
Developing no slower than it did in 2007 (16 years of no change), Arctic sea ice is providing polar bears in southern regions with their second-most critical feeding opportunities while in areas like Wrangel Island and Franz Josef Land, they now have easy access to and from important summer refuge/maternity denning islands. And contrary to predictions of increased ‘conflict’ between polar bears and people around Churchill, there have been fewer problem bear reports there in recent years, this year included. In other words, there is no ‘climate crisis’ for polar bears, even in Western Hudson Bay, and recent models of a dire future for polar bears are based on totally implausible worst-case climate scenarios. Sea ice loss since 1979 has been so gradual that polar bears have been able to adapt, either through natural selection or changes in behaviour.
UPDATE 12 November 2022. One of the independents on the ground near Churchill had this to say about the bears and freeze-up conditions this year:
“Bears started leaving on November 10; conservation emptied the jail on the 10th as well.”
[the 10th was the day this post was originally published; ‘the jail’ is the Churchill Polar Bear Alert Program’s ‘holding facility’, see report below]. This information suggests the average date for bears leaving shore will likely turn out to be 12-14 November, again earlier than the average for the 1980s (16 Nov +/- 5 days). There may still be a few bears on the shore of Wapusk National Park that seem to be in no hurry to leave, but a few stragglers doesn’t mean there isn’t ice available for hunting.
Continue readingComments Off on Polar bear habitat update: ice forming along Hudson Bay, Wrangel & Franz Josef Islands surrounded
Posted in Advocacy, Life History, Sea ice habitat
Tagged activists, Arctic, Churchill, climate change, disinformation, facts, global warming, Hudson Bay, polar bear, Polar Bears International, problem bears, sea ice
Should only be a few weeks more until the ice forms along the western shore of Hudson Bay, it’s already been snowing. But for the tourist outfitters around Churchill, this is their time to profit from those willing and able to spend big money to see polar bears up close.
Those tourists are captive audiences for the global warming propaganda provided by activist organization Polar Bears International: it’s virtually impossible for anyone to escape the climate change doom-mongering in Churchill and that’s a real pity.
Continue readingComments Off on Western Hudson Bay polar bears waiting for the sea ice to freeze as tourists flock to watch
Posted in Life History, Sea ice habitat
Tagged Churchill, climate change, freeze-up, Hudson Bay, polar bear, Polar Bears International, sea ice, Wapusk National Park
Barents Sea polar bears had another good year in 2022 despite having lost the most sea ice of any subpopulation but the media and activists can’t help themselves insisting a dismal future is ahead.
Oddly, Norwegian polar bear researcher Jon Aars recently said the quiet part out loud: that he expects Barents Sea polar bear numbers to keep rising, which is rather at odds with the standard narrative:
“What we think is that in the future, if you get less and less sea ice and more and more bears, at some stage they will start struggling and you get fewer bears,” Dr. Jon Aars, a research biologist at Norwegian Polar Institute, told CTV News. [CTV News, 8 May 2022]
This despite the fact that recent research results showed the bears have been doing fine despite declining ice and a study on females up to 2017 compared to 1997-2005 showed the bears were in significantly better condition in recent years:
“Unexpectedly, body condition of female polar bears from the Barents Sea has increased after 2005, although sea ice has retreated by ∼50% since the late 1990s in the area, and the length of the ice-free season has increased by over 20 weeks between 1979 and 2013. These changes are also accompanied by winter sea ice retreat that is especially pronounced in the Barents Sea compared to other Arctic areas. Despite the declining sea ice in the Barents Sea, polar bears are likely not lacking food as long as sea ice is present during their peak feeding period. Polar bears feed extensively from April to June when ringed seals have pups and are particularly vulnerable to predation, whereas the predation rate during the rest of the year is likely low.” [Lippold et al. 2019:988]
This is has been upheld this year as well, with Aars saying in the video below (6 May 2022) that bears were found to be in excellent condition this spring. In contrast, the media framed this good news within the false ‘polar bear numbers are declining’ narrative, urged on, no doubt, by doom-monger Steve Amstrup.
Amstrup is the paid spokesman for activist organization Polar Bears International, who is identified in this ‘news’ report only as a ‘scientist’, as if he were unbiased, banging on about bears in Western Hudson Bay, where sea ice decline has been a fraction of what the Barents Sea has experienced.
