In spite of claims that polar bear populations are facing pressure from loss of Arctic summer sea ice, their numbers have in fact grown. Video follows.
Guest essay by Dr. Susan Crockford
For more than ten years, we’ve endured the shrill media headlines, the hyperbole from conservation organizations, and the simplistic platitudes from scientists as summer sea ice declined dramatically while polar bear numbers rose.
Now, just in time for International Polar Bear Day, there’s a video that deconstructs the scare. It runs about 8 minutes, written and narrated by me, produced by the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
Facts of polar bear life which escape CACA adherents:
1. The ice that matters to polies is landfast ice in the spring, on which mama ringed seals build their snow lairs in which to give birth to their pups and keep open their holes into the water below. Drift ice in the summer, not so much.
2. Mama polies emerge from their winter dens with their cubs (technically the estivate rather than hibernate, a distinction with very little difference) in the spring. They are hungry and need seal pups to eat.
3. Male polies spend the winter roaming the arctic wastes, eating whatever they can find, whether on land or ice. Ditto the summer, although more land and less ice.
Cute baby ringed seal = fat-rich power bar.
The polie’s sense of smell is uncanny. She can scent a seal den a mile away.
Until the advent of the high-powered rifle, polies were arguably the top Arctic predator, followed by griz and humans tied for third with wolves.
4. Polar bear ranges are large, but one fit and active male polie could probably cover several sows, so loss of young males has little effect on polie populations.
Today – feral hog crisis in Texas.
Future – bear crises in multiple locales.
Calling all hunters ….
Trump’s getting the feral hogs OUT of Washington . . .
Here is another counterintuitive climate science theory. When the arctic ice all melts, seals will have to come ashore and polar bears will have a linear hunting ground instead of a two dimensional one. We may have to go out in the spring and club baby polar bears to death to save the seals.
I have had redwinged blackbirds and common grackles and brownheaded cowbirds on my front steps since Friday, Feb. 24. 2017. Third year in a row they’re coming back early and looking for food. I have pictures. What else do you need to show that the angle of the sun is changing just slightly? Because that’s what they go by, not by ‘averages’ or ‘computer models’.
Oh, sorry – I forgot that direct observation in a world of computer modeling doesn’t count for squat. My bad. Ten lashes with a limp strand of spaghetti.
All limp spaghetti strands are offended by your comments, (or is that snowflakes?)
My pal Chuck Darwin has a reason for that. For several years we had male bluebirds winter over at our home near Foxboro, MA. Called MA Audubon and asked them WTF that was about. Males pick and or create nesting sites, and females fall for the ones who have the best sites. Sometimes males will head north early to get a good site. Occasionally some will take a big gamble and winter over. We always kept our bird feeders full. That probably defined a good site area, and lessens their risk. We had three or four red robins here two weeks ago. They’re still OK, but it was 72 degrees here on Sunday.
On CTV News in Winnipeg they yapped about climate change on “international Polar Bear day”
http://winnipeg.ctvnews.ca/video?clipId=1066336
Yuk!
Some people might ask, “Why, then, would scientists report more sightings of cannibalism?”, … to which I might answer, “More sightings do not automatically mean more occurrences – this simply means that there are more observers rather than more occurrences.”
Or some people might ask, “What about those starving polar bear sightings or those drowning polar bears?”, … to which I might answer, “What about all the starving human beings and drowning human beings? — these tragic things happen even amidst a population explosion, and focusing a camera on them does NOT mean that the starvings and the drownings overwhelm the population – it just means that somebody chooses to focus on THESE emotional events rather than the emotional events of births.
If you are looking for starving or drowning polar bears, then you will find them, since you are not spending your time looking for new born bears or healthy bears. It’s an issue of observer focus, NOT an issue of dominant trends.
People wanting to depict a tragic scenario will choose tragic images, at the expense of overlooking the greater picture.
Thanks for the video and all your research Dr., Oh and BTW did this come across your desk?http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2017/02/27/polarbearday-photo-ark-polar-bears-in-the-wild-at-risk/
Thanks asybot for posting that. I was scrolling down to see if anyone had mentioned that particular misinformed article, before I mentioned it myself.
