Polar Bears Are Thriving

The bears are having a good year.
Higher than average Svalbard sea ice extent in November 2021 has implications for birth of cubs
Posted on December 1, 2021 | Comments Offon Higher than average Svalbard sea ice extent in November 2021 has implications for birth of cubs
Early last November, sea ice around Svalbard was the lowest it had been since 1967 and pregnant females were simply unable to den on the eastern islands of the archipelago and instead had to make their dens and give birth in the pack ice or the Franz Josef Land archipelago further east, as they have done before. However, the ice is back this fall with a vengeance: even Hopen Island in the south of region was surrounded by ice well before the end of the month but whether it will attract a few pregnant females remains to be seen.


Results of polar bear health monitoring in the spring of 2021 indicated the bears are doing just fine after last year’s low ice levels. Despite this evidence, a single bear photographed killing a reindeer in August 2020 was falsely blamed on climate change. The narrative never seems to change.

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The bears are having a good winter.
Mid-December polar bear habitat update
Posted on December 16, 2021 | Comments Offon Mid-December polar bear habitat update
Compared to last year, polar bear habitat at 15 December 2021 is way up in the Barents and Bering Seas but way down in Hudson Bay but nothing any polar bear has to worry about.


Here’s what the ice charts look like.

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Polar Bear Science

A ‘mass exodus’ of polar bears from Alaska to Russia has taken place, local residents claim

Posted on January 2, 2022

Excerpt:

An article in a UK newspaper yesterday contains a claim made by local residents that polar bears which used to hang around Utqiagvik (formerly known as Barrow) in western Alaska, are ‘moving to Russia’ (i.e. the Chukchi Sea) in a ‘mass exodus’. It’s certainly possible but if so, it should come as a surprise to no one and is good news for polar bears.


LINK
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They are adaptable and successful.

 

The fact is. there are actually damned few "deniers".

Mostly what you have are those that deny that the warming is "man made". Those that know of the many cycles the environment goes through, and see nothing special in the current ones.

But they must be shouted down, so people foolishly scream they are "deniers", as they are too simply to actually bother listening to them. Or upset because they refuse to bow down to the "AGW God", and therefore must be purged.

I think you will find that the vast majority of what most call "deniers" are that at all.

 

Sometimes the bears misbehave.
Remembering the terrorizing Belushya Guba polar bears: lots of Barents Sea ice cover this year
Posted on January 6, 2022 | Comments Offon Remembering the terrorizing Belushya Guba polar bears: lots of Barents Sea ice cover this year
Three years ago, the Russian village of Belushya Guba on southwest coast of Novaya Zemlya on the Barents Sea got international attention for the dozens of polar bears that had invaded the local dump and some aggressive bears were terrorizing local residents. The phenomenon was of course blamed on climate change by virtually all media outlets largely because there was no sea ice on that coast at the time (as had been true many years before without bear trouble).


This year is a different story completely. It’s only early January and already there is abundant ice along the west coast of Novaya Zemlya; ice in the Barents Sea in general is well up over recent averages and the pack is already converging on Bear Island (Bjørnøya) to the south of the Svalbard archipelago. Ice this far south often brings polar bear visitors to the weather station there but that doesn’t usually happen until March or April.

You’ll find references in previous posts linked here.


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The alarmists don't like good news.
What’s With the False Reporting, Inside Climate News? Polar Bears Are Doing Well
POLAR BEARS JANUARY 11, 2022

A Google News search of the phrase “climate change,” today turns up a story in Inside Climate News claiming polar bears are declining due to climate change. Nothing could be further from the truth. Data show polar bear numbers have grown significantly during the recent modest warming.

The story, “Warming Trends: Climate Threats to Bears, Bugs and Bees, Plus a Giant Kite and an ER Surge,” covered a lot of topics, not all of them related directly to climate change. The first section of the story, however, claimed later than usual freezing conditions in the Hudson Bay in 2021 threatened the polar bear populations there. . . .

Contrary to what is implied in the Inside Climate News story, data show polar bear numbers across the arctic region and for most sub-populations have increased dramatically since the 1970s, during the period of modest warming. The increase has occurred despite waxing and waning sea ice extent and normal historical variation in freeze up dates. . . .

