Now at least 10 years with sea ice at 2050-like levels yet polar bears are still abundant

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With about the same minimum Arctic sea ice extent this season as 2008 and 2010, persistent claims of ‘rapid decline’ are looking more than threadbare, and polar bears don’t seem too bothered either, judging by the numbers. Climate scare merchants may have to look elsewhere to try and generate a headline.

polarbearscience

We’ve hit the seasonal Arctic sea ice minimum for this year, called this morning by US NSIDC for 19th and 23rd of Septmeber: 4.59 mkm2, the same extent as 2008 and 2010. This is not a “ho-hum” year for polar bears: it means that since 2007, they have triumphed through 10 or 11 years¹ with summer ice coverage below 5.0 mkm2 —  levels that in 2007were expected to cause catastrophic declines in numbers.

Summer sea ice below 5.0 mkm2 were not expected to occur until about 2050, according to 2005/2006 sea ice models and polar bear specialists at the US Geological Survey (USGS). Polar bear survival models predicted 2/3 of the world’s polar bears would disappear when ice levels reached this threshold for 8 out of 10 years (Amstrup et al. 2007, 2008; Hunter 2007) but polar bears have been more resilientthan expected (Crockford 2017, 2018; Crockford…

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Wear white on the solstice to celebrate polar bear success in a warming world

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Add polar bear non-decline to the long list of climate alarms that the doomsters have got embarrassingly wrong.

polarbearscience

Wednesday 21 June is the longest day of the year: wear something white tomorrow to acknowledge and celebrate the success of polar bears despite such low summer sea ice since 2007 that 2/3 of them were predicted to disappear.

White tie, white shirt, white socks work too. Keep cool and signal to the world that you love outstanding survivors of climate change,  fat though they may be.

Read here and here.

Global sea ice extent at 19 June 2018, well past the end of the intensive spring feeding period for polar bears:

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Steve Amstrup is lying to the media about my critique of his 2007 model

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Looks like polar bear alarmists could become an endangered species, struggling for the negative propaganda material necessary for survival.

Susan Crockford explains…

polarbearscience

Until now, my scientific paper post at PeerJ Preprints for review, about the failure of Steve Amstrup’s 2007 USGS polar bear survival model (Crockford 2017), has been formally ignored by Amstrup and his colleagues. But now Amstrup and his colleagues have taken to lying to the media about my analysis because he can’t refute it in a scholarly manner.

Amstrup was quoted by Erica Goode in her New York Times article on the Harvey et al. (2018) BioScienceattack paperpublished Tuesday (10 April 2018: “Climate Change Denialists Say Polar Bears Are Fine. Scientists Are Pushing Back”):

“Dr. Amstrup, however, said that according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, the average September sea ice extent for the years 2007 to 2017 was 4.5 million square kilometers, “nowhere near the low levels projected it would be by the middle of the century.”

“To say that we already should have…

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Polar bear attack paper invalidated by non-independent analysis

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Playing prosecutor judge and jury ensures the desired outcome in the minds of these climate alarmists. But all they’ve really done is damage themselves.

Shub Niggurath Climate

From Bart Verheggen’s blog, where he clearly identifies himself as a co-author of a paper in a post promoting it

Stephen Lewandowsky has co-authored (yet another) paper attacking climate skeptics. His colleagues-in-arms this time are long-time climate consensusite Jeff Harvey , Bart Vergheggen, and a cohort of ecologists along with Michael Mann. First author Harvey is well-known to climate commenters as a rant-prone passionate bulldog for the climate cause.

The main supposed finding of the paper is that zoologist Susan Crockford is the source of a number of skeptical blog posts. Harvey and colleagues claim a large figure (80%). The authors then claim to identify a ‘majority-view’ position in the polar bear literature, which they say is diametrically opposite of the Crockford-based blog position/s.