Sea ice charts for the Barents Sea
Compared to previous years, ice extent around Svalbard is above average now (in May) but in contrast to last year, was well below average for much of March, leading to a huge hue-and-cry of impending doom:
Amstrup’s prophet-of-doom side-kick, Dr. Andrew Derocher (University of Alberta), who worked in the Svalbard area in the 1990s, was wringing his hands in public over sea ice loss in March:
and…
It turned out, this wasn’t an “early melt” but pack ice moving in response to wind, as it often does. A bucket-load of angst, all for nothing. Oddly enough, the polar bears figured out a way to not just survive, but thrive! Who would have thought?
References
Lippold, A., Bourgeon, S., Aars, J., Andersen, M., Polder, A., Lyche, J.L., Bytingsvik, J., Jenssen, B.M., Derocher, A.E., Welker, J.M. and Routti, H. 2019. Temporal trends of persistent organic pollutants in Barents Sea polar bears (Ursus maritimus) in relation to changes in feeding habits and body condition. Environmental Science and Technology 53(2):984-995.
Comments Off on Barents Sea good news: researcher reveals polar bears, even females, still in excellent condition
Posted in Advocacy, Sea ice habitat
Tagged Aars, Amstrup, Barents Sea, Norwegian Polar Institute, Polar Bears International, population size, prophets of doom, Svalbard
In a move that echoes the collaboration of activist organization World Wildlife Fund (WWF) with Netflix that brought us Sir David Attenborough’s walrus deception in ‘Our Planet’ that I chronicled in my latest book, ‘Fallen Icon’, streaming service DisneyNature has joined with activist organization Polar Bears International (PBI) to create a polar bear ‘documentary’ (called ‘Polar Bear’) that we can tell is propaganda because they’ve chosen to release the “cute and worrying” film on Earth Day (Friday 22 April 2022). In fact, the two films have a producer in common: Alastair Fothergill.
In the case of ‘Our Planet’, WWF bankrolled the film series for Netflix to ensure the content they desired; in ‘Polar Bear’, the tables are turned: DisneyNature is paying PBI for their assistance getting the polar bear film shots and providing their biased content, via money they are calling a research grant. I think you know by now what to expect. However, here are the facts about polar bear conditions in Svalbard, where the film was shot, and some good news from Western Hudson Bay this year, courtesy of Mike Reimer and his team at Churchill Wild. In short, there is still no climate emergency for polar bears: the hype is based on old models that failed spectacularly and new ones which depend on old data and totally improbable climate scenarios (Crockford 2017, 2019; Hausfather and Peters 2020; Molnar et al. 2020).
Continue readingComments Off on Dispelling the doomsday propaganda in DisneyNature’s new polar bear ‘documentary’
Posted in Advocacy, Population, Sea ice habitat
Tagged advocacy, body condition, Churchill Wild, Earth Day, misinformation, Nanuk Lodge, Polar Bears International, polar berar, Svalbard
Does the following statement stand up to scrutiny – i.e. a fact check – of the scientific literature on polar bear ecology?
In the 1980s, “the males were huge, females were reproducing regularly and cubs were surviving well,” Amstrup said. “The population looked good.”
[Steven Amstrup, Anchorage Daily News (Borenstein and colleagues), 5 November 2021: ‘How warming affects Arctic sea ice and polar bears’]
In short, it does not.
Continue readingComments Off on Conditions were not golden for polar bears in the 1980s despite what activist expert claims
Posted in Advocacy, Life History, Population
Tagged Amstrup, body condition, Chukchi Sea, climate change, cub survival, litter size, polar bear, Polar Bears International, prediction, western hudson bay
Here I take a detailed look at sea ice and polar bear population health information available for Western Hudson Bay and the Southern Beaufort compared to the Barents and Chukchi Seas. Data from the first two regions – but especially Western Hudson Bay – are used repeatedly to proclaim that a pronounced decline in summer sea ice since 1979 has caused harm to the health of global polar bear populations even though data from the second two regions strongly contradict such a conclusion, as I’ve pointed out in my fully referenced book, The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened.
These contradictions mean that studies from Western Hudson Bay and the Southern Beaufort should not be used to extrapolate to the rest of the Arctic with regard to how polar bears are responding to reduced summer sea ice. The plea to ‘Save Our Sea Ice‘ for the sake of polar bear survival is a climate change marketing slogan, not a scientific assessment.