 

The bears are enjoying the winter.
East Coast sea ice so far similar to last year
Posted on January 13, 2022 | Comments Offon East Coast sea ice so far similar to last year
Davis Strait ice pack is slowly moving south this year just as shorefast ice is developing in-place along the Labrador shoreline, similar to last year. East Coast harp seals that give birth in the region in March depend on this ice and so do many Davis Strait polar bears that feed on those newborn seals. In contrast, in 2017 the ice off Labrador was broader by mid-January (even more so by mid-February) and that seems to have made a huge difference by April, when ice north of Newfoundland was thick and extensive. . . .

 

Welcome, Goldilocks.
Polar bears at Kolyuchin Island weather station provide a rare photographer’s treat
Posted on January 24, 2022 | Comments Offon Polar bears at Kolyuchin Island weather station provide a rare photographer’s treat
Russian wildlife photographer Dmitry Kokh took some photos and video last year of polar bears hunkered down at an abandoned weather station on the Chukchi Sea coast and he apparently won a prize for one of them, shown below. The shots are very cool, so I’ve provided some context for the story and posted the video here.


‘Summer Season’ by Dmitry Kokh
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Excellent conditions for the bears.
Davis Strait polar bears in Eastern Canada are thriving according to new survey
Posted on January 31, 2022 | Comments Offon Davis Strait polar bears in Eastern Canada are thriving according to new survey
Pack ice is barreling down the Labrador coast, almost certainly bringing Davis Strait polar bears with it. And according to new survey results, those bears are doing just fine: numbers are stable, bears are fatter than they were in 2007, and cubs are surviving well – thanks largely to abundant harp seals.


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With apologies to Perry Mason: Were they lying then? Or are they lying now?

Statement of polar bear population size estimates by polar bear scientists in 1965
Posted on February 10, 2022 | Comments Offon Statement of polar bear population size estimates by polar bear scientists in 1965
Polar bear scientists in 1965 published a consensus statement on population size, with no caveats that these were ‘wild guesses’ or not to be taken seriously. They quoted some of the same authorities that I did when I suggested a plausible baseline figure. Andrew Derocher, Steven Amstrup and others who say there has never been population estimates for the 1960 or 1970s are not defending science, they are lying to protect their ‘polar bears are all gonna die because of climate change’ narrative. No other biologists do this, even those who insist the species they study are at risk from human-caused global warming. You should ask why.


This controversy is why archives like the one I created yesterday are so important: they make it impossible to re-write history as some insist on doing:

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When a skeptic creates the only archive of past proceedings, that suggests the alarmists are trying to cover their tracks.
Archive of IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group status and meeting reports back to 1965
Posted on February 9, 2022 | Comments Offon Archive of IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group status and meeting reports back to 1965
The IUCN/SCC Polar Bear Specialist Group have recently modernized their website, which apparently required them to remove all meeting reports and status documents going back to 1968. Since I had downloaded all of them for my own research, I have archived them here for anyone wishing to assess the accuracy of statements made by PGSG members about what they did or said in the past, or to understand the history of the organization. I did something similar a few years ago regarding the administrative reports used in 2007 to support the decision to list polar bears as ‘threatened’ under the US Endangered Species Act (ESA), which disappeared from the US Geological Survey website: they can now be found here.


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This link includes a powerful statement of scientific commitment and integrity from the author.
Open response to a polar bear researcher who objected to me ‘attacking’ their colleagues
Posted on February 16, 2022 | Comments Offon Open response to a polar bear researcher who objected to me ‘attacking’ their colleagues
Last week, I got an email from a polar bear scientist I have interacted with a few times. Not one of the big names but aside from that, I’ll leave their identity private. The email was polite and I tried to respond in kind. I have copied it here because others may have had similar concerns.


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The old boys' club among polar bear researchers continues to circle the wagons in denial.

Accepted sea otter population estimate at 1911 as inaccurate as rejected polar bear estimate for 1960s
Posted on February 24, 2022 | Comments Offon Accepted sea otter population estimate at 1911 as inaccurate as rejected polar bear estimate for 1960s
Sea otter specialists, without shame or apology, routinely use a benchmark figure of ‘about 2,000’ for the pre-protection population size of the species at 1911 based on extremely limited evidence yet polar bear specialists refuse to accept a benchmark figure for the 1960s despite the existence of eight published estimates made by experts at the time. Sea otters came much closer to extinction than polar bears did and are not out of the woods yet, for reasons that are not entirely understood (Doroff et al. 2021).



Andrew Derocher, 22 February 2022: ‘There never was a population estimate of global abundance in the 1960s.’

