Polar Bears

A Geological Perspective of Polar Bears

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By David Middleton – Re-Blogged From WUWT

A Popular Narrative

Polar bears (Ursus maritimus) are the poster child for the impacts of climate change on species, and justifiably so. To date, global warming has been most pronounced in the Arctic, and this trend is projected to continue. There are suggestions that before mid-century we could have a nearly ice-free Arctic in the summer. This increases the urgency with which we must act to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions to delay or avoid some of the worst consequences of climate change.

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Polar Bear Survival

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By  Polar Bear Science – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Posted on September 20, 2020 | Comments Off on Potential impact of the second-lowest sea ice minimum since 1979 on polar bear survival

The annual summer sea ice minimum in the Arctic has been reached and while the precise extent has not yet been officially determined, it’s clear this will be the ‘second lowest’ minimum (after 2012) since 1979. However, as there is no evidence that polar bears were harmed by the 2012 ‘lowest’ summer sea ice this year’s ‘second-lowest’ is unlikely to have any negative effect.

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Sceptical Covid-19 Research and Sceptical Polar Bear Science: Is There a Difference?

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By Polar Bear Science – Re-Blogged From WUWT

This essay about medical researchers having trouble getting their papers published because the results don’t support the official pandemic narrative has disturbing parallels with my experience trying to inject some balance into the official polar bear conservation narrative.1 Especially poignant is the mention of models built on assumptions sold as ‘facts’ that fail once data (i.e. evidence) become available – which of course is the entire point of my latest book, The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened.

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Polar Bears Defy SCIENCE! by Refusing to Die

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By Dr. Susan Crockford – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Many W Hudson Bay polar bears still offshore at 7 August despite apparent low ice levels

Contrary to all expert expectations, five female polar bears (45%) out of eleven that had tracking collars attached last year were still out on the sea ice that’s lingering along the western shore of Hudson Bay as of 7 August. And if five collared bears are out there, then there are almost certainly many more without collars doing the same thing. This pattern of bears staying out on the ice long after the so-called ‘critical threshold’ of 50% concentration has passed has been going on since at least 2015 and many bears on tracking maps in July and August appear to be on ice that doesn’t exist.

Chukchi Sea polar bear Arctic_early August 2018_A Khan NSIDC small

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Emperor Penguin Numbers Rise

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By Dr. Susan Crockford’s Polar Bear Science – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Emperor penguin (Aptenodytes fosteri) populations in 2019 were found to have grown by up to 10% since 2009 – to as many as 282,150 breeding pairs (up from about 256,500) out of a total population of over 600,000 birds (Fretwell et al. 2012; Fretwell and Trathan 2020; Trathan et al. 2020) – despite a loss of thousands of chicks in 2016 when an ice shelf collapsed. Yet, biologists studying this species are currently petitioning the IUCN to upgrade emperor penguins to ‘Vulnerable’ (Trathan et al. 2020), based on models that use the implausible and extreme RCP8.5 ‘worse case‘ climate change scenario (e.g. Hausfather and Peters 2020) that polar bear biologists find so compelling. Not surprisingly, their unscientific models suggest emperor penguins could be close to extinction by 2100 under these unlikely conditions – but if we reduce CO2 emissions via political policy, the penguins will be saved!

Emperor penguins NOAA_Wikipedia 2006 med

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Polar Bear Survival Contradictions: Sea Ice Decline vs. Documented Harm

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Reposted from Dr. Susan Crockford’s Polar Bear Science

Re-Blogged From WUWT

Here I take a detailed look at sea ice and polar bear population health information available for Western Hudson Bay and the Southern Beaufort compared to the Barents and Chukchi Seas. Data from the first two regions – but especially Western Hudson Bay – are used repeatedly to proclaim that a pronounced decline in summer sea ice since 1979 has caused harm to the health of global polar bear populations even though data from the second two regions strongly contradict such a conclusion, as I’ve pointed out in my fully referenced book, The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened.

