My press release response to activist ‘fact checkers‘ attacking a graph used by Bjorn Lomborg on social media:
Canadian zoologist Dr. Susan Crockford warns that some polar bear specialists are attempting to cast a smoke-screen over the growth of global polar bear numbers.
Comments Off on Activist fact-checkers are misleading the public on polar bear numbers
Posted in Advocacy, Population, Summary
Tagged climate change, fact check, Lomborg, models, polar bear, population size, predictions, sea ice, thriving
This morning, self-professed ‘climate campaigner’ Mike Hudema posted a short video of two polar bears seemingly struggling to survive as they repeatedly break through newly-formed ice, with the message “Polar bears are up against a huge problem. They are losing their habitat. As the Arctic becomes increasingly warm & sea ice disappears its harder to find a mate & food.”
This was clearly designed to elicit an emotional response from viewers but it’s every bit as manipulative and false as the video of the emaciated polar bear shamelessly promoted by National Geographic as ‘what climate change looks like’, which I describe in detail in my new book, Fallen Icon (Crockford 2022a).
Continue readingComments Off on Fact check: Polar bears breaking through thin ice is not evidence of climate change, it’s a drone chase
Posted in Advocacy, Conservation Status, Sea ice habitat
Tagged activists, chasing, climate campaigner, drone, Mike Hudema, moral compass, polar bear, thin ice, thriving
This little snack won’t make much difference to the bear’s survival but rare film footage of an already-fat bear (estimated at 1,000lbs) catching and eating a Canada goose on Friday last week (26 August 2022) just outside of Churchill on the western shore of Hudson Bay is not a bear motivated by starvation to eat something other than seals.
Newsreel of the goose hunt is below; photo of another fat bear, also near Churchill, taken the day before (25 August 2022) is shown above, see more from that day here.
Continue readingComments Off on Video: Fat polar bears on the shore of Hudson Bay near Churchill, one catches a goose
Posted in Life History, Polar bear attacks
Tagged body condition, fat, polar bear, terrestrial foods, thriving
In an article published last week, polar bear specialist Jon Aars is quoted as saying that Svalbard bears are “unexpectedly” thriving. However, he fails short of admitting that the bears don’t really need summer ice as long as they are well-fed in spring, which they have been for the last two decades—this year included.
Aars said the sea ice in this area is declining more than twice as fast as anywhere else in the Arctic. But the polar bears here — unexpectedly — are thriving. [E. Haavik, Svalbard’s polar bears persist as sea ice melts — but not forever, 21 July 2022; my bold]
The suggestion by Aars that the Svalbard archipelago could one day be ice-free for the entire year is speculative hyperbole but even if that were to happen, it would only mean the permanent movement of 300 or so Svalbard bears to Franz Josef Land (still within the Barents Sea) where ice conditions are less volatile.
Continue readingComments Off on Expert admits polar bears in Svalbard are thriving despite the greatest loss of sea ice in the Arctic
Posted in Conservation Status, Life History, Population, Sea ice habitat
Tagged Barents Sea, Franz Josef Land, persistent, polar bear, sea ice, Svalbard, thriving
The beginning of this month was the 15th anniversary of the day the IUCN declared polar bears ‘vulnerable’ to extinction because of climate change, the first time such a designation had ever been made. It was based on the opinion of polar bear specialists who examined the vague information available at the time and decided that in 45 years the bears might be in serious trouble. This decision changed the way the IUCN assessed species risk and led to mass confusion for the general public, who falsely assumed polar bear numbers had already declined by a huge amount.
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Posted in Conservation Status, Population, Sea ice habitat
Tagged anniversary, extinction, IUCN, PBSG, polar bear, population size, status, threatened, thriving, vulnerable
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]
Comments Off on Polar bears are thriving: an ICSC Canada short video
Posted in Conservation Status, Population, Summary
Tagged polar bear, population size, sea ice, thriving, video
Is Facebook now an expert on polar bear conservation status? Apparently they have decreed themselves the last word for online content. There is a plan afoot to label anything that says polar bears are not being harmed by recent sea ice declines as ‘disinformation’ – but on whose authority? Thanks to Josh for the cartoon below.
