Susan Crockford
As this year draws to a close, it is worth noting that over the last 12 months — and contrary to predictions and headlines, including claims about “the warmest year ever” — polar bears have not been reported dying, starving, or eating each other in large numbers, or relentlessly attacking people. On top of that, summer sea ice coverage in the Arctic has stalled for the last 17 years, not melted out in a death spiral of rotten ice.
Except for the lying and obfuscation that most of us have come to expect, I’ve mostly been left to reiterate that polar bears are not “canaries in the coal mine” indicators of climate change and to point out that Arctic sea ice extent and polar bear survival are not inextricably tied. For example, in some specific areas of interest, like Western Hudson Bay, there has not been a consistent decline in sea ice over the last few decades and bears are not attacking people at increased rates because they are desperately hungry. In other areas, like the Svalbard area of the western Barents Sea, sea ice has declined dramatically in recent years yet polar bears have not been attacking people more than usual.
Contradictions and failed predictions abound.
All in all, a rather boring year for the anticipated implosion of polar bear health and survival, despite my constant tracking of publicly-available information. That said, I would like to take this opportunity to thank you all again for your continued support, and especially those who have donated hard-earned cash over the last few months: your support makes it possible for me to continue my work keeping polar bear science honest. Together, we have made a difference and I know it’s worth the fight. Because if we let evidence-based science die without challenge, we lose our ability to make sense of the world.
All the best for 2024 to you all.
Arctic ecology 2023 update
From this month’s NOAA Arctic Report Card for 2023 on sea ice:
Also according to NOAA researchers, primary productivity in 2023 continued to be higher than 2003 across the Arctic, with increased values especially in the Barents Sea and Hudson Bay which ultimately benefits polar bears with more seals to eat:
Buy her latest book on polar bear evolution from brown bears. Really interesting stuff. Shows Derocher and Sterling (‘expert’ polar bear climate alarmists) did not just get the current polar bear annual biology wrong, they never bothered to understand how the current biology came to be via speciation during the past 2 million year ‘ice age’. Hopelessly inexpert ‘experts’.
Polar bear and Brown bear are still the same species, just specialized for 2 distinct ecosystems, ice and water, and forest and prairies respectively.
That is why they can breed and their offspring can breed. They “evolved” their special traits to the need of their environment BUT what is unknown is why they separated into two such distinct habitats and thus became so different while being of the same species. Did a group of the brown ones get cut off from their forest habitat and gradually become white and webbed footed, or did some white ones get cut off from the ocean and became the brown not web footed grizzly we now know?
I know I am repeating myself, but I think this bears repeating.
Dogs, dingoes, cayotes, wolves, are all just one species, DOG. Take any 2, (one male one female, for those recently “educated” to think gender is fluid) selectively breed for a couple or 10 centuries and you can recreate all the deferent dogs out there today.
Apparently lions and tigers are also the same species. Who’d of thunk it.
Actually Drake, this just isn’t so. With all due respect, I think you need to read my book. Polar bears and brown bears are NOT the same species. Brown bears and polar bears are closely related but have distinct physical, physiological, and ecological traits that make them unique biological entities.
Some classify wolves and dogs as the same species (I do not) but as far as I know, NO ONE classifies dogs, coyotes, and wolves as the same species. There is no agreed-upon level of genetic relatedness that signifies whether two entities are the same species or not, which is why the dog/wolf classification gets contentious.
And I have never seen lions and tigers referred to as the same species. Again, I think you should read my book, which might sort out your confusion. I do think you’d find it of interest.
As I understand, for polar bears and brown bears to be of the same species, they would have to be able to mate and produce fertile offspring. There are some species which are closely related and can produce offspring when they mate, but the offspring are not fertile. This means they are not of the same species, although related. An example is, the female horse and a male donkey. They can mate, but the offspring, called a mule, is not fertile.
I presume the polar bear and the brown bear can produce a hybrid offspring which is not fertile, therefore, by definition, they are not of the same species. Is this correct?
