Tag Archives: population size

Polar bears are thriving: an ICSC Canada short video

Posted on March 19, 2021 | Comments Off on Polar bears are thriving: an ICSC Canada short video

From Tom Harris at ICSC Canada: Polar bears are nowhere near as sensitive to declining sea ice than originally thought. In fact, their population is now three times higher than in the 1960s. 17 March 2021 [1:28]

 

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Top six polar bear stories of 2020

Posted on December 31, 2020 | Comments Off on Top six polar bear stories of 2020

Here are the six most important polar bear stories I wrote about in 2020 that are worth reading if you missed them.

 

These posts cover new evidence that polar bears are thriving (including more populations stable or increasing) despite recent declines in summer sea ice blamed on climate change, an explanation of why the simplistic ‘less ice, fewer bears’ is false and a short post that shows a much-publicized new model predicting future extinction of polar bears is scientifically implausible. Honourable mention goes to a story refuting the claim that Alaskan polar bear cubs are at risk from oil exploration in coastal Wildlife Refuge.

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Good news: Gulf of Boothia and M’Clintock Channel polar bear survey results

Posted on November 17, 2020 | Comments Off on Good news: Gulf of Boothia and M’Clintock Channel polar bear survey results

Final reports for two Canadian subpopulations reveal the number of polar bears in M’Clintock Channel has more than doubled since 2000 while Gulf of Boothia as remained about the same despite moderate declines in summer sea ice cover. All of the survey results were published online yesterday (16 November 2020) and I was alerted to the posting this morning via email by a Nunavut employee.

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S. Beaufort polar bear population stable since 2010 not declining new report reveals

Posted on October 4, 2020 | Comments Off on S. Beaufort polar bear population stable since 2010 not declining new report reveals

A just-released report on the latest count for the Alaska portion of the Southern Beaufort subpopulation reveals that numbers have been stable since 2010 despite claims the population has continued to decline. However, the study also has a very odd feature: 2012 had the highest population estimate over the decade of 2006-2015 yet also had the lowest survival of all age classes since 2001.

Healthy polar bear male at Kaktovik, Alaska on the Southern Beaufort Sea, September 2019, Ed Boudreau photo, with permission.

However, what is essentially good news about polar bear health and survival in the Southern Beaufort has so far been glossed over by the media because the report prominently includes estimates of polar bear dens on land in areas of potential oil exploration, a highly politicized topic. Accordingly, the Washington Post (picked up by other outlets) focused a statement in the paper that “long-term persistence of polar bears (Ursus maritimus) is threatened by sea-ice loss due to climate change” and on the denning issue rather than the new population count.  As far as I am aware, no other population estimate report has included such distracting information.

Recent claim of a polar bear expert [my bold]:

In 2015…the polar bear population in the Beaufort Sea had declined by 40% over the previous decade. “We can only anticipate that those declines have continued.” Steven Amstrup, 29 September 2019.

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Baffin Bay polar bears are abundant and the population is stable, study scientist admits

Posted on March 3, 2020 | Comments Off on Baffin Bay polar bears are abundant and the population is stable, study scientist admits

An article by CBC News today (3 March 2020) is a surprisingly well-balance report on a recently published paper by Kristin Laidre and colleagues on their work on Baffin Bay polar bears that I discussed last month. It presents the Inuit perspective that polar bears are currently abundant in the area and the population stable despite less summer sea ice and some documented declines in body weight and at least one scientist conceded this is indeed true.

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Fat polar bear, summer 2012 near Thule, NW Greenland (Baffin Bay subpopulation). Robin Davies photo.

However, the CBC writer still left out the most critical caveat included in the paper about the study: that factors other than changes in sea ice could have affected the body condition and litter size data that the authors documented but they didn’t look at anything except sea ice. This automatically means the conclusions are scientifically inconclusive.

See some quotes below from the CBC article and the caveat from the paper. Continue reading

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State of the Polar Bear Report 2019: Are polar bear researchers hiding good news?

Posted on February 27, 2020 | Comments Off on State of the Polar Bear Report 2019: Are polar bear researchers hiding good news?