What a crock of cr@p! I read that article, plus an interview which is mentioned on the same page, and was appalled that in almost every paragraph the term “climate change” was referenced!
But what about the Spotted Owl….I can’t write any more….I’m too upset!
Clearly there are 3 polar bear populations under pressure from the direct effects of declining sea ice:
The Hudson Bay population – where bears need to wait for winter ice formation, which is later in recent years.
You can look up the Polar Bear International reports chronicling the impacts here.
The Svalbard population, where late arriving sea ice means that bears cannot reach traditional denning areas in recent years. There are also reports of bears in poor condition and eating unusual food sources.
The Beaufort Sea population, where rapid and deep retreat of sea ice means some bears have elected to remain on shore, tied to whale carcasses left by native hunters.
Most of the rest of the populations are little studied and we have only vague ideas of how many bears there are.
The polar bear is uniquely tied to the sea ice and the seals that need it to breed.
That ice is declining.
There’s no way, sadly, they are OK and I thing it even sadder that people seem to want to prove otherwise for political, not scientific ends.
This is not a report by a polar bear expert or anyone who really cares about the future of the arctic.
What are your qualifications Griff?
Griffikins,
As your betters have repeatedly told you, polar bears aren’t tied to drift ice. Sow bears rely on ringed seal lairs on landfast ice in the spring. That’s it. The rest of the year they, like boar bears, hunt equally well on land or sea.
Why do you refuse to learn from the world’s leading polar bear expert, Dr. Susan J. Crockford?
Griff,
Polar Bears International is an advocacy organization: like WWF or Greenpeace, the “information” they provide is that which supports their cause. It is filtered information that tells the story they want to tell – it’s not data. For the data, one needs to read the literature.
Your so-called “Hudson Bay population” is comprised of three subpopulations, all of which are currently stable.
Numbers in Foxe Basin at 2009 were an increase over the previous count and are now considered stable, despite less ice in summer than in the 1980s.
Numbers in Southern Hudson Bay – the most southerly subpopulation in the world – has been stable since the 1980s despite spending longer onshore in summer than they did in the 1980s.
Numbers in Western Hudson Bay (which included Churchill bears) – which is probably what you are calling the “Hudson Bay population” have been stable since 2004.
Furthermore, breakup and freezeup for WHB have been stable in recent years. Breakup and freezeup are always highly variable but the shift to about 3 weeks longer for the onshore period happened back in the early 2000s and has not changed since. I’ve checked the actual literature that reports this data, which is what any competent scientist has to do.
As I said in the video, Svalbard bear numbers increased 42% between 2004 and 2015, despite the poor ice conditions. I don’t question the lack of ice around Svalbard and lack of denning there – but Norwegian scholars acknowledge that Franz Josef Land to the east (in Russia) is a viable denning alternative for Svalbard females in poor ice years and the increase in numbers was actually expected (I can give you the references if you like).
As for Beaufort Sea bears, the last population count (conducted 2001-2010) included a period of known decline due to thick spring ice (2004-2006) which is documented in the literature. Any decline in numbers cannot legitimately be blamed on reduced summer sea ice *even if summer sea ice was reduced* – that’s a correlation, not a causation.
All those Beaufort Sea bears you say are “tied to whale carcasses left by native hunters” are fat and healthy bears, judging from the pictures in recent years. Last summer, a fat sow with a litter of fat triplets was photographed: as triplets are very rarely seen outside Western Hudson Bay, some of these bears are clearly doing very well despite spending a few weeks more time onshore over the summer.
In fact, the Chukchi Sea has had a larger decline in summer sea ice than Beaufort Sea bears, but recent studies show those bears have not suffered any impact to their reproductive or survival potential due to spending a month or so longer onshore and are in better shape than they were in the 1980s when there was more summer ice. Read the papers, Griff! Press releases are not peer reviewed.
Sea ice conditions in spring – when polar bears do most of their feeding – has not changed much at all, allowing the bears to get as fat as they need to be to survive through the rest of the year. Even sea ice ‘experts’ don’t expect these spring conditions to change much over the next 35 years – that’s why the focus of all this PBI angst is over summer sea ice.
Despite your lame regurgitation of PBI talking points and attempts to discount my qualifications, the data from recently studied subpopulations around the world support the conclusion that polar bears are thriving despite the dramatic loss of summer sea ice.