However, a search on Google revealed the following Wiki article addressing this issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursid_hybrid#:~:text=Brown%20%C3%97%20polar%20bear%20hybrids,-Polar%2Fbrown%20bear&text=Since%201874%2C%20at%20Halle%2C%20a,species%20and%20with%20one%20another
“Since 1874, at Halle, a series of successful matings of polar and brown bears were made. Some of the hybrid offspring were exhibited by the London Zoological Society. The Halle hybrid bears proved to be fertile, both with one of the parent species and with one another. Polar × brown bear hybrids are white at birth but later turn blue-brown or yellow-white.”
Just because 2 animals can produce a hybrid species as a result doesn’t make them the same species.
Richard is correct. Species distinction is more complicated than not being able to produce a fertile hybrid offspring.
Polar bears and brown bears can indeed produce fertile offspring but credible scientist has suggested that they are the same species. They are simply too different in so many ways. It’s one of the reasons I find the topic of speciation to be so fascinating, and why the brown bear/polar bear relationship is so important to sort out.
It is my opinion that the decision ~two decades ago to classify domestic dogs as a subspecies of wolf, i.e. Canis lupus familiaris, was premature and inaccurate. As I discuss in my book, recent genetic analysis shows that living wolves are not ancestral to domestic dogs. I am convinced that dogs will eventually be restored to Canis familiaris.
Lions and tigers are two different species. That is a fact.
There are two different kinds of hybrids, ligers and tigons.
“The liger is a hybrid offspring of a male lion (Panthera leo) and a tigress, or female tiger (Panthera tigris).”
Tigons are created the opposite way.
Both have a long and detailed history on the record, although they are mostly known from hybrids born in captivity.
They were both long considered sterile, but there are documented instances of each of them having viable offspring.
Then there is the issue of Haldanes rule.
In short, and for example, male ligers are sterile, while female ligers are not:
“In September 2012, the Russian Novosibirsk Zoo announced the birth of a “liliger“, the offspring of a liger mother and a lion father. The cub was named Kiara.[28]”
Even cursory research on the topic of each of these sets of animals mentioned here, bears, dogs, big cats, quickly reveals that all of the separate common names we have, also have a distinct species name.
Doys and coyotes and wolves are not the same species, unless you have your own way of deciding such things based only on whether it is possible for them to interbreed. I recall reading many decades ago, something along the lines of defining a species that way, but clearly, it is not how zoologists define species, since it is known that these animals can produce fertile offspring (although they rarely or almost never or actually never do in the wild), and yet they all have their own distinct species names.
If one simply looks up what the definition of a species is, it is stated that the most common definition is in fact a question of ability to produce fertile offspring, but also that there is far more to it than that.
Detailed discussions of the topic point out that the idea of defining a species according to only the ability to produce fertile offspring is highly problematic, and in fact creates an unworkable definition.
It turns out there are at least 27 different concepts of what constitutes a species, each of which is called a “species concept.”
Collectively, these are part of what is known as the “species problem”.
The easiest way to understand this is, there is no law of nature that forces various organisms to conform to our at times half-baked, and very often ad hoc, notions of zoological classifications.
I agree. Like many things we take for granted, and much of what I learned when I was young, there is far more complexity and considerable debate about things that were taught as “settled” in the past.
My understanding is there remains debate about how to define species and there is certainly abuse of such controversies for other purposes as when environmental activists define subspecies as if they were distinct species when they may only be geographically localized parts of or phenotypic variations of the same species.
This definition is used to claim a “species” at risk from something humans are doing. This is done in order to constrain the human activities, but it doesn’t reflect nature’s view of how the world works. Let’s not forget that almost all species that have ever existed on Earth are extinct. We are only cohabiting with those species that survived to or emerged in our current period of Earth’s history. All species are doomed to extinction. Nothing is permanent.
Surely it depends upon the definition of the word ‘species’. If two creatures with similar features, but perhaps a different colour and different size, and which perhaps thrive in different environments, can interbreed and produce fertile offspring, then perhaps they meet the definition of ‘same species’.
An example is dark-skin humans compared with white-skin humans. Dark-skin humans developed a dark skin in order to protect themselves from excessive exposure to the sun, in the tropics, in Africa. When they migrated to cooler climates further from the equator, they had a survival problem due to their dark skin, which caused a vitamin D deficiency.
Those born with a slightly lighter skin had a survival advantage and that advantage continued with increasingly lighter skin that developed over thousands of years, which is an example of the process of evolution.