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These contradictions mean that studies from Western Hudson Bay and the Southern Beaufort should not be used to extrapolate to the rest of the Arctic with regard to how polar bears are responding to reduced summer sea ice. The plea to ‘Save Our Sea Ice‘ for the sake of polar bear survival is a climate change marketing slogan, not a scientific assessment.

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BBC Asks Dr. Willie Soon to Respond to Climate Conspiracy Claims

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By Eric Worrall – Re-Blogged From WUWT

The BBC has belatedly decided they need at least a little input from one of the targets of their latest big oil climate conspiracy propaganda piece. Dr. Willie Soon does not hold back in his response.

Note some of the links take you to a “You are leaving the mail.com service” page. This is a harmless artefact caused by copying Dr. Soon’s email, click continue to see the referenced document.

Dear Ms. Keane,

I am wary of responding to your false allegations, since your questions seem somewhat loaded. Disappointingly, they appear to repeat the dishonest and misleading claims of the former Greenpeace USA research director, Kert Davies (now running the so-called “Climate Investigations Center”), whose research we have shown to be disingenuous in Section 2 of our attached 2018 report on Greenpeace (Attachment 1). Unfortunately, the premise of your series seems to be the dangerous conspiracy theories promoted by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway in their 2010 book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Climate Change and their 2014 film of the same name. I’ve attached a short 3-page .pdf (Attachment 2) summarizing just a few examples of the poor scholarship and bizarre hypocrisies in Oreskes & Conway’s conspiracy theories.

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Why are Polar Bears Going Extinct? (Spoiler: They’re Not)

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By Dr. Susan Crockford – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Reposted from Dr. Susan Crockford’s Polar Bear Science

Google says many people ask this question so here is the correct answer: polar bears are not going extinct. If you have been told that, you have misunderstood or have been misinformed. Polar bears are well-distributed across their available habitat and population numbers are high (officially 22,000-31,000 at 2015 but likely closer to 26,000-58,000 at 2018): these are features of a healthy, thriving species. ‘Why are polar bears going extinct?’ contains a false premise – there is no need to ask ‘why’ when the ‘polar bears [are] going extinct’ part is not true.1

mother-with-cubs-russia_shutterstock_71694292_web-size-e1582489285608

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A Conversation with Susan J. Crockford

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Interview by Grégoire Canlorbe – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Susan Janet Crockford is a Canadian zoologist, author, and blogger specializing in Holocene mammals. From 2004 to 2019 she was an adjunct professor in Anthropology at the University of Victoria. She is best known for her blog posts on polar bear biology, which oppose the scientific consensus that polar bears are threatened by ongoing climate change. In October 2019 she was interviewed by Grégoire Canlorbe—on behalf of the Association des climato-réalistes, the only climate-realist organization in France. The English version of the conversation was first published on Friends of Science, in December 2019.

Susan J. Crockford: I live in Victoria, British Columbia, and I specialize in animals from the late Pleistocene, so probably the last fifteen to twenty thousand years. I have a contract company called Pacific Identifications Inc. We identify animal bones from archaeological projects and also from biological research: stomach contents, fecal samples, that kind of thing. That’s primarily how I get my income. And then, I am also a former adjunct professor at the university—I had held that position since 2004 but in 2019, it was not renewed.

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Unfounded Fear of Polar Bear Catastrophe

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Re-Blogged From Polar Bear Science

Misplaced eco-anxiety that kids have about polar bears starts with activist biologists like Steven Amstrup, spokesperson for an organization devoted to raising climate change alarm – and media outlets like The Guardian who help them spread fears unsupported by scientific evidence.

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Fat healthy polar bear male at Kaktovik, Alaska in the Southern Beaufort Sea, September 2019, Ed Boudreau photo, with permission.

You can’t get much more over the top than these statements from Amstrup today but read carefully: it’s either opinion or factual aspects of polar bear life (“we know that the bears aren’t feeding”) made to sound like new, terrifying developments that can be blamed on climate change.