*Any* unbiased scientist with more than 40 years of experience doing this kind of analysis on a variety of species could only conclude that summer sea ice is not essential habitat for polar bears and at present, polar bears are doing well and not threatened with extinction.
Dr. Susan Crockford, zoologist
Correct! Dr. Crockford.
Griff has not learned what Polar Bears International is.
Are they the ones who banned a real scientist from a conference several year ago because he was going to give facts?
Well said. Unfortunately Dr. you didn’t source your information and data from The Guardian, like Griff does, so your expert analysis of the situation is very wrong.
Do I need a /sarc off?
Griff? Griff? [crickets] Where’d you go?
Again, the Grifter simply repeats the same propaganda that has just been debunked. Goebbles methodology is not complex – he just doesn’t have another button.
And his phony maudlin sentiments are the sort of thing that promotes projectile vomiting.
Back around 2002 or 2003, when the hand-wringing over polar bears really got going, I went on various environmental sites (like WWF) to see what their surveys were really saying. I came across papers like this one (https://portals.iucn.org/library/efiles/documents/ssc-op-026.pdf), which is still online. The interesting thing is their table 1. I’ve listed some of the fields from that table here:
These papers usually divide the Arctic into about twenty to twenty-two population groups (the Arctic is not just one, monolithic climatic zone). This paper has twenty populations and most were steady or unknown. Two populations were decreasing and two were increasing.
I found that the temperature changes in these zones were interesting too. Those with steady bear populations had steady temperatures. Those two regions with decreasing bear population had decreasing temperatures, And the two regions where the bear populations were increasing had increasing temperatures. It was the opposite of what the alarmists were saying.
The real problem with decreasing bear populations had more to do with over hunting than anything to do with global warming. It’s too bad that polar bears get all the press. There are bear species that are really endangered, and you’d think environmentalist would focus on them.
Jim
You can read about the barring of Dr. Mitchell Taylor from a conference in Copenhagen in 2009 here:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/27/warmists-deny-copenhagen-access-to-polar-bear-scientist/
The start of the post says:
Warmists deny Copenhagen access to polar bear scientist
Anthony Watts / June 27, 2009
From the UK Telegraph 26 June 2009
Christopher Booker
POLAR BEAR EXPERT BARRED BY WARMISTS
Over the coming days a curiously revealing event will be taking place in Copenhagen. Top of the agenda at a meeting of the Polar Bear Specialist Group, set up under the International Union for the Conservation of Nature/Species Survival Commission, will be the need to produce a suitably scary report on how polar bears are being threatened with extinction by man-made global warming.
This is one of a steady drizzle of events planned to stoke up alarm in the run-up to the UN’s major conference on climate change in Copenhagen next December. But one of the world’s leading experts on polar bears has been told to stay away from this week’s meeting, specifically because his views on global warming do not accord with the views of the rest of the group.
Dr Mitchell Taylor has been researching into the status and management of polar bears in Canada and around the Arctic Circle for 30 years, as both an academic and a government employee. More than once since 2006 he has made headlines by insisting that polar bear numbers, far from decreasing, are much higher than they were 30 years ago. Of the 19 different bear populations, almost all are increasing or at optimum levels, only two have for local reasons modestly declined.
For those interested, here is the science behind the video, published 28 Feb 2017:
https://peerj.com/preprints/2737v2/
Citation:
Crockford, S.J. 2017 v2. Testing the hypothesis that routine sea ice coverage of 3-5 mkm2 results in a greater than 30% decline in population size of polar bears (Ursus maritimus). PeerJ Preprints 28 February 2017. Doi: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.2737v2 Open access. https://peerj.com/preprints/2737v2/
[Version 2, published 28 February, incorporates additional reviewer comments and suggestions received on Version 1 (published 19 January), as well as new data from Baffin Bay, Kane Basin, and Barents Sea.
Here is another great video, but full length documentary.
The Great Global Warming Swindle!
https://www.google.com/url?q=http://m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DD-m09lKtYT4&sa=U&ei=Bvn4VK6sI4r6yASv3oE4&ved=0CAsQtwIwAA&usg=AFQjCNE_77YLiaG7-eh73StPLTlV5eZF-Q