However, the darkest-skin African is still the same species as the lightest-skin European.
All human beings are of the same species no matter their inherited familial traits. It is wrong to assume that the lighter skin of northern europeans is evolution in action, it isn’t, it’s a increase or decrease in melanin, a skin pigment – otherwise we would only burn but never tan. A higher level.of melanin can be inherited as a familial trait but it can also be developed within a group as an inherited trait, as can a decrease. It’s adaptation not evolution.
If less melanin aids in producing vitamin D in northern Europeans- isn’t that considered as evolution? At least that’s the way it has been explained. But that bit of evolution doesn’t make a new species of humans.
No. Sunlight creates vitamin D in humans, melanin prevents too much vitamin D from being created. As humans moved further and further north we needed less melanin because the sunlight was more diffuse in higher latitudes; eventually the melanin in our bodies grew less and less as we needed more and more sunlight and our skin became much paler. Conversely, the humans that moved closer to the equator, away from the tropic areas where we’d evolved, needed more melanin and developed a much darker skin tone. This is adaptation not evolution.
There is no such thing as too much production of vitamin D2 in skin. The reason for the dark skin is to protect folate (vitamin B9) from degredation by UV A and B. Here also there is a very strong selective pressure as folate deficiency increases the risk of malformations of the neural tube (spina bifida).
Or use Darwin’s term, natural selection.
Evolution implies actual changes in DNA somehow. Natural selection, on my opinion, implies all the DNA necessary is already there, it just takes time for the recessive genes to come to the forefront and dominate a gene pool.
The men and women with lighter skin were more healthy due to V D levels being increased so they lived longer and were able to have more offspring and more healthy offspring. The farther from the equator, lighter the skin, the healthier the offspring.
Diet could cause this natural selection of paler skin to NOT occur, as is the case with the Inuit (Eskimo) who’s diet was almost exclusively animal based until recently, which provided the needed V D. With the change to a more “modern” diet, their health suffered. From wiki:
Diet[edit]
Historically Inuit cuisine, which is taken here to include Greenlandic cuisine, Yup’ik cuisine and Aleut cuisine, consisted of a diet of animal source foods that were fished, hunted, and gathered locally.
In the 20th century the Inuit diet began to change and by the 21st century the diet was closer to a Western diet. After hunting, they often honour the animals’ spirit by singing songs and performing rituals. Although traditional or country foods still play an important role in the identity of Inuit, much food is purchased from the store, which has led to health problems and food insecurity.[82][83] According to Edmund Searles in his article Food and the Making of Modern Inuit Identities, they consume this type of diet because a mostly meat diet is “effective in keeping the body warm, making the body strong, keeping the body fit, and even making that body healthy”.[8
Sorry! You are not making much sense. Black people have a greater degree of melanin in the skin, which protects them from excessive amounts of UV radiation in the sunny climates near the equator, where they evolved. In those days, hundreds of thousands of years ago, they didn’t have clothes and sun screen lotion, and would have spent many hours in the sun each day, hunting for food.
Evolution is a result of genetic mutations which give the individual of a species a survival advantage.
Every person is genetically different to some degree. Even identical twins are not truly identical. They pick up genetic mutations in the womb, but each twin does not pick up the same type and same number of genetic mutations.
Whilst I admit that the ‘Out of Africa’ theory has problems regarding the location in Africa where humans first evolved, and the timing of their first exit, and the number of migrations that occurred, there seems to be a general agreement amongst Evolutionary Anthropologists, that Africa, as a whole, was the location of the first Homo Sapiens.
Of course a higher or a lower level of melanin can be in herited as a family trait. If a black couple were to produce a child with a brown or white skin, that would be due to a genetic mutation, and in Africa, thousands of years ago, such a child would probably soon die of skin cancer. However, if the black couple were to migrate northward from the equator, the child would stand a better chance of survival.
People adapt by changing their behaviour and activities to help them deal better with environmental and other issues. Genetic mutations are a fundamental requirement for evolution to take place.
A lack of Vitamin D is a common problem in modern societies where people avoid exposing themselves to the sun without applying sun screen lotion. Sun screen lotion blocks the UV rays and prevents the body from producing Vitamin D.