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10 Fallacies About Arctic Sea Ice & Polar Bear Survival

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Dr. Susan Crockford’s Polar Bear Science – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Summer sea ice loss is finally ramping up: first year is disappearing, as it has done every year since ice came to the Arctic millions of years ago. But critical misconceptions, fallacies, and disinformation abound regarding Arctic sea ice and polar bear survival. Ahead of Arctic Sea Ice Day (15 July), here are 10 fallacies that teachers and parents especially need to know about.

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The cartoon above was done by Josh: you can drop off the price of a beer (or more) for his efforts here.

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Polar Bear Population Has Quadrupled Since ’60s

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By Michael Barnes – Re-Blogged From Liberty Headlines

‘Almost everywhere polar bears come into contact with people, they are much more common than they used to be…’

STUDY: Decline of Polar Bears is Fake News
The plight of arctic polar bears is an emotional tragedy that has helped advance public awareness about the devastating impact of climate change.

Except, it’s not actually true.

According research from the Global Warming Policy Foundation, polar bear numbers appear to have quadrupled since the 1960s.

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False Premises

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By Dr. Tim Ball – Re-Blogged From WUWT

The perpetuation of the deception that humans are causing the inevitable collapse of the world because of global warming works because of the deliberate exploitation of human traits and frailties. Usually, they are exploitations of ideas and misdirection’s that worked in the past. Despite clear, concise, explanations with evidence under oath before political leaders by well-qualified scientists of what is wrong with the science the lies and deceptions continue. It is hard to believe that all or even a portion of the proponents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) don’t know what is wrong with the hypothesis. Senator Timothy Wirth instrumental in the creation of the AGW deception was quoted by Michael Fumento as early as 1993 that,

“We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing, in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”

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Twelve Invisible Eco-Catastrophes and Threats of Doom That are Actually Fake

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By Patrick Moore, PhD – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Some time ago it struck me that the majority of alleged environmental catastrophes and threats are invisible or very remote, thus making it virtually impossible for the average person to validate them through observation. Observations, along with replications of those observations, are the very foundation of the scientific method. Seeing is believing, and seeing the same result again and again under similar circumstances reinforces the belief. Is it possible that activist groups and the media choose to cite supposed catastrophes and threats that are invisible, very remote or both because the majority of people cannot verify them in person and therefore must rely on the activists, the media, and other third parties to tell them the truth? At the conclusion of this essay, the reader may judge. Here’s a list of some of the alleged invisible catastrophes and threats of doom, beginning with one of the former.

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A Conversation With Dr. Willie Soon

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By Grégoire Canlorbe – Re-Blogged From http://www.WattsUpWithThat.com

Science, Philosophy and Inquiry on a Galactic Scale

  • Dr. Willie Soon is an independent solar physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who has been studying the Sun and its influence on the Earth’s climate for more than a quarter of a century. A short while ago, he had a conversation with Mr. Grégoire Canlorbe, an independent journalist who is also vice president of the French Parti National-Libéral (“National-Liberal Party,” conservative, nationalist, and free-marketist). Here Dr. Soon speaks for himself. 

 

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Extinctions and Shutting Down the Gulf Stream

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By Andy May – Re-Blogged From http://www.WattsUpWithThat.com

This is part four of our series on climate change costs and hazards. The first three parts were on humans and the environment, population and the food supply, and the cost of global warming. In this part we examine the assertion that man-made climate change, the growth of the human population, and other human activities are causing an increase in species extinctions. We also examine the polar bear controversy.

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The Making of a Climate Skeptic – at University

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Foreword by Anthony Watts -Re-Blogged From http://www.WattsUpWithThat.com
This essay is written by a student at the University of Wyoming, who finds herself in the middle of a set of circumstances that are pushing her further into the realm of being a climate skeptic. It is an eye-opening read. I have verified the identity of the student, but per her request (due to the backlash she fears) I am allowing her to write under the pen name of “Clair Masters”

Guest essay by Clair Masters

The class was languid, most kids were on their phones, or surfing Facebook on their laptops. I sat with my notebook open in front of me, empty except for the lecture title at the top of the page. The professor put a slide up on the projector showing a chart relating CO2 and temperature over the course of a few million years, the one we’ve all seen by now. The CO2 curve lags after the Temperature one, and anyone’s first reading of the chart would probably be that temperature is driving the CO2 changes, not the other way around, if there is any trend at all. I perked up slightly, it was new for a professor to show alternate data, and looked around expectantly at other students, waiting for some kind of reaction—confusion, frowns, anything to show they’re seeing something that fights what we’ve been told since elementary school. I saw a few yawns, dull stares, people on their phones, though one loud girl who was a religious global warming fanatic was glaring at the slide, slouching in her seat so her hand could pet her (dubiously trained) service dog.

