Larry Kummer, Editor Book, Film, & TV Reviews, Science & Nature 21 March 2019 Summary: This is a fascinating book about science, about the making of public policy, about climate change, and above all – about nature. They all intersect in the debate about the future of polar bears. Review of a fact-rich, logical, and…
Dr. Susan Crockford writes: The MSM have gone mad for this story today. I wrote up a post yesterday debunking the AGW claim. Polar bears have been terrorizing a Russian town on the Barents Sea since December Since early December, a group of 52 polar bears have terrorized the Russian village of Belushaya Guba on southern…
Reposted from Polar Bear Science Posted on December 20, 2018 | Comments Off on Biologists escalate conflict over Inuit management of polar bear populations Yesterday, two polar bear specialists and an inept freelance journalist poured gasoline on the already-volatile issue of polar bear management in Nunavut. Quote of the day: “I think there’s a reasonable…
From Polar Bear Science Posted on September 3, 2018 | Chukchi Sea polar bears number almost 3000 according to new survey results The Chukchi Sea finally has a polar bear population estimate! According to survey results from 2016 only recently made public, about 2937 bears (1522-5944) currently inhabit the region, making this the largest subpopulation…
Guest essay by Eric Worrall [addition h/t to users: Cam_S, Neo, and Fraizer, who all called attention to the this story ~ctm] h/t Howard “Cork” Hayden; Inuit communities are increasingly alarmed at surging populations of polar bears posing a risk to public safety, and have advanced plans to kill more polar bears to mitigate the…
Observations: Polar Bears Continue To Thrive, Grow In Number, Shredding Forecasts Of Climate Doom Ten years ago, polar bears were classified as an endangered species due to model-based assumptions that said the recession of Arctic sea ice would hamper the bears’ seal-hunting capabilities and ultimately lead to starvation and extinction. The Inuit, who have observed…
A stunning admission from National Geographic: National Geographic went too far in drawing a definitive connection between climate change and a particular starving polar bear in the opening caption of our video about the animal. We said, “This is what climate change looks like.” While science has established that there is a strong connection between…
Inconvenient rebound in polar bear numbers. Polar bears not starving, says Nunatsiavut wildlife manager Geoff Bartlett · CBC News One of the people who oversees an Indigenous hunt of polar bears says the population is doing well, despite heart-wrenching photos online suggesting some bears are starving. Every year, the Nunatsiavut government awards polar bear licences to Inuit hunters living in…
Guest essay by Eric Worrall According to the Guardian, cute endangered animal toys trick our minds into thinking the animals represented by the toys are all around us. Using cute animals in pop culture makes public think they’re not endangered – study Proliferation of giraffes, lions, tigers and elephants in toy shops and films creates…
The two most bizarre people in the climate debate have now had the most bizarre thing happen to them and their garbage science paper that basically become a peer reviewd smear of Dr. Susan Crockford.. Retraction watch notes: Caught Our Notice: Climate change leads to more…neurosurgery for polar bears? Denial by Proxy What Caught Our…
From Dr. Benny Peiser GWPF details on the upcoming battle. Coming next Tuesday to Toronto’s swanky Yorkville district, it’s the 2018 Polar Bear Showdown, an international display of conflicting views on the state of polar-bear science. At one corner in Yorkville, in the ballroom of the upmarket Four Seasons Hotel, Polar Bears International (PBI) will stage a grand, $15,000-a-table gala to raise funds to protect…
It seems thicker sea ice in the region was the cause, but they ignore that fact. By Dr. Susan Crockford The really significant content of a new paper being heavily-hyped by the media1 is what wasn’t said rather than what the authors discovered about metabolic rates and weight maintenance of a small sample of nine Southern…
Guest essay by Dr. Richard Tol In their eagerness to discredit a colleague[1] Harvey et al. (2017) got ahead of themselves. The write-up shows signs of haste – typographical errors (“principle component analysis”, “refereces cited”) and nonsensical statements (“95% normal probability”) escaped the attention of the 14 authors, 3 referees and editor – but so does…
By Andy May 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…
Guest essay by Jim Steele Director emeritus Sierra Nevada Field Campus, San Francisco State University and author of Landscapes & Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism What oddly seems to surprise so many people, reality can quickly disagree with the hypotheses and speculative models of scientists. The polar bear is a rich case in…
By Larry Kummer. From the Fabius Maximus website. Summary: Climate activists have made polar bears “the face of climate change.” This week we see how they have done so: with fake news. That they do so instead of relying on science tells us much about them — and why they have achieved so few policy…
As many readers know, there was a erroneous and malicious paper recently published by The journal Bioscience titled Internet blogs, polar bears, and climate-change denial by proxy, (Harvey et al. 2017) covered here and here by WUWT, along with a request for retraction here. The person who was the focus of the 14 authors of the Harvey…