Africa is a very large continent and, according to the research I’ve seen, humans evolved away from the equator towards the tropic regions. As to the rest of it you are confusing inherited genes with genetic mutations – babies do not pick up genetic mutations in the womb, on the whole, but they do inherit a selection of a wide range of inherited genes from both parents. Some of those genes are co-associated as familial genes, which gives rise to stereotypical ‘african’ or ‘middle eastern’ or ‘north european’ type looks that stay within a familial group.
UV creates vitamin D and can provide some protection against skin cancer although even people with very dark skin, ie lots of melanin, can still get skin cancers. Our bodies are adaptable and have proven able to adapt to a wide range of conditions but this is on a much shorter timescale than an evolutionary timescale – it is adaptation NOT evolution.
“babies do not pick up genetic mutations in the womb, on the whole, but they do inherit a selection of a wide range of inherited genes from both parents.”
It’s obvious that babies inherit a wide range of inherited genes from their parents. There’s no dispute about that. However, you seem to be unaware that mutations frequently take place in the womb as the baby develops.
Here’s a recent study which addresses the issue.
“Right after conception, hundreds of tiny mutations begin to accumulate in cells of a developing fetus, a process that continues, but at a much slower rate, well into adulthood, a new study by researchers at Yale and the Mayo Clinic shows.
Many of these small variations in DNA occur as sex cells are forming in the embryo, meaning they can be incorporated into the genome and passed on to the next generation for good or ill, researchers report Dec. 7 in the journal Science.
This insight into development can help explain why one identical twin may have a genetic disorder and the other is healthy, or why some members of a family who carry a disease-causing mutation do not get sick, the authors say.”
https://news.yale.edu/2017/12/05/genetic-mutations-pile-soon-after-conception
Well there is your first mistake, accepting a study from Yale, “pal” reviewed in Science, as having a factual basis of any sort.
Now in today’s publish or parish uni-cultural leftist racist antisemitic higher learning monstrosity, there must be at least 15 or 20 published papers that have duplicated this paper’s data and conclusions.
If this has NOT occurred, then you can use THAT paper as another type of paper for your next BM.
Just sayin.
There are quite a few other studies that get similar results. Here’s another one. Is this also unreliable?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9862193/#:~:text=The%20data%20show%20that%2C%20as,linearity%20of%20mutation%20with%20age
“Somatic mutations seem to accumulate slowly with age during adult life in both mice and men. There is, however, a substantial mutant frequency at birth, suggesting that the rate of accumulation is much higher before birth. This suggests that DNA replication plays an important role in the generation of spontaneous mutations. Since most cell division and accompanying DNA replication occurs early in development, more mutations would arise during growth and development. Indeed, if the mutations are genetically neutral, the mutant frequency would rise very rapidly during early fetal growth, more slowly during later fetal growth and development and still more slowly after birth.”
Adaptation as a consequence of altering the genetic makeup is a process of evolution. In the case of dark skin in humans moving north, the selective pressure was pretty extreme: a woman badly affected by childhood rickets cannot birth a baby.
I agree that at the present time, there is only one species of people. But not long ago, there were Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals, which were two separate species and yet they are known to have interbred.
The process of speciation is far more complex than we might have guessed or even imagined, is how it seems to me.
The problem is we tend to categorize things into an ‘either/or’ category, such as ‘good or bad’, ‘hot or cold’, ‘fast or slow’, and so on.
It is reasonable to suppose than within any species there are different degrees of genetic variations. When those genetic differences, that exist between two groups of the same species, reach a level that prevents the production of fertile offspring, then we describe the two groups as being of a different species. Is there a better definition of ‘species’?
I don’t know if Neanderthals, if they were alive today, could interbreed with modern humans to produce fertile offspring. However, we do know that many groups of modern humans have traces of Neanderthal DNA, which shows that they did interbreed in the past. As a result of this evidence, Neanderthals are now classified as Homo Sapiens, and modern humans are reclassified as Hom Sapiens Sapiens.
Susan, thank you for your kind response.
This idea of what a species IS is just a matter of OPINION. (Below, man and men are used to include women in the old style.)
I think “scientists” try to make things more complicated then necessary, by their nature to investigate and expand their knowledge. This is in reference to all the different categories historically created for defining species, not about you personally.
