Reposted from Dr. Susan Crockford’s Polar Bear Science
Beaufort Sea ice coverage is about average for this time of year, again failing to decline in lock-step with other Arctic regions. Will there be lots of fat bears onshore like there was in 2019? Only time will tell.
Ice breakup on Hudson Bay ice has been faster than average this year even though last year and the year before were as slow as the 1980s, but the Beaufort Sea has shown a different pattern. What they had in common was 1998, which was a low point for both regions, as the graph for the Western Canadian Arctic shows below:
Here’s the ice chart for all of Canada and the Beaufort Sea in Alaska at 16 July 2021, which has retreated a bit beyond that recorded in weekly charts:
Below is what this year’s Beaufort Sea ice coverage looks like on the CIS chart showing ice stage of development (i.e. thickness) for the week of 12 July 2021, showing how much thick, multiyear ice is still present (brown), and where dark green is thick first year ice >1m:
Compare the above weekly ‘stage of development’ chart to the one from 2019 below, when sea ice retreat was more advanced; only in 1998 was the ice further offhsore at mid-July (according to the graph above):
However, recall that the summer of 2019 was also the year when a survey of the Alaska coast in July showed more bears onshore (31) than in 2017 (3) when sea ice retreat was similar (and compared to 2012, when none were spotted) but all of those photographed in 2019 were fat and healthy:
So much for the ‘less summer sea ice = polar bears starved into extinction‘ meme.
Lets try ‘less summer sea ice=more food for polar bears‘.
PS. The last Southern Beaufort population survey showing no further decline in numbers since 2010 but it only went up to 2015.
Yes, this year the Beaufort is melting late…
but you wouldn’t have been able to use the misleading ‘as much’ headline in most of the last decade, would you?
and meanwhile the Atlantic side of the sea ice is rubble and the extent is once again hovering around second/third lowest for date. Even with average melt, the ice will end up in third lowest place.
Third lowest since modern (highly time-biased) records began, yes, but in geological terms it’s meaningless. There is a mountain of evidence showing that ice extent was lower within recorded history, and the land itself tells us that the poles were warmer within the span of modern human existence. Much warmer. All of this panic over something that isn’t even causing problems for the bears, it’s all meaningless.
Can’t find it as yet, (changed puters & haven’t yet been able to access previous data!) but there was a letter written by Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, written in 1817, to the Lords of the Admiralty, after an Arctic expedition, commenting upon the ice that has encompassed the region for centuries, “is much abated!” suggesting a new source of warmth has occurred, potentially opening up the region for trade & exploration!!! Oh & here in the UK the system has already been claiming that the unusual but glorious heatwave is a direct result of globul warming, never miss an opportunity do they? The only FINAL SOLUTION to alleged manmade globul warming, is the destruction of “free-enterprise” capitalism, & the adoption of a Globul ONE-WORLD guvment, run by the intellectual Wealthy Intellectual Elites, run on Socialist lines whereby the peasants (you & me) will be ruled by the WIE’s, Socialism is definitely NOT for them, taxed, almost to the point of oblivion, but not quite, otherwise they wouldn’t have anybody to tax!!!! Oh how it must be so awful for them to sit on some beautiful exotic beach so close to some peasants, spoiling their exclusive pleasure!!! Here in the UK we are bombarded by tv adverts begging for regular funding/sponsorship to prevent young African girls, aged between 7-13 years of age, being forced to marry men up to “three times their age”, often forced, some dying in childbirth when they are merely children themselves, yet the UN does absolutely nothing to highlight this primitive (we had this system in the Dark Ages in England for wealth & inheritance purposes etc) obscenity nor do they act against it, I do wonder where their priorities actually lie???
Third lowest since 2007 and 2012. Doesn’t your passive aggressive lame prediction of impending doom for humanity tell you that you need to find a more robust hobgoblin than “carbon”. It’s been such a slacker of late. Loonies like you are switching to “billionaires are horrid” and “street names are racist”. Come on griff, don’t be late to those parties.
Griff has been asked dozens of times how Polar Bears survived the Holocene Thermal Optimum. He has never deigned to reply.
Griff is a paranoid worry wort. People like this see no value in their life so they create a false sense of importance by telling others what issues are dangerous and must be addressed. Extensive therapy is the only way to combat this illness.
Or if griff gets cut from the alarmist payroll, Tom. That’ll cure what ails griff.
