Posted onFebruary 26, 2025|Comments Off on No News is Good News on Polar Bear Day: Celebrate With 35% Off Polar Bear Evolution
In honour of International Polar Bear Day coming up on Thursday February 27, I’ve discounted the price of my Polar Bear Evolution book by 40% for the next month in order to encourage evolutionary thinking about polar bears (in all markets: see links at the end of this post). UPDATE: Sale extended until June.
Instead of asking whether polar bears will survive a bit of warming over the next few decades, ask yourself how they survived more than 100,000 years of unimaginable changes in Arctic climate (both much warmer and colder) before now?
Posted onSeptember 12, 2024|Comments Off on Churchill seemingly unworried about polar bears, fails to post problem bear reports on social media
We know transparency’s gone out the window for many public officials, but still: Since early August, I’ve been checking daily for Problem Polar Bear Reports issued by the Churchill Polar Bear Alert Program managed by Manitoba Conservation. This morning (12 September), five reports were posted at once on the Town of Churchill website, dating back to first of the season for the week of August 5-11, see image below.
It’s apparent that the intent of these reports is in part public safety: to raise awareness of the potential threat of wandering polar bears around the town of Churchill because of the language that appears on virtually every report: “stay vigilant”, “be bear smart,” “be bear aware,” etc.
However, the X account for Town of Churchill seems to have been abandoned (last post 19 April 2024), which suggests the town is confident no residents or tourists would benefit from Alerts on X that polar bears are ashore:
The town’s Facebook account seems to be their only method of public communication yet even there, there have been no Polar Bear Alert reports posted this summer.
Oddly, even though it is now apparent from the just-released reports that one bear got so close to town that it had to captured and put in the ‘polar bear jail’ the week of 5-11 August — for the public’s safety — the only safety announcement the town issued that week was a ‘heat warning’ on 12 August:
I guess we are to assume that whoever is running this account – or the town council, or the mayor – believes that a day or two of hot weather (which Churchill gets regularly most years) is more dangerous to public safety than a massive predator wandering around town.
I can only conclude that keeping residents and tourists in the dark about potential threats from local polar bears is one way that Churchill is now adapting to climate change (from CBC News, 10 September 2024):
Bears Onshore and Effective Sea Ice Breakup dates
It is apparent from the wording of the Churchill reports that even by the last week of August this year, all bears were not yet off the ice, since they say only that “most bears” were on shore the week of 26 August to 1 September (see next section).
That suggests the last bears came ashore this year at least a week later than they did in 2020 (at 21 August), which at the time polar bear specialist Andrew Derocher presented as an anomaly (see tweet below). Compare to the situation last year here.
The last report I’ve seen from Derocher (via X) for 2024 on the status of his teams’ tagged females is that many of them (11/29 or 38%) were still on the ice as of 8 August (posted 11 Aug):
Derocher referring to this an “amazing” year that’s “similar” to the 1980s probably doesn’t tell the half of it, since he hasn’t posted any maps since then (as of noon, 12 September).
This effectively keeps secret the date when the last of these females bears actually came ashore, which is in any case a biased microcosm of the entire subpopulation. In other words, we can expect that if 40% of tagged female were still on bits of remnant ice at 8 August, there will have been many more bears, especially males, out there as well – which of course he never mentions.
He also never mentions that satellites under-report the amount of ice at this time of year by as much as 20% because of the effects of melt-water sitting on ice, but we’ve come to expect that.
Oddly, a recent study tried to explain the importance to survival of the recent phenomenon (since about 2015 or so) of bears staying out on melting bits of remnant ice rather than heading immediately to shore when the ice coverage over Western Hudson Bay drops below 50%. They suggested this behaviour was largely confined to male bears because they had to make up for feeding missed during the breeding season (McGeachy et al. 2024).
Females, alternatively, appear to respond to break-up in WH by coming onshore approximately 3 weeks after the mean ice concentration in WH reached 50%, … However, suitable habitat was still present elsewhere in the Bay and appeared to be used by a portion of WH prime age males. [McGeachy et al. 2024: 494, where “prime age males” are aged 5-19 years.]
However, these authors never mention the data reported by Derocher every year showing fairly significant numbers of tagged females lingering on tiny chunks of ice well into August, even though Derocher is a co-author. Funny, that.
Problem Bear Reports 2024, Weeks 1-5
Week 1, 5-11 August
Week 2, 12-18 August
Week 3, 19-25 August
Week 4, 26 August-September 1
Week 5, 2-8 September
References
McGeachy, D., Lunn, N.J., Richards, E.S. and Derocher, A.E. (2024). Sea ice influence on male polar bear survival in Hudson Bay. Arctic Science 10, 483-498. https://doi.org/10.1139/as-2023-004 Open access.
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Posted onAugust 13, 2024|Comments Off on Western Hudson Bay sea ice breakup for polar bears like the 1980s for 3 of the last 5 yrs
The 1980s and early 1990s are said to have been the “good old days” for sea ice conditions and polar bears in Western Hudson Bay, with all tagged bears usually ashore by mid-to-late August. Then an abrupt step-change in sea ice breakup dates brought polar bears to shore an average of two weeks earlier in the late 1990s. From then until 2019, the only significant outlier to all tagged bears being ashore by about late July was 2009, which was such an unusually cold year that the last bears came ashore about August 20.
That pattern changed in 2020, when the last bears came off the ice as late as they had in 2009, on August 21. Something similar happened in 2022, when the last bears came off a small remnant of ice even later, about August 26. And this year, the bears may be moving ashore even later: there is even more ice remaining off WH and much of it is thick compacted ice that hasn’t melted much over the last few weeks, which means bears have been as late onshore as the 1980s for three out of the last five years.