So my opinion as stated above is that if 2 animals can breed, and their offspring are fertile and can breed, then they are of the same species. This appears to be the case with White and Brown bears.
The last time this came up here on WUWT, I did some research, limited but interesting.
It appears lions and tigers can breed and DO produce fertile offspring. SO the single species was separated by geography and developed into two distinctive looking animals that became different in appearance to suit their environment. Because they were so far separated by natural barriers no one knew they were able to breed and have fertile offspring until man brought them together. So I say they breed, not interbreed, as is the case with a horse and donkey and apparently a goat and a sheep, which produce infertile offspring.
Apparently every “sub species” of dog can breed with every other, so they are one species.
And as to the Galapagos finches of such great interest to Darwin and others, it also appears that they CAN breed, they just “chose” to breed with like colored and shaped etc. other finches, so they are all ONE species, In My Opinion.
from Merriam Webster
species1 of 2
nounspe·cies ˈspē-(ˌ)shēz -(ˌ)sēz
pluralspecies
Synonyms of species
1
a
: KIND, SORT
b
: a class of individuals having common attributes and designated by a common name
specifically : a logical division of a genus or more comprehensive class
confessing sins in species and in number
c
: the human race : human beings —often used with the survival of the species in the nuclear age
d
(1)
: a category of biological classification ranking immediately below the genus or subgenus, comprising related organisms or populations potentially capable of interbreeding, and being designated by a binomial that consists of the name of a genus followed by a Latin or latinized uncapitalized noun or adjective agreeing grammatically with the genus name
My emphasis. However I disagree with the use of “interbreeding” vs just breeding.
I also disagree with the use of “potentially” since I am speaking of actual breeding with fertile offspring.
In is not correct that such animals as tigers and lions remain or have remained distinct from each other due to physical barriers. There are locations all throughout Asia and Africa where lions and tigers have overlapping ranges and populations.
Same for canids, and I am pretty sure the range of brown bears and polar bears overlap as well.
As far as I’m aware there have been no tigers in Africa – I would be very interested to see your information that says otherwise. On the other hand, there have been areas where the asiatic lion and tigers have overlapped ranges, but not the african lion as far as I know.
You are correct, as far as I know, there are no tigers in Africa.
I was attempting to give a shirt response, not a detailed one.
There are in fact 5 different species of the genus panthera that can interbreed, and several of them overlap with their ranges in Africa.
I am not sure if each and every different pair of them has specific examples of such interbreeding, but there are enough examples to conclude that it is possible and perhaps likely they can all interbreed.
The question is, do they?
For the cats at least, it seems that this is only known to have occurred in captivity.
The point is, for all of the examples that have been mentioned so far, canids, panthera, and bears, it is demonstrably not the case that geographic separation explains how these various groups of animals became distinct.
AND Polar bears and Brown bears HAVE in nature have produced offspring which have also then produced offspring.
https://www.buffalo.edu/news/releases/2022/06/005.html
Although these researchers call the bears 2 different species, they do appear to show the repeated mating and reproduction of the two color of this species of bear.
I say this is just another example that shows they can breed and produce fertile offspring, MY definition, and Merriam Webster’s definition of ONE species.
Why are you shouting?
I never said any different regarding bears interbreeding.
In fact I pointed out that the ranges do overlap.
And I pointed out that the most commonly found dictionary definition is “your” definition.
However, I went further than that, and attempted to give some nuance and fullness to the understanding of the topic.
There are entire libraries of books about this topic, and as I said, something like 27 (at least) distinct conceptions of what constitutes a species.
Did you see someplace that Webster has been declared the final authority on such matters, depending on how they defines such terms?
I never learned that in any of the biology or zoology classes I ever took, nor in anything I have read.
Me myself, I do not see the point in oversimplifying complex matters, but I have no problem at all if that is what you like to do.
Maybe this is a good example of why we have dictionaries, and also encyclopedias.
How does “your” definition account for and explain such things as ring species?
BTW, mules are only usually infertile.
The fact that there are so many examples of how hybridization can give so many widely varying results, is evidence that the idea of species distinctiveness is likely a flawed concept when applied to the real world.
We like to have rules and categories and such, but that does not mean that these are “discoveries”, rather than “inventions”.
