Polar bears: They are going extinct!?

Reef Rebels

We are told that Polar Bears are on hugely threatened by climate change. But does the data support this proposition?

Susan Crockford’s report.

Peter Ridd has been researching the Great Barrier Reef since 1984, has invented a range of advanced scientific instrumentation, and written over 100 scientific publications. Since being fired by James Cook University for raising concerns about science quality assurance issues, Peter Ridd receives no payment for any of the work he does. Also see https://www.facebook.com/ProjectforRealScienceReefRebels/

Transcript

Polar bears have seen their numbers collapse in recent decades due to climate change. My focus on problems within science institutions stems from work on the Great Barrier Reef, where groupthink, emotion, and raw self-interest to maintain funding have resulted in a form of noble cause corruption. Polar bears are another great example of this. You’ll have seen lots of news stories about the loss of polar bears due to melting ice around the North Pole, featuring pictures of starving bears stranded on tiny melting pieces of ice, which look absolutely terrible.

Unlike coral, which grows faster in hotter climates, it makes sense to worry about polar bears in a warming climate. The North Pole ice has reduced over the last few decades. There is a debate as to how much of that reduction is part of natural variation, because we know over centuries the ice comes and goes. But that’s a debate for another video. There has been a loss of ice in the last few decades, so it sounds credible that this is bad for polar bears. Polar bears like ice, right? Less ice, fewer bears. And we have fewer bears today, right? Wrong.

There’s a very brave scientist who’s been blowing the whistle on this, and she’s suffered the consequences by being out of step with the scientific consensus. Her name is Susan Crockford, and her data is as simple as it is devastating: polar bear numbers have increased. Since the 1960s, the number of bears has not reduced; it may well have gone up quite significantly, perhaps even tripled. You can just see how that would make her very unpopular with the consensus group. As The Washington Post put it, nobody has done more to sink the claim that climate change is endangering polar bears than zoologist Susan Crockford. And she may have paid the price for it with her job. After 15 years as an adjunct assistant professor, Crockford said the University of Victoria rejected her renewal application without explanation in May, despite her high profile as a speaker and author stemming from her widely cited work on polar bears and dog domestication. Ms. Crockford accused officials at the Canadian university of bowing to outside pressure, the result of her research showing that polar bear populations are stable and even thriving, not plummeting as a result of shrinking Arctic sea ice.

Defying claims of the climate change movement, one reason that bear numbers have almost certainly rebounded is that there’s a lot less hunting than there was half a century ago. Now, some argue that the early estimate of bears in the sixties was not particularly accurate. But even if we accept this, where is the data to show that they’re in decline? This has been a hugely contentious issue and the subject of numerous fact checks, including one by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation after Mrs. Gina Rinehart, a very well-known Australian, quoted Crockford’s work. What was notable about the fact check was that while they took exception to the statement that the numbers were increased, they couldn’t present any evidence for a general decline in polar bear numbers. So, they’re effectively agreeing with Crockford.

For example, one of the experts said we know that some polar bear populations are stable, some have declined, and some have increased. Well, what a surprise. There’s a bit of fluctuation in the population. But all of these populations, all of these groups of bears in the various areas, they should be declining if one believes everything in the news about loss of ice and loss of polar bears. Now, if you read the commentary on Crockford by the climate alarmists, they often say things like she’s not published this work in journals, but who cares? Data is data. And anyway, she does publish in peer-reviewed journals. This is typical of the spurious argument that anybody who questions the catastrophes of climate change is in the pay of the oil industry, which I get all the time, even though I live on my superannuation pension and don’t get paid by anybody. By making these spurious, non-scientific arguments, they avoid debating the data, and the data for bears and for corals on the Great Barrier Reef is very bad for the catastrophists, but it’s really good news for bears and corals.

Just as there are record amounts of coral on the Great Barrier Reef, there are also record numbers of polar bears. No, not record numbers of polar bears on the Great Barrier Reef. Record number of bears near the North Pole, at least in some regions. Anyway, if you want this message to get spread widely, to encourage the story to get out about the polar bears, time to like and subscribe, I suspect. But what about the emaciated bear in these photographs? Well, of course, bears occasionally get old, can’t hunt very well, and starve and fade away. These are just opportunistic pictures which are actually just very sad. But I’m afraid death is just a part of life and bears never supposed to die of anything? Of course they must. And of course, bears will sometimes get onto small pieces of ice. The pictures actually mean nothing, but they can certainly stir emotions when they are used effectively in a corrupt purpose. I see exactly the same thing with corals on the Great Barrier Reef. They take pictures of a whole heap of dead coral and say, “Well, this is bad, it’s caused by humans” when it’s actually just part of life on the reef. Anyway, if you want to know more about Susan Crawford’s work, go to the website in the description box below. You’ll see that she’s a scientist who should not be ignored. She’s very impressive and she’s also been very unfairly treated.