Polar bear alarmism has a checquered history and scientists Ian Stirling, Steven Amstrup and Andrew Derocher have been prominent proponents. All three have made several statements pushing…

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Bioscience paper and starving polar bear follow-up

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As Dr Susan Crockford correctly says:
‘Now folks know exactly where to go for an unbiased take on polar bear issues.’

And an expert suggests the ‘starving polar bear’ widely reported in recent days may have been a cancer victim.

polarbearscience

Between the two stories (the attack by my colleaguesand the starving polar bear hype), views at my blog have gone through the roof and one Arctic biologist speaks out on what SeaLegacy folks should have done when they saw a starving polar bear on Baffin Island this summer.

For the two weeks prior to the release of the Harvey paper (rounding to the nearest 100) the number of page views was 11,400 while for the two weeks since the Harvey et al. paper was released views were at 72,300 (with 14,900 views yesterday, 23,300 views the day before, and 12,500 the day before that). Prior to the Harvey et al. incident, my highest-ever one day blog view tally was 10,400 (a walrus haulout post!).

Several blogs were discussing the Harvey et al. paper and its implications from the first day (29 November) and a few have contacted me to…

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Retraction request to Bioscience: FOIA emails document another harsh criticism of Amstrup’s 2007 polar bear model

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The gloves are off in the polar bear wars, as Dr Susan Crockford launches a strong response to a recent unfair and malicious attack on her reputation by a group of climate scientists.

polarbearscience

Today I sent a letter to the editors of the journal Bioscience requesting retraction of the shoddy and malicious paper by Harvey et al. (Internet blogs, polar bears, and climate-change denial by proxy) published online last week.

The letter reveals information about the workings of the polar bear expert inner circle not known before now, so grab your popcorn.

I have copied the letter below, which contains emails obtained via FOIA requests to the US Geological Survey and the US Fish and Wildlife Service by the Energy and Environment Legal Institute, E&E Legal, and the Free Market Environmental Law Clinic (USFWS request; USGS request) and sent to me by lawyer Chris Horner in 2014, unsolicited. I reveal some of them now, with his permission (most of the emails are boring, involving mostly technical topics not relevant to anything, as might be expected).

The emails in…

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Published essay: the conservation fiasco that is the ESA listing of polar bears

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Another climate alarmist embarrassment that can’t be hidden any longer.

polarbearscience

In early October, the US Fish & Wildlife Service reversed its 2011 decision to list Pacific walrus as ‘threatened with extinction’, saying they could not “determine with certainty that walruses are likely to become endangered “in the foreseeable future.” [details below]

I have arguedthat the 2008 decision by the USFWS to list polar bears as ‘threatened’ is similarly lacking in certainty (Crockford 2017) and as for walrus, the previous determination of ‘threatened’ for polar bears was premature and should be reversed.

A prominent biology colleague and I recently put it this way in a newly published essay:

“Is it ethical or fair to the many citizens impacted directly and indirectly by the 2008 polar bear ruling for the FWS to allow polar bears to remain on the Endangered Species List?”

Read our piece in the winter 2018 issue of RANGE Magazine (open access), authored by…

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As polar bear populations fail to decline with sea ice, message of doom intensifies

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The climate alarm industry could be heading into a recession next year – unlike the polar bears they’re so fond of wailing about.

polarbearscience

If 10 years of summer sea ice levels expected to kill 2/3 of the world’s polar bears by 2050 hasn’t had an impact, why would anyone expect a bit less summer icewill do the job?

The more the polar bears fail to die in droves, the shriller the message from activist polar bear researchers – via willing media megaphones – that the great death of the bears will soon be upon us, just you wait and see!

Some big media guns were out this past week spreading the prophesy of doom fed to them by the polar bear researchers most committed to the “threatened with extinction” narrative: The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian. The desperation is becoming palpable as the public catches on to their epic failure.