Posted onFebruary 27, 2024|Comments Off on State of the Polar Bear 2023: W. Hudson Bay polar bear numbers have not declined since 2004
In my State of the Polar Bear 2023 report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, I discuss recent news relevant to polar bear conservation and science issues. The most startling of these is the revelation that Western Hudson Bay polar bear numbers have not declined since 2004.
Posted onDecember 12, 2023|Comments Off on Churchill end-of-season problem polar bear reports finally published
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).
Posted onDecember 9, 2023|Comments Off on Despite hand-wringing about Churchill polar bears this year, 2023 wasn’t their worst summer
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.
From a Churchill Wild report on the condition of WH polar bears, January 2023
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]
Posted onNovember 30, 2023|Comments Off on Western Hudson Bay polar bears on their way offshore to hunt seals: freeze-up has begun
Official confirmation has come in this morning that polar bears that have spent the summer fasting along Western Hudson Bay now have enough ice to move offshore. That makes this year a bit later than usual (average is 16 November) but is not one of the extremely late freeze-ups, as happened in 1981, 2016 and 2021 when bears didn’t leave until the first week of December (Castro de la Guardia et al. 2017; Miller et al. 2022). Since breakup of sea ice came earlier than usual this summer, this means (as of 30 November) many bears will have been off the ice and without food for 166 days or 5.5 months.
Courtesy Andrew Derocher, University of Alberta, who monitors WH bears:
Close-up of the tracking map below. Note that pregnant females will stay ashore to give birth so not all of these tagged bears are expected to head onto the ice this fall to hunt for seals:
Still not a word from the Polar Bear Alert folks in Churchill, who as of today, haven’t released any of their weekly reports since 23 October 2023.
Ice Conditions in Canada
At 30 November 2023, courtesy Canadian Ice Services shows the expanding band of ice developing along the western shore of Hudson Bay but note also that the rest of the Canadian Arctic, as well as the Beaufort Sea, is completely covered in ice, as is most of Baffin Bay and Foxe Basin:
References
Abrahms, B., Carter, N.H., Clark-Wolf, T.J., et al. 2023. Climate change as a global amplifier of human–wildlife conflict. Nature Climate Change 13:224-234. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-023-01608-5
Castro de la Guardia, L., Myers, P.G., Derocher, A.E., Lunn, N.J., Terwisscha van Scheltinga, A.D. 2017. Sea ice cycle in western Hudson Bay, Canada, from a polar bear perspective. Marine Ecology Progress Series 564: 225–233. http://www.int-res.com/abstracts/meps/v564/p225-233/
Miller, E.N., Lunn, N.J., McGeachy, D., and Derocher, A.E. 2022. Autumn migration phenology of polar bears (Ursus maritimus) in Hudson Bay, Canada. Polar Biology 45:1023-1034.
Stirling, I. and Derocher, A.E. 2012. Effects of climate warming on polar bears: a review of the evidence. Global Change Biology 18(9): 2694–2706.
Wilder, J.M., Vongraven, D., Atwood, T., et al. 2017. Polar bear attacks on humans: implications of a changing climate. Wildlife Society Bulletin 41(3):537-547. https://doi.org/10.1002/wsb.783
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Posted onOctober 26, 2023|Comments Off on Churchill so far has few problems with polar bears despite predictions of a record bad year
Despite misleading warnings in mid-August that a record number of incidents had already taken place, and that Churchill was on track for a record-number of bear problems this fall, the number of incidents and bears captured so far have been well below other years after the same number of weeks ashore. And while this is shaping up to be the longest ice-free season on record for Western Hudson Bay bears, it may not be a record year for problem bears in Churchill.
“On average, officers receive around 250 calls from residents and detain around 50 bears every year, according to statistics provided to Live Science by the Manitoba government. The record number of bears captured in a single year was 176, in 2003.” LiveScience, 16 August 2023
Posted onAugust 30, 2023|Comments Off on W. Hudson Bay polar bear numbers declined 27% in 2021 but not because of missing ice: secret paper
As will become apparent tomorrow, Western Hudson Bay polar bear numbers apparently declined 27% between 2017 and 2021 but not because of sea ice loss. This fact, gleaned from a secret government report leaked to the media, emerged just before Christmas last year and spread around the world. I commented on it here at the time.
It will also be apparent tomorrow why that government report is still unavailable. Thursdays are when the big two science magazines publish their papers, which means associated news stores promoting preferred narratives are embargoed until then. Stay tuned.
Posted onJuly 14, 2023|Comments Off on Hudson Bay sea ice loss has not accelerated since 2014: in fact, summer ice cover has improved
This is an early breakup year for Hudson Bay but sea ice loss has not been accelerating. While some Western Hudson Bay bears have been on land for weeks, others are still out on melting remnants of sea ice, much of it invisible to satellites. This is only the third year since 2014 that the bay has had less than usual amounts of ice, which means most years since then have had normal or nearly normal ice coverage, similar to the 1980s. Hardly the ever-worsening catastrophe of sea ice loss story being spun in the media for Western Hudson Bay polar bears.
From the tracking map above, out of the 38 visible tags or collars on bears at 11 July 2023, 16 bears (42%) were on land and 22 (58%) were still out on the sea ice. That’s virtually identical to the 40/60 percent split last week when there was even more ice.
Watch polar bear habitat reform in the Canadian Arctic: “last 10 days” Canadian Ice Service animation (works anytime) HERE.
See Quote archive for details.
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