See here:
“A mule has 63 chromosomes, intermediate between the 64 of the horse and the 62 of the donkey.[24] Mules are usually infertile for this reason.[25]
Pregnancy is rare, but can occasionally occur naturally, as well as through embryo transfer. A few mare mules have produced offspring when mated with a horse or donkey stallion.[26][27] Herodotus gives an account of such an event as an ill omen of Xerxes’ invasion of Greece in 480 BC: “There happened also a portent of another kind while he was still at Sardis—a mule brought forth young and gave birth to a mule” (Herodotus The Histories 7:57), and a mule’s giving birth was a frequently recorded portent in antiquity, although scientific writers also doubted whether it was really possible (see e.g. Aristotle, Historia animalium, 6.24; Varro, De re rustica, 2.1.28). Between 1527 and 2002 approximately sixty such births were reported.[27] In Morocco in early 2002 and Colorado in 2007, mare mules produced colts.[27][28][29] Blood and hair samples from the Colorado birth verified that the mother was indeed a mule and the foal was indeed her offspring.[29]
A 1939 article in the Journal of Heredity describes two offspring of a fertile mare mule named “Old Bec”, which was owned at the time by Texas A&M University in the late 1920s. One of the foals was a female, sired by a jack. Unlike her mother, she was sterile. The other, sired by a five-gaited Saddlebred stallion, exhibited no characteristics of any donkey. That horse, a stallion, was bred to several mares, which gave birth to live foals that showed no characteristics of the donkey.[30] In a more recent instance, a group from the Federal University of Minas Gerais in 1995 described a female mule that was pregnant for a seventh time, having previously produced two donkey sires, two foals with the typical 63 chromosomes of mules, and several horse stallions that had produced four foals. The three of the latter available for testing each bore 64 horse-like chromosomes. These foals phenotypically resembled horses, though they bore markings absent from the sire’s known lineages, and one had ears noticeably longer than those typical of her sire’s breed. The elder two horse-like foals had proved fertile at the time of publication, with their progeny being typical of horses.[31]”
Mule – Wikipedia
And then there are hinnies…
Well it might have occurred to a liger or a tigon. Grolar Bears and Pizzlies might also frolic over the tundra but dont look to a Pooh Bear and a Paddington getting it on together
A few Pandolar bears could make things more exciting in China.
What about Booboo and Yogi? They’re living together.
So, we know that between lions and tigers, we have a different result altogether depending on which is the male and which the female. So this by itself calls into question the idea that we can have a simple definition of what a species is.
It is an interesting topic for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that some people have spent their entire lives trying to reconcile a notion that people invented to satisfy our innate need to classify things, with the fact that sometimes even our good ideas do not fit in very well with the actual world in all of it’s amazing complexity.
Besides for all of that, does anyone know if the offspring of a male polar bear and a female grizzly, is the same or different than that of a female polar bear and a male grizzly?
So are polar bears just brown bears with white privilege?
Thanks for that Rud! And have you left a review on Amazon yet? It really helps potential readers decide whether to purchase or not. It is always much appreciated.
Wilco.
White polar bears are systemic racists who do not tolerate bears of color.
But they will procreate with them!
Only due to toxic masculinity.
I would be interested to know if there are documented instances of such hybridization between bears in the wild, or if it is only known to occur in captivity?
In either case, I’ll take odds on whether or not it mostly or exclusively happens only if the larger of the two individuals is the male.
Does anyone know of any instances of a Great Dane and a Chihuahua having a thang with each other? And I do not mean by artificial means.
What, like a step-ladder for the Chihuahua you mean?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grizzly%E2%80%93polar_bear_hybrid
That was hard.
I do not agree with the title of “hybridization” or hybrid because the white and brown bears are ONE species since they can breed and their offspring are fertile and can breed.
Again MY and Merriam Websters opinion.
Sort of like calling the MRNA “therapy” shot a vaccine when it does not meet the definition of a vaccine. They (the great controlling all powerful THEY) control the media and especially social media and they want the riff raff to believe that the China virus was something other than a lab experiment gone wrong. They claim to have solved the problem with massive profits to a couple of drug companies and they claim that their “therapy” actually helped end the pandemic, which it did not.
The J and J vaccine was the only vaccine and the government quit funding that one because only one dose was required FOREVER, and each new variety of China V would not need more panic and another dose.
