Here’s a trip down memory lane for Arctic sea ice at the end of July, which as far as I can see provides no evidence that a very low sea ice disaster is in the cards for polar bears this year.
A look at this year first:
The ice in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas is primarily thick multiyear ice (brown), as the charts below show (Chukchi and western Beaufort first) from the Alaska Sea Ice Program. Wrangel Island in the western Chukchi Sea, which is a major denning area and summer refuge for polar bears, is still surrounded by ice (in fact, ice is covering most of the label for the Chukchi Sea):
Eastern to central Beaufort, from the Canadian Ice Service, for the week of 26 July. That open water provides important ice-edge feeding areas for seals (and thus hunting potential for bears):
Hudson Bay is virtually ice free at this point, which is earlier than the last few years but not extraordinarily so, as I explained last week. As I also pointed out in that post, there is almost certainly more ice present than is shown on this map, due to the problems that satellites have interpreting melting ice. Oddly, Andrew Derocher has not updated the tracking map for his remaining bears with satellite collars since 19 July: I guess he is too busy. Same thing regarding the Town of Churchill problem bear reports, which haven’t been updated since 12 July. However, some of the bears that came ashore near Churchill and are hanging out on the shore of Wapusk National Park have been spotted by the Explore.org live cams.
Compare this year to previous years
2021
2020
2019
2018:
2017:
2016:
2015:
2014:
2013 (the Canadian chart is the only one I have in my archive for this period in 2013):
Here is Canada this year for comparison to 2013 above:
I don’t see a looming sea ice catastrophe for 2021, do you see a looming sea ice catastrophe?
6.8 Wadhams worth of Arctic sea ice end July is only a reputational catastrophe for Wadhams. Who richly deserves the ridicule.
Plus, as Dr. Crockford has explained, polar bears do not depend on summer sea ice. They get about 85% of their annual caloric intake by gorging during the spring seal whelping season. Nobody claims the Arctic will be ice free in the spring.
During the Holocene there have been long periods when the arctic was quite a bit warmer than it is now. Spring sea ice did not exist in many areas during those warmer times and yet the polar bears obviously survived. link Much/most/all of the arctic has been seasonally ice free some time during the last 10,000 years. My guess is that, if there’s no ice, the seals will come ashore to have their pups.
So where do seals whelp when there isn’t ice? I doubt they just hold the pups in until fall. Is there some reason the bears can’t catch them on land?
Elephant seals whelp on the beach in California, visible from the Pacific Coast Highway. No reason why the seals in the arctic would not do the same thing if there is no ice. They must have done so during the especially warm times in the past. Seems like helpless seal pups on the beach would be easy prey for hungry bears, sort of like strolling through the fresh meats section of a supermarket….
When is it ice free in the spring. Inquiring minds and what not.
loocyyy, you got sum splain’in to do…..
Calling griff, time to apologize to Dr Crockford, and then you can let me know, given all the climatological catastrophes cascading across our fragile globe…in which time period would you prefer to live your life?
[__] Benign low CO2 1675-1750
[__] “Dangerous” CO2 1950-2025
O, just leave him/her alone. Don’t rub it in.
Nope. Rub it in. Rub it in hard and often!
That’s true. The more it’s rubbed in, the less he will be able to escape it. Fitting punishment to his or her deathbed, and it’s legal too.
…. and he/she only gets one life.
Maybe but the borg lives on
Yes, 40 grit kosher salt with a belt sander.
Griff was told the truth by many and refused to accept reality. Abuse will ensure a more humble approach in future. Ie. he deserves it.
No! But Griff claims to have been seeing it for a decade or so now!
Many thanks for the update. It confirms once again that the alarmists are getting all het up about nothing
The climate worriers have had nothing but end-of-hype bad news of late. They’ve had to come out and trash the models (based on physics doncha know) that are projecting warming 300% too high. They knew this a decade and a half ago, but were hopefull after weathering the heartbreaking 18yr pause, only to plunge into a 6 year cooling period after brief relief caused by an el Niño in 2015. They were smoked out.