International Polar Bear Day is a good day to ask: Are polar bear researchers hiding good news? Extended lags in publishing polar bear counts and a failure to publish data on female polar bear body weights and cub survival in Western Hudson Bay for more than 25 years make it look like polar bear researchers are delaying and suppressing good news.

StatePB2019 cover image

In particular, the failure to report the data on cub survival and weights of female bears suggests that these health measures have not declined over the last two decades as claimed. If these figures are indeed the strongest evidence that sea ice loss due to climate change is harming Western Hudson Bay polar bears, why on earth have they not been made public? And why won’t a single journalist ask to see that data?
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First-ever polar bear population survey for entire Russian coast planned for 2021-2023

Posted on February 12, 2020 | Comments Off on First-ever polar bear population survey for entire Russian coast planned for 2021-2023

Word that Russia is planning to generate a count of polar bears along its entire Arctic coast within the next few years is good news indeed, as it will resolve a long-standing gap in population estimates that have not been dealt with at all well by the polar bear community. Whether North American and European academics will accept the results of the aerial surveys is another matter entirely, especially if the numbers are higher than they like, which is what happened with the first Russian Kara Sea count in 2013.

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Up first will be the Chukchi and East Siberian Seas in 2021, the Laptev and Kara Seas, in 2022, and the eastern Barents Sea around Franz Josef Land in 2023.

Polar bear regions_larger

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Polar bears are thriving despite global warming: this short essay explains why

Posted on July 11, 2019 | Comments Off on Polar bears are thriving despite global warming: this short essay explains why

This essay explains in simple terms why so many people still believe that polar bears are in peril when nothing could be further from the truth: it is an essential lesson that shatters the basis of the shameful indoctrination of young school children and undermines the baseless claims of activist protestors. It was written and translated into French for a special climate change feature issue (July) of the monthly French magazine Valeurs Actuelles (reviewed here) and reprinted by the French hunting magazine Chasses Internationales. It has also been translated into German for a dedicated climate change issue (11 July) of the Swiss weekly magazine Die Weltwoche.

Chukchi Sea polar bear Arctic_early August 2018_A Khan NSIDC

I have added a couple of figures to illustrate this English version of the essay.

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Activists who use polar bears as a symbol of climate change are out of touch with reality

Posted on June 3, 2019 | Comments Off on Activists who use polar bears as a symbol of climate change are out of touch with reality

Young activists like Ollie Nancarrow from the UK need to find another symbol for their messages of climate change. Polar bears are thriving despite recent dramatic declines in summer sea ice: they have not been devastated as predicted by declining summer sea ice blamed on climate change. Anyone who uses a polar bear image to further a message of climate change, as Ollie has done, is simply out of touch with reality.

Standing bear_shutterstock_751891378_cropped web sized

UPDATE 4 June 2019: Police instruct activist teen to remove ‘rude’ message from UK field. He turned the penis into a turtle but apparently, the polar bear remains.

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Zoos abrogate their position of trust by misleading the public about polar bears

Posted on May 23, 2019 | Comments Off on Zoos abrogate their position of trust by misleading the public about polar bears

Since at least 2007, zoos around the world have proudly partnered with climate change activist organization Polar Bears International to ‘educate’ the public about the plight of polar bears. Although contrary to all expectations, polar bear numbers have increased slightly since the abrupt decline of sea ice in 2007 yet zoos are still promoting the false message that polar bears have already been gravely harmed by lack of sea ice.

CTV News on pb sightings Labrador as climate change warning

A news clip that aired on Canadian television in April 2019 was ostensibly about recent sightings of polar bears in Labrador (which I discussed here). But it digressed rapidly into a baseless diatribe about polar bears as victims of climate change, delivered by an animal keeper from the Toronto Zoo presented as an ‘expert’ on this topic.

See it here (about 4 minutes long).

And while I have no doubt that Toronto Zoo curator Maria Frankie is indeed an expert in keeping mammals in captivity, she appears to have zero qualifications to speak with any critical scientific authority on climate change, sea ice variability, or polar bear survival in the wild.

Frankie is complicit in spreading misinformation about polar bears to an unwary public (including children) as a method of spurring political action on climate change as surely as David Attenborough is to blame for spreading misinformation about Pacific walrus. She is being used by PBI but is too naive to realize it.

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