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What I Learned About Climate Change: The Science is NOT Settled

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By David Siegel – Re-Blogged From Medium.com

What is your position on the climate-change debate? What would it take to change your mind?

If the answer is It would take a ton of evidence to change my mind, because my understanding is that the science is settled, and we need to get going on this important issue, that’s what I thought, too. This is my story.

More than thirty years ago, I became vegan because I believed it was healthier (it’s not), and I’ve stayed vegan because I believe it’s better for the environment (it is). I haven’t owned a car in ten years. I love animals; I’ll gladly fly halfway around the world to take photos of them in their natural habitats. I’m a Democrat: I think governments play a key role in helping preserve our environment for the future in the most cost-effective way possible. Over the years, I built a set of assumptions: that Al Gore was right about global warming, that he was the David going up against the industrial Goliath. In 1993, I even wrote a book about it.

Recently, a friend challenged those assumptions. At first, I was annoyed, because I thought the science really was settled. As I started to look at the data and read about climate science, I was surprised, then shocked. As I learned more, I changed my mind. I now think there probably is no climate crisis and that the focus on CO2 takes funding and attention from critical environmental problems. I’ll start by making ten short statements that should challenge your assumptions and then back them up with an essay.

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Science vs. Assumpsence: The Act of Knowing What You’re Quarreling About

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By Geir Hasnes – Re-Blogged From http://www.WattsUpWithThat.com

Very often, and arguably most often, a disagreement is rooted in a lack of definition of what one agrees upon before starting the argument. Thus the argument soon develops into a quarrel, and while each side thinks he has won the argument in the end, he is also puzzled by why the other side doesn’t give in to the facts, of for instance, as in the case of the climate quarrel, the ‘Science’.

The statistician William M. Briggs, in his recent article Climate Change Alarmists Appear Immunized against Reality (link) asks: “This brings us to the crucial question: how do we reach educators like Johnson? We can’t do it with reality. Temperatures aren’t increasing, storms are down in number and strength, sea levels aren’t chasing folks from beaches, droughts are not increasing, parts of the world are growing greener.

“I don’t have the answer. Do you?”

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Environmental And Climatic Alarmism Demand Accountability

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By Dr. Tim Ball – Re-Blogged From http://www.WattsUpWithThat.com

In Aesop’s story of the boy who cried wolf the consequences included him losing his sheep and his credibility, even if he later told the truth. Today, environmental and climate alarmists who cry wolf don’t lose anything. There is no accountability. In fact, they continue to have credibility, keep their jobs and receive funding as millions of others suffer in a multitude of ways. Failed climate predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) continue as the basis for regulations and policies, that profoundly affect thousands of people’s lives. What is happening confirms H.L. Mencken’s observation,

“The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the greatest liars: the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.”

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Talking Truth to the Climate Consensus

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A sound bite summary*

By Rud Istvan – Re-Blogged From http://www.WattsUpWithThat.com

The climate consensus has two levels of derogation for those who disagree. Climate ‘contrarians’ like Bjørn Lomborg disagree about mitigation policies. Climate ‘deniers’ like Judith Curry disagree about the underlying climatology. The consensus does not want disagreement, since the ‘science is settled’. They decline to engage (Schmidt/Spencer), disappear comments (Real Climate, the Guardian), refuse to host comments (LATimes), and loudly allege a fossil fuel funded ‘denier’ conspiracy (Grijalva). But they cannot avoid the occasional personal encounter. Following are some possible ‘silver bullets’.

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