A new section of the Climate Science Information Center, launching alongside the labelling trial, debunks common myths such as the false claim that polar bear populations are not suffering due to global heating, or the widespread belief that excess carbon emissions help plant life. Facebook is working with climate communication experts from around the world, including at the University of Cambridge, to produce the content.
Ah, they’re consulting ‘climate communication experts‘! Those experts surely must be up on all the latest papers and not trusting the word of obviously biased conservations organizations like the WWF or PBI whose real reason for existence is the generation of as much money in donations as possible?
The peer reviewed literature supports the claim that polar bears are currently thriving despite recent ice declines – especially in the Chukchi and Barents Seas – regardless of what computer model predictions say about what might happen in the future. This is a fact, not a ‘myth’. See my paper from 2017 and my 2019 book for most of the citations (Crockford 2017, 2019) and others in the reference list below. Check them out yourself before you believe Facebook. Ask me for any paper you’d like to see via the ‘contact me’ form and I’ll send it along. Also, look for my State of the Polar Bear Report 2020 next week.
Comments Off on Fact: polar bears are thriving despite sea ice loss according to the scientific literature
Posted in Advocacy, Conservation Status, Sea ice habitat, Summary
Tagged climate change, experts, extinction, Facebook, fact, myth, peer-review, polar bear, sea ice, thriving
Polar bear researcher Andrew Derocher says it takes four years of good sea ice conditions to recruit a polar bear from birth but implies that 2019 is the first year in decades that conditions for bears have been ‘good’ in Western Hudson Bay. He thinks he can get away with saying this because he hasn’t published any of the data on body weight and body condition he’s collected on these bears over the last 25 years (apparently, whatever funding agency pays for his research does not require him to publish the data he collects).
But independent observations such as dates of ice freeze-up in fall, ice breakup in summer, dates and condition of bears recorded onshore, suggest he’s blowing smoke: at least five out of five of the last sea ice seasons for WH bears have been good. That means we should be seeing more bears in the next official population count.
Comments Off on Western Hudson Bay polar bears in great shape after five good sea ice seasons
Posted in Advocacy, Conservation Status, Polar bear attacks, Sea ice habitat
Tagged body condition, breakup, Derocher, fat bears, freeze-up, Hudson Bay, polar bear, sea ice, thriving
The Chukchi Sea finally has a polar bear population estimate! According to survey results from 2016 only recently made public, about 2937 bears (1522-5944) currently inhabit the region, making this the largest subpopulation in the Arctic. This is exciting news — and a huge accomplishment — but the US Fish and Wildlife Service responsible for the work has been oddly mum on the topic.
Not only that, but an extrapolation of that estimate calculated by USFWS researchers for Chukchi plus Alaska (the US portion of the Southern Beaufort Sea subpopulation) was estimated at 4437 (2283-9527), although with “significant uncertainty.” Nevertheless, it means the 2016 estimate for Alaska could be roughly three times what it was in 2010: a whopping 1500 or so, up from about 450 (or about 225-650) for the same area estimated during the last survey (Bromaghin et al. 2015: Fig. 5a).
Even if the real number for Alaska is only twice as large (~1000), that’s still a huge improvement. It would eliminate the Southern Beaufort as the only polar bear subpopulation in the Arctic to have shown a significant decline blamed on human-caused global warming (Crockford 2018). If the recovery is real, it means the 2004-2006 decline was a temporary fluctuation after all, just like previous declines in the region. I expect, however, that it will take a dedicated SB population survey for officials to concede that point.
There is not yet now a detailed report to cite (Regehr et al. 2018 in prep, see update below), but the numbers were announced at the 10th meeting of the Russian-American Commission on Polar Bears held at the end of July this year (AC SWG 2018) by Eric Regehr (formerly of the US Fish & Wildlife Service, as of 2017 at the University of Washington). [h/t to G.H.] This was the same report that raised the quota for subsistence hunting in the Chukchi from 58 to 85, based on these new figures, as I discussed last week.