In 2007, the sea ice dropped to a level the experts said wouldn’t be reached…

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If experts had been right about sea ice, there would be no polar bears in Churchill

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While BBC viewers in their TV bubble sit by the fireside grieving about the plight of those ‘poor polar bears’ (or similar emotive words)…in the real world it’s a different story altogether.

polarbearscience

The simple fact is that if polar bear experts had been right about the threat to polar bears from the loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic, there would be no polar bears in Churchill this fall. No bears for tourists to photograph, none for biologists to study, and certainly none for the BBC to film for an upcoming three-part TV special called “Arctic Live.”

The low-ice future that biologists said would doom polar bears to extinction by 2050 has already happened in 8 out of the last 10 years. The sea ice future has been realized.

Polar bears have experienced those supposedly deadly low-ice summers for almost a decade but the global population did not drop by 2/3 as predicted and not a single one of the ten subpopulations predicted to be extirpated under those conditions has been wiped out.

How much more wrong can you…

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Recent studies show Sept ice of 3-5 mkm2 did not kill polar bears off as predicted

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Once again it turns out that polar bears are more resilient to low summer sea ice conditions than experts assumed. Maybe they should look for some other supposed problem to highlight.

polarbearscience

The annual Arctic sea ice minimum for 2016 is imminent and the hand-wringing about polar bear survival has already begun. While this year is shaping up to be another very low sea ice minimum in the Arctic – not as low as 2012 but lower than 2007 (previously the 2nd lowest since 1979) – contrary to predictions, several recent studies show that such low sea ice coverage in summer has had no (or very limited) negative effects on polar bear health and survival. In fact, for polar bears in some areas low summer sea ice has been quite beneficial (although these are not the populations that polar bear specialists predicted would do better).

Since low summer extents of recent magnitude (3.0 – 5.0 mkm2) are clearly not any sort of threat to polar bears, it seems improbable that even an ice-free (≤ 1.0 mkm2) summer (e.g…

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BREAKING: DNA results prove so-called polar bear hybrid was a blonde grizzly

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Yet another polar bear alarm bites the dust.

polarbearscience

All the hubris last month about polar bear x grizzly hybrids, based on an unusual-looking bear killed near Arviat, has turned out to be wishful thinking by those who’d like to blame everything to do with polar bears on climate change. An awful lot of “experts” now have egg on their faces. That “hybrid” was just a blonde grizzly, as I warned it might.

According to one report,Nunavut wildlife manager Mathieu Dumond said:

“Some otherwise pretty renown bear biologists jumped on the hybrid bear story without even knowing what they were talking about,” Dumond said.

“I think it was something blown out of proportion, with the wrong information to start.”

Gee, ya think? CBC ran a story too. But the CBC don’t really admit (see below) that they were the first out of the gate on this story and started the media madness. It was the CBC that relied…

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Silence of the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group on the 2015 IUCN Red List assessment

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Hiding the non-decline in polar bear numbers? Why would anyone want to bury good news – unless they had an agenda?

polarbearscience

It’s been six months and still the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group has not updated its website with a link to the 2015 IUCN Red List assessment for polar bears, which was made public with some fanfare in November 2015. They are not the only group still ignoring the Red List decision but their silence is the most damning – the IUCN is the parent body of their organization.

On May 7th, I wrote to the IUCN Red List folks (redlist@iucn.org) about this situation (excerpt below) but as yet have received no reply.

In part, my letter to the Red List said:

“The IUCN PBSG website is one of the first places people are directed to when they look online for official information about the conservation status of polar bears. Yet by early May 2016, no mention is found of the November 2015 Red List assessment of polar bears on…

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‘No extinctions’: polar bears survived periods when the Arctic had no ice

Sea ice optional [image credit: BBC]

More global warming sales talk masquerading as science gets exposed.

Date: 11/01/16 Michael Bastasch, Daily Caller News Foundation
Former Vice President Al Gore shocked Americans in “An Inconvenient Truth” when he said polar bears were drowning because global warming was melting Arctic sea ice, but now a new study shows that polar bears did just fine even when there was no ice covering the Arctic.