Susan Crockford
We’ve got ourselves another round of field data–i.e., facts–not fitting the polar-bears-are-starving-to-death narrative. According to polar bear specialist Andrew Derocher, Western Hudson Bay polar bears his team saw in April while installing collars and ear tags were in good shape this year, as he said they were last year. There was no spring field work in 2021 and 2020 but in 2019, he also said the bears he saw were in good condition.
Two years in a row of bears in good condition in spring–with no mention of starving bears–does not fit the picture of a population supposedly declining due to starvation. The most recent population count for WH, which garnered wide-spread media attention just before Christmas last year, claims that a 27% decline in numbers took place between 2017 and the fall of 2021 even though sea ice conditions had been good during those five years as well. It’s a perplexing situation. Makes me really wonder what that survey report actually says, but it still hasn’t been released, five months after the results made news around the world.
Spring WH bear reports
Andrew Derocher and his team of students from University of Alberta have been monitoring WH polar bears for years. They go out every spring, in April, to tag and collar bears. Derocher communicates almost exclusively via Twitter, so there is seldom anything more than brief snippets of information provided. Links below to his original tweets:
Spring 2023 – bears reported in good condition
Spring 2022 – bears reported in good condition
Spring 2021 – no field work but a population survey was done that fall
Spring 2020 – no field work but a number of bears left the ice as late as the 1980s, in mid-to-late August
Spring 2019 – bears reported in good condition and left the ice in August, as late as 1980s
Hudson Bay sea ice conditions
The patch of thick sea ice (>1m, dark green) over the central portion of the bay isn’t as extensive as it often is in early May, which may mean breakup will come earlier than it has for the last few years:
Compare above to 2020 at 4 May:
The polar bear alarm fundamentally failed on bad biological ‘science’. Polar bears get 70-80% of their annual caloric intake during the spring seal whelping season. Nobody ever said a globally warmed Arctic winter would not result in sufficient spring whelping ice. The alarmist canard that summer Arctic ice would disappear by about 2014 was ALWAYS irrelevant to polar bears. And, it didn’t happen.
This is but one of many amusing alarmist prediction failures. Some favorite others:
You can NOT fight a progressive dogma with mere facts. As they manufacture their own facts quite freely, they just know that you do the same.
Correlation is not causation.
The fact that polar bears are not starving to death does not disprove the fact that your CO2 emissions are destroying ecosystems (in places that most people have never been and will never go)
You should have stopped after the first line.
The rest is a fact-free assertion — something a cult member has ingested.
I should have added “sarc”.
Yes
I read this comment just in time before I got out my virtual sledgehammer. 🙂
There was no need for a /sarc. It was obvious to anyone for whom:
A) English was a first language .
And
B) A sense of humour was inate.
But look at all the down votes!
Arctic sea ice was lower for most of the Holocene, ie the past 11,400 years, without harming polar bears. For that matter, their less “derived” ancestors weathered the hotter, longer Eemian interglacial just fine.
These ancestors more than 115 Ka were already seal-eating specialists descended from brown bears, but with fewer of the further adaptations of modern polies.
Makes me really wonder what that survey report actually says, but it still hasn’t been released, five months after the results made news around the world.
Why would they? It leaves their report open to critical analysis and the possibility of being refuted. An informed public is antithetical to the Leftist agenda. Half truths and hyperbole are their favored methods for a
conversationdialogcommunicationindoctrination.Are the polar bears still an issue for global warming proponents? I’ll go check their sites, I guess. I remember around the time of Inconvenient Truth, polar bear population seemed to be an issue, then it “went away”. If the bear population still matters, the specific population referenced in the movie should now be a relevant data point.
“Polar bears can live up to 25 or 30 years in the wild.”
“An Inconvenient Truth is a 2006 American documentary film “