From “Military bases to open on Wrangel Island and Chukotka” 22 October 2015.
Regehr was quoted as saying:
“Chukchi bears remain larger and fatter and have not seen downward trends in cub production and survival, according to new preliminary information on the health and numbers of bears.”
UPDATE 15 November 2018: The scientific paper describing the entirely new method (yes, yet another one: see Bromaghin et al. 2015) used to estimate the size of the Chukchi Sea population is now available (University of Washington press release here), in an open-access paper: Regher et al. 2018. News reports (see one here) spin the positive outcome as something that researchers expected all along but that’s simply not true. They expected Chukchi Sea bears and Southern Beaufort Sea bears to respond similarly to reduced amounts of summer sea ice, as explained here and in Crockford 2017).
Continue reading
Comments Off on Chukchi Sea polar bears number almost 3000 according to new survey results: update
Posted in Conservation Status, Population
Tagged Alaska, body condition, Chukchi Sea, cub survival, fat bears, guesstimate, healthy, increase, polar bear, population, Regehr, sea ice, Southern Beaufort, thriving, triplets
The Chukchi Sea finally has a polar bear population estimate! According to survey results from 2016 only recently made public, about 2937 bears (1522-5944) currently inhabit the region, making this the largest subpopulation in the Arctic. This is exciting news — and a huge accomplishment — but the US Fish and Wildlife Service responsible for the work has been oddly mum on the topic.
Not only that, but an extrapolation of that estimate calculated by USFWS researchers for Chukchi plus Alaska (the US portion of the Southern Beaufort Sea subpopulation) was estimated at 4437 (2283-9527), although with “significant uncertainty.” Nevertheless, it means the 2016 estimate for Alaska could be roughly three times what it was in 2010: a whopping 1500 or so, up from about 450 (or about 225-650) for the same area estimated during the last survey (Bromaghin et al. 2015: Fig. 5a).
Even if the real number for Alaska is only twice as large (~1000), that’s still a huge improvement. It would eliminate the Southern Beaufort as the only polar bear subpopulation in the Arctic to have shown a significant decline blamed on human-caused global warming (Crockford 2018). If the recovery is real, it means the 2004-2006 decline was a temporary fluctuation after all, just like previous declines in the region. I expect, however, that it will take a dedicated SB population survey for officials to concede that point.
There is not yet now a detailed report to cite (Regehr et al. 2018 in prep, see update below), but the numbers were announced at the 10th meeting of the Russian-American Commission on Polar Bears held at the end of July this year (AC SWG 2018) by Eric Regehr (formerly of the US Fish & Wildlife Service, as of 2017 at the University of Washington). [h/t to G.H.] This was the same report that raised the quota for subsistence hunting in the Chukchi from 58 to 85, based on these new figures, as I discussed last week.
From “Military bases to open on Wrangel Island and Chukotka” 22 October 2015.
Regehr was quoted as saying:
“Chukchi bears remain larger and fatter and have not seen downward trends in cub production and survival, according to new preliminary information on the health and numbers of bears.”
UPDATE 15 November 2018: The scientific paper describing the entirely new method (yes, yet another one: see Bromaghin et al. 2015) used to estimate the size of the Chukchi Sea population is now available (University of Washington press release here), in an open-access paper: Regher et al. 2018. News reports (see one here) spin the positive outcome as something that researchers expected all along but that’s simply not true. They expected Chukchi Sea bears and Southern Beaufort Sea bears to respond similarly to reduced amounts of summer sea ice, as explained here and in Crockford 2017).
Continue reading
Comments Off on Chukchi Sea polar bears number almost 3000 according to new survey results
Posted in Conservation Status, Population
Tagged Alaska, body condition, Chukchi Sea, cub survival, fat bears, guesstimate, healthy, increase, polar bear, population, Regehr, sea ice, Southern Beaufort, thriving, triplets
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