They didn’t survive. Captain Kirk went back in time and brought a breeding pair back.
So it wasn’t The Doctor in the Tardis, after all? But he said HE was the one that did that. I am SO disappointed in him!!!!
Rule 1: The Doctor Lies.
Sheesh phil, you want him to just be even more annoying by adding new obsessions?
The third lowest is up from the second lowest that you were proclaiming just a couple of weeks ago.
What happened, is the ice still not melting the way the sacred models say they should be melting?
Griffypoo, you provide no backup for anything you say.
Please spend more time with chocolate sundaes. You’ll be a lot happier.
So, griff, when would you prefer living so you can watch sea ice increase to massive amounts and the bears be saved from this obvious madness?
When? Any time prior to 1900 when demon CO2 was benign?
How about 1875 to 1950? CO2 still very tame. Presumably lots of bears.
Or now? Bear carcasses everywhere.
Last time I looked, Polar Bear numbers started to increase in the 1960s when hunting was banned, the numbers were apparently around 5000, then the numbers have rapidly increased since then to around 25,000, at least in the Western Arctic, not seen any numbers for the Russian sector!!!
Alan, correct. It seems the “control knob” driving polar bears to extinction is not excessive CO2, but excessive Pb, and I don’t mean leaded gasoline…
In 1960 when atmospheric CO2 was at 317 ppm, there were about 5,000 polar bears in the world.
Today CO2 is over 410 ppm and there are only 25,000 left.
More bad news for the griffter…Hudson Bay ice is not melting as fast as average….any ice at end of season means accumulation. The grifter is trying so hard not to be cancelled becuz he cannot melt the arctic…..griffter may be erased….melted away.
Poor griffie, stuck on stupid and no one to pull it out.
Yet you can’t show any evidence that it is hurting the Polar Bears health or population numbers.
You KNOW from my efforts at another blog to show you that Polar Bears lived for long periods of time with far less Summer ice than now to no summer ice at all. You say that was caused by Solar Insolation, but YOU misses the point because Polar Bears survived the centuries long lack of ice in the summer.
Your comment today doesn’t even say a thing about Polar Bears, just about how low sea ice is……, as you do over and over. You are BORING!
You are like a broken record, you repeat over and over about low sea ice, but ignore the main point about the post itself.
….. well, he wasn’t repeating it over and over earlier this year when the Arctic sea ice extent was a whole wadham above 2016.
I’m getting rather peed off with your discourteous manner! I have asked you twice now to kindly explain why, when there was 19 times as much CO2 in the atmosphere in the geological past, the Earth was smack bang in the middle of an Ice-Age!!! Please explain this geological anomaly, on the basis that Man’s paltry emissions of CO2 are damming the planet, when it’s never happened before??? Has your MODUL got an error in it, taking into account that all the PUTER moduls are totally perfect & infallible, & globul warmist scientifiky types are brilliant beyond compare, & never ever get things wrong??? As a structural engineer, if I’d have taken their bigoted, biased, prejudiced, unscientific attitude, people would have died, & I would be in jail!!! What’s your excuse???
But then … so what?
How do you know the polar bear population isn’t really on decline? Do a Google news search on “Polar bear” with a past week filter You get 1 2 3 4 Next. and a lot of it is about sports teams named “The Polar Bears” Do the same with “Sea Level” and you get 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Next and it’s mostly about “Climate Change”
Noting what isn’t there is part of observation. In this case, the number of polar bears in the news stories over the last decade or so seems to have declined. What does that tell you?
“In this case, the number of polar bears in the news stories over the last decade or so seems to have declined. What does that tell you?”
It tells that global warming is acting upon the brains of alarmist and making them lose memory.
The karmic irony of aborting a handmade tale that was not viable. A weird faith and religion. One step forward, two steps backward.
Karmic irony & handmade tale:
Nice terms and brings to mind the off topic and favorite phony tale of methane:
Over the years the IPCC’s assessment reports with their Global Warming Potential numbers have said that methane is 63, 56, 62, 72 & 85 times more powerful at trapping heat than CO2. But they have NEVER said how much methane will actually contribute to global warming. That’s because it is statistically nothing.
Smart money says the IPCC’s AR6 will claim methane is over 100 times more powerful than CO2.
I’ve seen numbers that methane absorbs 21 times more IR radiation that CO2, on a per-molecule basis. But if CO2 is present at about 410 ppm, and methane at less than 2 ppm, then the total effect on “global warming” of methane is less than 10% of that of CO2.