By Dr. Susan Crockford Last week I asked: “What’s causing the death of the polar bear as a climate change icon?” I was echoing the conclusion of a commentator at the Arctic Institute (22 August 2017) who lamented: “The polar bear is dead, long live the polar bear” and climate scientist Michael Mann, who told a lecture audience a…
Press Release 19 January 2017 FROM: Dr. Susan J. Crockford, University of Victoria, Canada A paper published today finds that predictions of polar bear population crashes due to summer sea ice loss are based on a scientifically unfounded assumption. Specifically, the paper addresses the basic premise upon which predicted population declines linked to modeled habitat…
Guest essay by Eric Worrall NYT brings us this heartrending story about polar bears on the verge of extinction fooling people into thinking they are fine, by looking overweight, and scavenging Alaskan rubbish dumps. Polar Bears’ Path to Decline Runs Through Alaskan Village The bears that come here are climate refugees, on land because the…
Dr. Susan Crockford asks me to bring this to your attention. She writes: The annual Arctic sea ice minimum for 2016 is imminent and the hand-wringing about polar bear survival has already begun. While this year isshaping up to be another very low sea ice minimum in the Arctic – not as low as 2012…
From the “Emily Litella” department (never mind) and Zoologist Dr. Susan Crockford, comes yet another hilarious take-down of attempts to link polar bears and climate change last month. Turns out it’s just a blonde. Paging Andrew Derocher! Cleanup on aisle 5! Dr. Crockford writes: All the hubris last month about polar bear x grizzly hybrids,…
Guest essay by Eric Worrall The discovery of a rare wild Grolar bear, a fertile Grizzly / Polar bear hybrid, is being treated as a terrifying sign of global warming in the Arctic. Grolar bears: Climate change could be behind grizzly-polar bear hybrid, scientists say An unusual bear shot by a hunter days ago in…
Guest essay by Dr. Susan Crockford Grim predictions of the imminent demise of polar bears – their “harsh prophetic reality” as it’s been called – have been touted since at least 2001. But such depressing prophesies have so widely missed the mark they can now be said to have failed. While polar bears may…
Paleoclimate + genetic study confirms: Arctic species adapted to sea ice changes Guest essay by Dr. Susan Crockford A new paper that combines paleoclimatology data for the last 56 million years with molecular genetic evidence concludes there were no biological extinctions over the last 1.5M years despite profound Arctic sea ice changes that included ice-free summers:…
Guest essay by Dr. Susan J. Crockford of polarbearscience.com * see update below on the % number Survey Results: Svalbard polar bear numbers increased 30 42% over last 11 years Results of this fall’s Barents Sea population survey have been released by the Norwegian Polar Institute and they are phenomenal: despite several years with poor ice conditions,…
More Research Finds Polar Bears’ Condition Unaffected by Reduced Summer Sea Ice. Guest essay by Jim Steele Director emeritus Sierra Nevada Field Campus, San Francisco State University and author of Landscapes & Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism Reasons to Petition Congress to Investigate USGS’ Dubious Polar Bear Claims Sign Petition Here: Although the…
From the United States Geological Survey and the department of omnivorous dining comes this: Polar bears unlikely to thrive on land-based foods ANCHORAGE, Alaska — A team of scientists led by the U.S. Geological Survey found that polar bears, increasingly forced on shore due to sea ice loss, may be eating terrestrial foods including berries,…
From the University of Washington and the department of unbearable press releases: First global review on the status, future of Arctic marine mammals For Arctic marine mammals, the future is especially uncertain. Loss of sea ice and warming temperatures are shifting already fragile Northern ecosystems. The precarious state of those mammals is underscored in a…
Via Dr. Susan Crockford at polarbearscience.com: Here’s a new resource for cooling the polar bear spin, all in one place. I’ve updated and expanded my previous summary of reasons not to worry about polar bears, which is now two years old. In it, you’ll find links to supporting information (including previous blog posts of mine…
Susan Crockford, Special to Financial Post (republished at WUWT with permission from the author) Polar bears are a conservation success story. However, you’d never know that from the output of polar bear researchers, who lately seem to have forgotten that the most crucial part of their job is the unbiased collection and presentation of scientific…
The IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG) should have been disbanded in 1996, the year polar bears were down-graded from a status of ‘vulnerable to extinction’ to ‘lower risk – conservation dependent’ (now called ‘least concern’) on the IUCN Red List. Guest essay by Dr. Susan Crockford, Zoologist Polar bears had recovered from previous decades…
Guest essay by Jim Steele, Director emeritus Sierra Nevada Field Campus, San Francisco State University and author of Landscapes & Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism Suggesting impending climate doom, headlines have been trumpeting polar bears are “barely surviving” and “bears are disappearing” prompted by a press release hyping the paper Polar bear…