Comments Off on Polar bear survival contradictions: sea ice decline vs. documented harm
Posted in Advocacy, Conservation Status, Population, Sea ice habitat, Summary
Tagged advocacy, Arctic sea ice day, contradictions, loss of summer ice, marketing, polar bear, Polar Bears International, predictions, save our sea ice, sea ice
Worth watching if you haven’t seen it – and a second look if you have – a rare balanced documentary produced by the CBC in 2014 on polar bear conservation, with interviews with biologists Mitch Taylor and Andrew Derocher.
“In The Politics of Polar Bears, Reg Sherren will pick his way through the message track to help you decide what is really happening with the largest land carnivore on the planet.”
Short version here (about 18 minutes):
Entire version (45:30):
https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2499432823
Online summary by the producer of the film, Reg Sherren (see excerpt below).
The most up-to-date discussion of polar bear numbers and the politics of polar bears are in my popular new book, The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened.
Comments Off on Flashback Friday: The Politics of Polar Bears CBC documentary from 2014
Posted in Advocacy, Conservation Status, Population, Sea ice habitat
Tagged Andrew Derocher, CBC, Churchill, condition, documentary, jail, Mitch Taylor, polar bear, Polar Bears International, politics, sea ice, weights
Misplaced eco-anxiety that kids have about polar bears starts with activist biologists like Steven Amstrup, spokesperson for an organization devoted to raising climate change alarm – and media outlets like The Guardian who help them spread fears unsupported by scientific evidence.
Fat healthy polar bear male at Kaktovik, Alaska in the Southern Beaufort Sea, September 2019, Ed Boudreau photo, with permission.
You can’t get much more over the top than these statements from Amstrup today but read carefully: it’s either opinion or factual aspects of polar bear life (“we know that the bears aren’t feeding”) made to sound like new, terrifying developments that can be blamed on climate change. Continue reading
Comments Off on Activist biologist filled with eco-anxiety shares unfounded fear of polar bear catastrophe
Posted in Advocacy, Conservation Status, Life History, Population, Sea ice habitat
Tagged Alaska, Amstrup, Beaufort, catastrophe, Chukchi Sea, eco-anxiety, polar bear, Polar Bears International, population decline, predictions, sea ice, shrinking sea ice
Polar Bears International is the non-profit organization that virtually rules the town of Churchill when it comes to informing naïve tourists about polar bears. A million-dollar donation last year guaranteed the creation of a new building to permanently display PBI-generated information in downtown Churchill – previously limited to those visitors wealthy or influential enough to ride Tundra Buggies run by Frontiers North.
PBI is an organization dedicated to the promotion of climate change rhetoric that currently purports to present unbiased scientific information about polar bears and climate change. It was founded by a retired marketing director and “polar bear enthusiast” in 2002 but its current leader is ‘chief scientist’ Steven Amstrup. Amstrup was almost single-handedly responsible for the failed survival model that got polar bears classified as ‘threatened’ under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) in the US (Crockford 2017, Crockford 2019; Crockford and Geist 2018).
Amstrup’s model predicted that 2/3 of the world’s polar bears would be gone if sea ice got as low as it has been since 2007 but it was spectacularly wrong: polar bears are healthier and more numerous than 50 years ago.
Global polar bear population size estimates to 2018. From Chapter 10 of The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened (Crockford 2019).
Amstrup presented his firmly-held opinions as if they were scientific facts but observations have shown his guesses were incorrect. But he refuses to acknowledge this and PBI continues to spead a message of impending doom [my bold]:
“This year’s polar bear season is going to be big for our team, perhaps our biggest yet. Not only do we have an amazing schedule of Tundra Connections webcasts and live chats, but we’re also working with an array of media to tell stories and spread awareness about polar bears and the threats they face in a warming Arctic. This is especially important following another summer of massive sea ice loss in the Arctic and amidst overwhelming global momentum pressuring world leaders to address the climate crisis.”
Below is an excerpt from an interesting story from 2010 on how PBI controls the ‘polar-bears-are-doomed/save-our-sea-ice‘ narrative presented to the media and innocent tourists who just come to see polar bears in the wild.
Comments Off on People go to Churchill to see polar bears in the wild and PBI controls the info they get
Posted in Advocacy, Conservation Status, Sea ice habitat
Tagged activist, advocacy, Amstrup, canary in the coal mine, Churchill, climate change, ESA, extinction, icon, PBI, polar bear, Polar Bears International, predictions, propaganda, sea ice, threatened, tourists
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