One can’t but feel some pity for them when you see the pictures of truly the fattest healthiest polar bears seen in half a lifetime – a female with bustling triplets no less. This is the longest silence we’ve had from the polar bear ‘specialist’ group a sure sign of defeat and despair. I love Susan’s jaunty reporting, her love of the bears and the civil harpooning of the frodily ‘specialists’. The University of Victoria who dismissed Susan at the behest of polar bearly boffins and Michael “Disgrace to the Profession” Mann should have a mountain of publicity because of this. I see a flurry of Climateer retirements to preserve pensions in the tea leaves.
Actually, I feel slightly sorry (but only slightly) for all the Climate “Scientists”, who must be waking up to the fact that they have wasted their lives and careers on a complete lie. No amount of money or number of academic awards can ever compensate for that.
“They knew this a decade and a half ago, but were hopefull after weathering the heartbreaking 18yr pause, only to plunge into a 6 year cooling period after brief relief caused by an el Niño in 2015.”
Things are going from bad to worse for the alarmists. That’s good for the rest of us. It means it is not as bad as the alarmists claim.
“do you see a looming sea ice catastrophe?”
Yes. I see grief approaching in 3.. 2.. 1..
You misspelled Griff
Same difference
I know what I meant. But, looks like he’s giving this article a wide berth. Wonder why?
No north-east passage nor a north-west passage this year. If you booked a cruise, tough.
Dearest Griffypoo,
If CO2 be the control knob on sea ice, please explain then why 2012 is still the low for Arctic sea ice extent, while the 42 year record high in Antarctic sea ice was registered in 2014. And why at this point, 2021 ranks third in extent since 1979, when dedicated satellite observations began.
Thanks!
The usual good comments from Dr. Susan. Why is that mother polar bear and her two yearling cubs looking directly at me like that?
Lunch!
Allied to this, is there any naturally occuring open sea passages through the American Arctic? This was predicted would be happening for a substantial period of the summer not so many years ago?
I can’t see any open passages in these maps.
From the article: “I don’t see a looming sea ice catastrophe for 2021, do you see a looming sea ice catastrophe?”
No, I don’t.
All those maps look pretty much the same to me. The differences are small.
How is it that you people can’t see how emaciated and near death those bears are? Another year and between the three of them there’ll be a ton and a half of cuddly carnivore.
And apparently you don’t understand that you’re drowning in floods, burning up in heat waves and wildfires and whatnot like griff keeps reminding us? How can you be so unobservant?
Things are fine at my place in central Indiana and everywhere I’ve driven. Our cat loves to sit in the bay window in our small dining room. Today I saw a humming bird just tease the heck out her. It was going after the flowers and then saw her and came up and hovered as they do, moving quickly back and forth. The more agitated the cat got the more it teased her. That was a first for me.
The hummingbird was just trying to raise your cat’s consciousness of the imminent disastrous calamities that are already happening EVERYWHERE, ALL THE TIME!!
So this is really funny.
Just mention polar bears or arctic sea ice and Griff takes grief.
If Ed didn’t exist he would have to be invented.
How do you spell EPIC FAIL? G_r_i_f_f
Oh, so you know his first name, too. 🙂
Is griff’s real name Edward Griffin?
How do you know this?
His name was shown here in one post, years ago.
Some of us have long memories. 🙂
I think the occasion was the last time Anthony kicked Griff off the website. Anthony was kind of upset with him at the time.
What I see is a looming bumper year for taking of Polar Bears by hunters.
You’re so cruel. All they want is a Coke and a smile. (They’ll eat the smile off your face while you’re drinking your cola).
Wonder if leaving a case of Woke A Cola out would be considered baiting?
Polar bears are a very recent new “species”.
They appeared around the start of the previous Eemian interglacial. As recent as that, only ~150,000 years ago.
They’re not yet really a species at all, they still interbreed with grizzlies, it takes roughly a million years for a species to fully speciate. Most species also only last for about one million years, the two time durations are no doubt linked.
The appearance of a new white polar bear is a sign of deepening glaciation over the timescale of the Pleistocene and especially the last million years or so after interglacials became less frequent (at 100,000 year instead of 40,000 year intervals).