Methane also does not tend to accumulate in the atmosphere, because its molecular weight (about 16) is much lower than that of the rest of the atmosphere (about 29 on average), while CO2 with its molecular weight of 44 tends to stay low in the atmosphere, where it can be re-circulated by photosynthesis.
Methane tends to rise in the atmosphere, and since molecular velocity increases as molecular weight decreases, it tends to escape into space at the “top” of the atmosphere.
Also, corporations have a much stronger incentive to capture and use methane (as a fuel) than any emitters of CO2, for whom CO2 is simply a by-product of combustion.
For all of the above reasons, it is unlikely that methane will play much of a role in any warming of the atmosphere.
It tells me that the polar bears are doing fine, so they are being ignored by the alarmists.
Tells me we shouldn’t count polar bears by searching Google. Better to count them by actually counting them.
It’s why griff focuses on ice extent. He takes it as a given that less ice means fewer healthy bears. Just as he takes it as a given that more CO2 means hotter and also that hotter (more accurately “slightly warmer”) is harmful.
It ain’t the things you don’t know that get you in trouble, it’s the things you know that just aren’t true.
How’s the tee shirt go? When Al Gore first warned us about global warming there were 5,000 polar bears. Now there are only 35,000 left!
The “how did the polar bears survive the end of the last ice age” 10-12Ky ago (global temps up 4-5C, ice retreated 1000s of km, sea levels rose 110m over a few thousand years, etc etc) can be mapped onto a question pertinent to Australia – how did the Great Barrier reef survive all this “catastrophic global warming” so recently, yet be deemed incapable of putting up with a 150y climate drift of a degree?
My favorite polar bear quote is from some internet wag. I am poorly mis-quoting from memory.
“When Al Gore was born, there were only 6,000 polar bears on the planet. In his film An Inconvenient Truth, he predicted their extinction. Now, only 34,000 polar bears remain!”
If someone has a source for the original (and cares) please correct my quote.
If an actual polar bear expert want to correct my numbers, likewise put in the real numbers of polar bears over a documented time frame to show the actual “decline”.
So, yet again, the polar bears are doing just fine. That makes griffie and the climanistas sad.
Photo: Healthy polar bear male at Kaktovik, . . .
It is amazing to me that the term “healthy” applies.
If a human male had that body shape he would need gastric bypass surgery.
I wonder if the photographer was thinking of running.
Thanks Susan.
Yeah fat to burn for half a year. They can run fast and they have been observed to swim up to 600km.
I worked on a project in Tanzania and in a slack period visited Mount Meru game park. We drove up to a lake and noted a hippo and its foal(?) grazing about 100m from the water. When they saw us they began running to the lake. Man, they looked to be running as fast as a horse. I guess naturally fat animals can be in good shape.
I was thinking of running just looking at the picture. My God, if you turned the corner and came face to face with that!
Polar bears are not cuddly CocaCola drinkers.
I think that healthy bear has eaten so many seal pups that it could do with going out and swimming a few laps of the Arctic Ocean, and maybe a bit of jogging too.
Just not near me.
The most pernicious part of Griff’s post below is nothing to do with Polar Bears or Arctic Ice. I’m not even sure that Griff recognises this.
It is the idea that several near-contiguous “records” means something more meaningful than the record itself.
For example: If you walk, carefully, 10 meters from the summit of Mt. Everest, should you be surprised that you are still higher than any other summit in the world?
Is the second highest day in a stock market index most likely to be one day previous to or succeeding the highest day? I believe it is. I am confident enough to say that without a detailed study paid for by tax payers. It is obvious to anyone who has studied the real world in other disciplines.
Yes, we are indeed probably in a globally ‘warm period’ that hasn’t been seen since the 1930’s, possibly even earlier still. But the constant affliction of us by the media talking about multiple successive records carries a lot of weight in the minds of the public. I think most of them (media) are not malicious, just ill-informed by those who claim it is their job to inform those who inform most of the public.
As I have often said, organisations like the BBC have a formal duty to educate, yet they cannot educate themselves.
Sea-ice level seems to have no negative correlation to polar bear health and numbers. Likewise, emissions of CO2 has no negative correlation to polar bear health and numbers. The only known negative correlation to polar bear health and numbers are emissions of Pb from the likes of Remington, Colt, and Bushmaster.