New Science Scandal: Polar Bear Researchers ‘Hide The Increase’ Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop criticises US president Barack Obama for a speech in Brisbane last weekend in which he claimed climate change threatened the Great Barrier Reef. It is highly unusual for an Australian foreign minister to openly criticise a US president. Ms Bishop also…
A bit more good news about polar bear populations, this time from an abundance study in the Southern Beaufort Sea. Dr. Susan Crockford writes: A bit more good news about polar bear populations, this time from an abundance study in the Southern Beaufort Sea. A paper released yesterday showed a 25-50% decline in population size…
IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group says its global population estimate was “a qualified guess” By Dr. Susan Crockford Last week (May 22), I received an unsolicited email from Dr. Dag Vongraven, the current chairman of the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG). The email from Vongraven began this way:
Guest essay by Jim Steele, Director emeritus Sierra Nevada Field Campus, San Francisco State University. David Attenborough was my favorite wildlife cinematographer and each year I fed my students numerous clips to make biology and ecology come alive. Researching the plight of the polar bears, I began to worry that “my hero” had decided to…
Susan Crockford writes: This year marks the 40th anniversary of the signing of an international agreement to protect polar bears from commercial and unregulated sport hunting. The devastating decades of uncontrolled slaughter across the Arctic, including the Bering Sea, finally came to an end. And so in honour of the International Polar Bear Day (27 February) –…
Dr. Susan Crockford, Zoologist, of http://www.polarbearscience.com advises us of this: “We are now the polar bear” says Mann today (below) [a few weeks ago it was Patricia Romero Lankao of the federally financed National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado saying “The polar bear is us” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/24/climate-change-dangers_n_5019412.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular%5D Scientists Speak Out: The New IPCC Report…
WUWT readers may recall our coverage of Charles Monnett, whose antics with polar bear sitings and attribution led Al Gore to put this famous animated video clip into An Inconvenient Truth and make wild claims about polar bears drowning for lack of sea ice: Monnett’s legal case is over, and he has been forced to…
Dr. Susan Crockford writes: Regarding: Science self-corrects: bogus study claiming Roundup tolerant GMO corn causes cancer to be retracted This ratty story reminds me of the polar bear incident I just posted about this morning at PolarBearScience.
Image: Toonpool Newsbusters reports: Teasing an upcoming story on Wednesday’s NBC Nightly News, anchor Brian Williams warned of “the habitat of the polar bears melting earlier and faster than ever” and promised “a jaw-dropping look at a way of life quickly disappearing.” [Listen to the audio ] In the report that followed minutes later, chief…
Guest essay by Jim Steel, Director Emeritus, San Fransisco State University “Annual primary production in the Arctic has increased yearly … Should these trends continue, additional loss of ice during Arctic spring could boost productivity >3-fold above 1998–2002 levels” 1 -Dr. Kevin Arrigo, Stanford University While the Inuit argue it is the time of the…
Guest essay by Jim Steele, director emeritus, San Francisco State University The Inuit claim “it is the time of the most polar bears.” By synthesizing their community’s observations they have demonstrated a greater accuracy counting Bowhead whales and polar bears than the models of credentialed scientists. To estimate correctly, it takes a village. In contrast…
Great News! But Where Is The News Coverage? From The GWPF and Dr. Benny Peiser Exciting news about polar bears in eastern Canada: a new the peer-reviewed paper concludes that despite sea ice having declined since the 1970s, polar bear numbers in Davis Strait have not only increased to a greater density than other seasonal-ice…
The press release below is from Wiley, where they worry that the polar bear can’t find enough sea ice. Meanwhile, billboards proclaim the uptick in polar bear numbers thanks to conservation efforts and other factors. See below for 10 reasons to consider why we shouldn’t worry. – Anthony For polar bears, it’s survival of the…
Yesterday I posted a story, based on a press release from the University of Alberta, suggesting ‘timing is everything‘. Indeed, it appears to be for action. Polarbearscience picked up the release via my story and writes:
From the apparently out of touch with reality University of Alberta , comes this poorly timed headline that made me laugh out loud when I read it, because of this other polar bear story today in which it demonstrates polar bear numbers on the rise: NPR finally gets it – does this signal an end…
From NPR: The Inconvenient Truth About Polar Bears In 2008, reports of polar bears’ inevitable march toward extinction gripped headlines. Stories of thinning Arctic ice and even polar bear cannibalism combined to make these predators into a powerful symbol in the debate about climate change. The headlines caught Zac Unger’s attention, and he decided to…
From the Seattle Times – the end game of ‘polarbeargate’: Scientist who saw drowned polar bears reprimanded An Alaska scientist whose observations of drowned polar bears helped galvanize the global warming movement has been reprimanded for improper release of government documents. JUNEAU, Alaska — An Alaska scientist whose observations of drowned polar bears helped galvanize…