Susan Crockford
Polar bear habitat for June — the last month of spring in the Arctic — is still within 2 standard deviations of the long-term average despite sea ice experts’ predictions that catastrophic declines can be expected any year now.
The Arctic sea ice cover in June 2024 retreated at a below average pace, leading to a larger total sea ice extent for the month than in recent years. NSIDC, 3 July 2024
Oddly, the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) employees who wrote up the sea ice summary for June felt it appropriate to bring up a recently-published prediction of impending doom for Southern Hudson Bay polar bears based on a sea ice prediction (Stroeve et al. 2024), which I covered here. The inclusion of this topic is a naked promotion of the Stroeve sea ice modelling paper which not only doesn’t fit the reality of this year’s sea ice conditions but their discussion doesn’t include a single piece of evidence that Southern Hudson Bay polar bears came off the ice earlier than usual.
Arctic Summary
Here is the NSIDC chart and graph for June sea ice:
Extent this year for June, at 10.9 mkm2, compared to previous years was just about exactly what it was in 2006 and slightly lower than it was last year, as the graph below shows:
Southern Hudson Bay
The NSIDC report states: “The average date for ice retreat of southern Hudson Bay ranges between mid-June to late-July, so there is typically enough ice available for polar bears to hunt ringed seal pups, a major food source for them. If the ice breaks up too early, as is the case this year, the bears are stranded on land for more of the summer and autumn season, which extends their annual fasting period.”
First of all, polar bears do not “hunt ringed seal pups” from mid-June to late July in Hudson Bay. Young seals have been weaned by that time and are out feeding in open water. The only potential prey are adult and subadult seals that may be resting on sea ice while they are moulting, but it is very rare for bears to successfully hunt these older seals since they are experienced enough to be ever-vigilant and predator-savvy. As I have pointed out countless times, polar bears may stay on the ice into July or even August if they can but it is not to hunt seals.
Moreover, there was still ice in James Bay at 18 June (see chart below), so breakup wasn’t unusually early and there was still abundant ice along the SW shore of Hudson Bay where many SH bears come off the ice.
In fact, there is still abundant ice along the SW shore of Hudson Bay and all the way up into Western Hudson Bay and it’s almost mid-July! The sea ice chart closeup of Hudson Bay shown below is for July 10 and there is still ice along the shore of the Southern Hudson Bay subpopulation region:
In other words, despite the fact that a large swath of open water developed in eastern Hudson Bay in May, all indicators point to this not being an early breakup year for Southern Hudson Bay sea ice as far as polar bears are concerned.
And I would be remise if I did not point out that the supposedly dire consequence of a modelled early breakup for Southern Hudson Bay bears contradicts an earlier study that showed only late freeze-ups negatively affected this subpopulation (Obbard et al. 2016).
Here’s what Obbard and colleagues had to say about the relationship between body condition and sea ice of Southern Hudson Bay bears(my bold):
“Date of freeze-up had a stronger influence on subsequent body condition than date of break-up in our study. …we suggest that a stronger effect of date of freeze-up may be because even though break-up has advanced by up to 3-4 weeks in portions of Hudson Bay it still occurs no earlier than late June or early July so does not yet interfere with opportunities to feed on neonate ringed seal pups that are born in March-April in eastern Hudson Bay. Therefore, losing days or weeks of hunting opportunities during June and July deprives polar bears of the opportunity to feed on adult seals, but does not deprive them of the critical spring period when they are truly hyperphagic. No doubt, the loss of hunting opportunities to kill adult seals has a negative effect on body condition, but it appears that for bears in SH a forced extension of the fast in late fall has a greater negative effect on subsequent body condition.” [my bold]
Western Hudson Bay
By the end of June in Western Hudson Bay this year, all but one of University of Alberta’s tagged bears were still on the ice:
Note that the “behavioural plasticity” that Derocher refers to above refers to a pattern noted since at least 2015, where polar bears have been staying out on melting sea ice well past the stage that “experts” previously insisted would cause bears to abandon the ice for shore. Their sea ice/polar bear survival models all depend on this failed assumption, including the Stroeve paper.
It’s getting harder and harder for Derocher and colleagues to ignore the fact that their assumptions about sea ice concentration and polar bear behaviour was flat-out wrong. This year, some WH bears could again remain on the ice until August, despite what has been, on paper, the earliest breakup year on record for Hudson Bay sea ice.
References
Obbard, M.E., Cattet, M.R.I., Howe, E.J., Middel, K.R., Newton, E.J., Kolenosky, G.B., Abraham, K.F. and Greenwood, C.J. 2016. Trends in body condition in polar bears (Ursus maritimus) from the Southern Hudson Bay subpopulation in relation to changes in sea ice. Arctic Science, in press. 10.1139/AS-2015-0027
Stroeve, J., Crawford, A., Ferguson, S., Stirling, I., Archer, L., York, G., Babb, D. and Mallet, R. 2024. Ice-free period too long for Southern and Western Hudson Bay polar bear populations if global warming exceeds 1.6 to 2.60 C. Nature Communications Earth & Environment 5:296 [open access] https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-024-01430-7
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When some ice starts remaining on Hudson Bay …..that will be an indicator of the end of the Great Warming.
Do the bears need the sea ice, or do the seals need the sea ice?
Ringed seals need shorefast sea ice in early spring, but that’s not going away.
Arctic sea ice extent so far this year and decade has been above the average for 2011-20. Trend has been up since 2012 and flat since 2007.
I am far from knowledgeable about polar bears. However, having been a hunter all my life I know animals are adaptable and changeable in their habits. I am sure the polar bears have not survived for eras without displaying these attributes.