Derocher’s statement and those of his colleagues, discussed at length in The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened, makes them look biased and unprofessional. There is absolutely no rational scientific justification for holding this stance.

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Now is the hardest part of the year for the bears.
Mid-winter polar bear sea ice habitat is abundant & within range of long-term average
Posted on February 23, 2022 | Comments Offon Mid-winter polar bear sea ice habitat is abundant & within range of long-term average
Ahead of International Polar Bear Day (27 February) this year, polar bear habitat is as abundant as it has been for decades. This is a tough time for polar bears, many of which will be finding it hard to find seals to eat, as newborn seals won’t be an available food resource for about a month in most areas. Thin and hungry bears are dangerous.


Sea ice charts below for the Arctic as a whole and by region.

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Polar Bears are a good news story.
Mainstream Media Ignores Good News About Polar Bears; They’re Doing GREAT!
CLIMATE CHANGE IMPACTS MARCH 1, 2022

 

Lots of ice for the bears.

Arctic sea ice maximum extent was present for at least two weeks at about 14.9 million km2
Posted on March 22, 2022 | Comments Offon Arctic sea ice maximum extent was present for at least two weeks at about 14.9 million km2
US National Snow and Ice Data Center says the Arctic maximum extent for this winter peaked at 14.88 mkm2 on 25 February, but in fact this amount of ice coverage lasted for at least two weeks (22 February – 8 March), with very slight variation. Just a little something they all left out of their announcements, for some reason.


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Climate was never a significant factor in polar bear populations: the population was quite stable through the MWP and LIA. But the bears were in trouble after the Inuit got rifles because the Inuit quite rightly regarded them as dangerous pests, and killed them whenever they encountered them. Once they got legal protection from human hunting, their population rebounded. Climate was and is irrelevant.

 

Happy times for the bears.

Sea ice average for March is the metric used to compare to previous winters
Posted on April 5, 2022 | Comments Offon Sea ice average for March is the metric used to compare to previous winters
The average sea ice cover at the end of March is the metric used to compare ‘winter’ ice to previous years or decades, not the single-day date of ‘most’ ice. This year, March ended with 14.6 mkm2 of sea ice, most of which (but not all) is critical polar bear habitat. Ice charts showing this are below.


But note that ice over Hudson Bay, which is an almost-enclosed sea used by thousands of polar bears at this time of year, tends to continue to thicken from March into May: these two charts for 2020 show medium green becoming dark green, indicating ice >1.2 m thick, even as some areas of open water appear.





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Thank you for posting these bits of information, and continuing to do so. I'm no professional on the subject, but have loosely followed the Polar Bear saga for many years.

 

You are most welcome.

 

The mayor of what used to be Barrows, Alaska has had to move his house twice due to rising water.

It's great that the bears are having a good year, they need it after last year, and the likelihood of a warm winter next year.

One year doesn't change a trend, at least not on this planet.

 

The bears have been thriving year over year. The doomsayers have stopped publishing population estimates because the number of bears has been steadily growing.

 

Nope.

https://www.iucn-pbsg.org/#home-statistics

 

Yup.

• State of the Polar Bear 2021: polar bears continued to thrive

". . . In the State of the Polar Bear Report 2021, published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) ahead of International Polar Bear Day (27 February) zoologist Dr. Susan Crockford explains that while the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG) promotes the impression that polar bear population numbers are declining, the results of recent studies indicate otherwise.

Crockford further clarifies that the global population estimate used by the PBSG has not been updated since 2015, even though the results of numerous surveys have been published since then. These additions bring the global population total to almost 32,000, up from about 26,000, albeit with a wide range of potential error. This modest increase is consistent with a species recovering from low numbers brought about by overhunting that affect it before focused international protection was introduced in 1973. . . . "

 

"The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) is a lobby group in the United Kingdom whose stated aims are to challenge "extremely damaging and harmful policies" envisaged by governments to mitigate anthropogenic global warming.[2] The GWPF, and some of its prominent members individually, have been characterized as practising climate change denial.[3][4]

In 2014, when the Charity Commission ruled that the GWPF had breached rules on impartiality, a non-charitable organisation called the "Global Warming Policy Forum" was created as a wholly owned subsidiary, to do lobbying that a charity could not. The GWPF website carries an array of articles sceptical of scientific findings of anthropogenic global warming and its impacts"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Warming_Policy_Foundation

More of your fake science funded via Dark Money; which usually means Big Oil. Legit outfits don't hide their funding ...