So now we should discuss covid shots to make a point about hybridization?
As Polar bears survived the Medieval Warm, as well as all other periods warmer than the present, there is no reason to assume any ill effects.
Polar Bears are partying like it’s never going to melt again.
Polar bears need the ice to melt
100% sea ice makes life really hard for them.. food hard to find if there is no edge to the sea ice.
If there are no holes in the ice, it is unlikely there will be any seals or sea lions down there.
Nice work Susan.
Thanks Bob!
It looks like we are exiting 2023 with the highest level of sea ice cover in the Arctic for the past 5 years, though it may just come in second, with one day to go.
It’s very close to being the highest since 2003 !!
The NSIDC ftp site I use only goes to 29th Dec, so 2 days left.
Dec 29th has
2023…. 13.043
2004…. 13.046
2011….. 13.097
2009…. 13.103
30th Dec needs to go above 13.118
Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. 🙂
or above 13.18 on 31st Dec !
During the “hottest year evah” as well. Seems to indicate the air temperature is not a significant factor in sea ice levels.
That would support the theory that sea ice is part of a natural cycle of warming and cooling. The ice builds up and insulates the water. Over time enough heat builds up to start thinning the ice. This allow more seasonal melt which then cools the water. Rinse and repeat.
This could also be what drives the AMO. When the ice gets thicker it allows the development of colder air. Natural weather patterns bring the colder air over the North Atlantic which slowly cools the water. This starts the cold phase of the AMO which holds until the Arctic starts melting again.
Seems to indicate that there is definitely something else going on which has yet to be explained or even identified.
“During the “hottest year evah” as well. Seems to indicate the air temperature is not a significant factor in sea ice levels.”
Indicates to me what I have known for years, that the data sets are horribly corrupted and fraudulent, and are useless for saying anything whatsoever about how the present compares to the past.
There have been stretches of time in the past 150 years when alpine glaciers and sea ice where known to have been retreating and melting exceedingly rapidly. At the same time, long and very hot heat waves were occurring at far flung locales around the globe.
Nothing like that is happening now, ergo, it is not the hottest it has been in the modern era.
Many other converging lines of evidence support all of this in detail.
The only inconsistencies arise when data sets were altered to conform to the warmista religion.
“…if we let evidence-based science die without challenge, we lose our ability to make sense of the world.”
Obviously not the writing of a True Blue (Green) Climastrologist! Every proper Climastrologer knows that science is not to be made sense of, it is to make bucks of! Preferably kilo- or mega-bucks!
Happy New Year, Susan! Keep up the good work! I think I’ll see about following Rud’s advice.
Thanks for that. And Happy New Year to you too.
I’m not sure why leftists are so fascinated with polar bears
They all look the same so an accurate count seems difficult
I believe what we need is for people to spray paint numbers on the bears, visible from the air.
Hire leftists and give them cans of black spray paint.
Those leftist graffiti “artists” should be the first to volunteer.
Step forward Mr. Greene, I have an exciting new career opportunity for you!
My career is giving you a hard time
Have a happy New Year’s Eve anyway.
Hardly a career Richard, more of a perverted hobby. Anyway have a happy New Year, my best to you and yours.
So the whole CAGW/net zero fiasco is meant to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere to protect life in the biosphere BUT….. the rising CO2 is associated with increased photosynthesis and thereby increasing biomass on Earth. The rising productivity of arctic waters is just one of many examples of life thriving under a mild warming and the recharging of the atmosphere with life-giving CO2 after levels fell to where plants struggle to grow and survive. Perhaps we need a new environmental movement dedicated to raising atmospheric CO2, but that would of course defy the environmental logic of always being completely illogical.
Ah…. more settled science. And a broad range of confusion by people who know things that are settled without ever studying them. Remarkable ability they have. And they are happy to tell others what they “think”. Susan is very kind, but Dunning Kruger rules.
To support my last comment:
e.g.: Drake
Reply to
Rud Istvan
December 30, 2023 3:23 pm
Polar bear and Brown bear are still the same species, just specialized for 2 distinct ecosystems, ice and water, and forest and prairies respectively.
The science is obviously setted for this “expert”, who has no idea who he is disagreeing with, and knows it all.
Your witness – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWh45qp3qxc