To have observed polar bears for even a lifetime is too short a time to evaluate the limits of their adaptability.
Black bears, even more so. If people didn’t hunt them and convert land to urban uses- black bears would be pretty much everywhere.
The grizzly is somewhat similar. They started to be seen as far east in Canada as the Churchill River in eastern Saskatchewan which rises in Alberta, flows eastward and northward through Saskatchewan and Manitoba to Hudson’s Bay. The river is full of fish and the area has abundant game. I suspect this to be a natural corridor for them once they got started
I was doing geological work in northern Sakatchewan ~25yrs ago and had been given a heads-up by the fish and wildlife folk. I haven’t followed up on this, but maybe we will be hearing about it before too long. Grizzlies can interbreed with Polar Bears and did so in pre-history (DNA evidence). Thankyou Susan for this educational bit.
Bears, like many other successful animals, have flexible survival skills. Those that do not are usually selected for extinction.
Listening to the supposed experts you would think that Polar bears are unable to eat anything other than baby seals. Tell me if I’m wrong but I’m pretty sure that polar bears are omnivores and can eat whatever they want to.🤔🤷♂️
One hypothesis is that a bear would only chew on Michael Mann and then spit him out.
The internet dating scene clearly shows when asked women would rather be with a wild bear than a Mann so we’re halfway there-
I’ve Met the Bear, and I Would Still Choose It | Psychology Today
The problem is that modern women think a Bear is a large gay man. 🙃🙄
Would the bear spit out all of Mann or just the bones like Jaberwocki?😉
I suppose the bear could have a taste for a tiny morsel of cervelle de connard.
then gag- dry heaving for an hour
but.. but.. for the PB, baby seals are chocolate cake. 🙂
The common saying around here is: “A bear will eat anything but a rock.” My own experience and observations indicate that’s not much of an exaggeration.
I like a common sense person!
Matthew, you are right.
Food Preferences & Resources
For totalitarians (WEF, socialustthe strategy is total control of the message. They know polar bears will eat anything, but they never say so, because to sell alarm, (and thereby need authorities to fix things) is good for the strategy. If bears aren’t restricted in their diets then there is no alarm. I needn’t add that all the other wokey control levers, like Crisis Climate Change (don’t fly, don’t eat meat, welcome 15 minute cities, ….) is also part of the strategy of control of the populace.
Don’t be afraid of climate change, fear what the elites plan to do about it. They have cooked all the metrics of climate change to manufacture alarm.
No worries here. I’m still waiting for one of these warmists to find me a time period that the climate didn’t change.
Behavioural plasticity {A. Derocher}
Is this a new concept or, perhaps, an old one just discovered by Derocher?
Me thinks the rest of the world knows more about animals than he. 🙂
“The average date for ice retreat of southern Hudson Bay ranges between mid-June to late-July,…”.
That sentence makes no sense. There is no “range” of an average.
There are those who love to claim that Man is destroying what is natural and therefore Man must be controlled (by them).
Strange how Nature has a habit of proving them wrong.
Oh dear. Once again nobody is going to take up my annual £100 bet that Arctic ice will bottom out above 4 MKm2 as it has for 14 of the last 16 years. About a few days around the Autumn Equinox
“…. still within 2 standard deviations of the long-term average….”
I know little about statistics but—- that doesn’t necessarily sound good. Isn’t such a difference rather large? Enlighten me. 🙂
In a normally distributed range of results about 97% of them would be within 2sd of the mean. So we can conclude that this is more of the same. With quite a wide range.
But that assumes a nice Gaussian, symmetrical distribution of results. Which should be wrong.
We have a warming world. There should be a skew towards the lower end as more and more CO2 emissions enter the atmosphere.
In other words, we have a result that looks like a system that’s under control (but varying) when we should have a system that’s drifting away from the historical mean.
AGW is the planet out of control. This doesn’t look like that,
This is an interesting case study in how science actually works.
The schoolroom tale is that scientists:
Sch1) Make a hypothesis.
Sch2) Test the hypothesis against observations and maybe run experiments to gain extra observations.
Sch3a) Refine their hypothesis until it is widely accepted as robust and becomes a theory.
Or:
Sch3b) The hypothesis is not supported and is abandoned.
The real way that science works is:
Rea1) Make a hypothesis and publish it with support from whatever data is to hand.
Rea2) Look for more data that supports your publication and maybe run experiments to gain additional papers to publish.
Rea3a) Fight tooth and nail to claim that your publications are important.
Or:
Rea3b) Leave academia as you haven’t won the race.
We are well beyond Rea2 and heading for Rea3a or Rea3b for most of the people working in this field.
Of course the lead authors will just suffer Rea3c.
Rea3c) Keep publishing without anyone caring to read the papers for a stalled career and ever decreasing influence until the sweet release of retirement or death.
Exactly
The dooming is making days longer-
Climate crisis is making days longer, study finds | Climate crisis | The Guardian
Psychosomatic really because of the repetitive nature of the dooming boring everyone poopless and making the days seem longer.
Does that portend no more fertilizer?
t would be nice to see a longer plot of sea ice. 1979 was the close of a very cold decade where scientists were actively preaching the oncoming glacial period. Sea ice was higher then but has been lower as well. 1979 smells like it was cherry-picked for this.
Very nice Susan. The thing that amazes me is that there is ice that far south for any reason. How is it that Hudson Bay gets and keeps that kind of ice.
I suppose Stroeve et al. haven’t trained the polar bears to go ashore when their models told them they should. They need to go out on the sea ice and start cracking the whip, and hope they don’t become dinner for a hungry polar bear.
But as long as there are enough fish in the sea, the bears will stay on whatever ice floe they find.