Now that all bears are ashore for the season, the folks at the Polar Bear Alert program in Churchill note in their report for week 7 (21-27 August, 2017) that the bears ashore are in excellent condition (confirming reports on the first bears ashore in July):
Rather marked contrast to the pessimistic spin on conditions from the field a few months ago:
[yes, a few bears fail to make it through the winter, especially young bears; but that has always been the case — it’s not a sign of human-caused global warming catastrophe]
Last week’s problem bear report also confirmed news from the Churchill Polar Bears website a few weeks ago that showed several images of very fat bears:
See below for last year’s report for week 7 and this year’s report for week 8 (28 August-3 September). Western Hudson Bay polar bears that come ashore near Churchill, Manitoba are starting their third month on land this week, out of the five months or so they have spent ashore in recent years (about 3 weeks more than in the 1980s, no longer than they did in 2004 — conditions have not been getting worse).
Posted in Life History, Sea ice habitat
Tagged alert, Churchill, Hudson Bay, ice-free, onshore, polar bear, problem bears, sea ice, summer, western hudson bay
Churchill, Manitoba’s Polar Bear Alert Program is still reporting many fewer problems with polar bears onshore than it did last year at the same point in the ice-free season (week 5, 7-13 August):
Compare to week five last year (2016), when bears came ashore in excellent condition:
Although it’s been warmer than average recently (25.4 degrees C yesterday, expected to reach 29 degrees C today and 28 degrees C tomorrow), according to Environment Canada weather records, that’s not even close to an August record-breaker temperature for Churchill. Continue reading
Posted in History, Life History, Polar bear attacks
Tagged alert, attacks, Churchill, encounters, facts, heat wave, history, ice-free, jail, onshore, polar bear, problems, temperature
Polar bear populations in most of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago (CAA) must be booming, as they are elsewhere. That’s because the ‘experts’ were even more wrong in their predictions of future sea ice conditions than most people realize: they expected the CAA would remain choked with ice during a ‘nearly ice-free’ summer driven by human-caused global warming.
Map presented by Wang and Overland (2012: Fig 3) shows what these experts thought a ‘nearly ice-free’ summer would look like, which they expected to occur by 2030 or so.
Look at the map from Wang and Overland (2012) above, which is what they thought a ‘nearly ice-free’ summer would look like in the year 2030 or so.
Wang and Overland used the same models used by USGS biologists to predict the future survival of polar bears based on habitat loss (Amstrup et al. 2007; Atwood et al. 2016; Durner et al. 2007, 2009). Note the thick ice in the CAA — what USGS experts call the ‘Archipelago’ sea ice ecoregion (denoted by white in the map), indicating ice about 1 metre thick (2-3 feet) — expected to remain at the height of summer in 2030.
[Earlier renditions of sea ice projections (e.g. ACIA 2005) show something similar. The second update of the ACIA released just yesterday (AMAP 2017, described here by the CBC) has prudently included no such firm predictions in their Summary for Policy Makers, just dire warnings of future catastrophe. But see the 2012 update.]
The problem is that ice in this region has been largely absent most summers since 2006, even though overall ice extent has been much more extensive than expected for a ‘nearly ice-free’ summer, as I show below.
This is not another “worse than we thought” moment (Amstrup et al. 2007) — this is sea ice models so wrong as to be useless: failed models used to inform future polar bear survival models that got the bears declared ‘threatened’ with extinction in the US in 2008 (Crockford 2017).
It also means polar bears are almost certainly doing much better than recent population counts indicate, since only one subpopulation out of the six in the CAA has recently been assessed. But since polar bear specialists have consistently underestimated the adaptability of this species and the resilience of the Arctic ecosystem to respond to changing conditions, it’s hard to take any of their hyperbole about the future of polar bears seriously. Continue reading
Posted in Conservation Status, Population, Sea ice habitat
Tagged Canadian Arctic Archipelago, Crockford, first year ice, Gulf of Boothia, ice-free, IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group, IUCN Red List, Kane Basin, Lancaster Sound, multiyear ice, Northwest Passage, PBSG, predictions, sea ice, wrong
Ringed seal biologist Steven Ferguson, in a statement to a reporter from the Winnipeg Free Press, made one of the boldest predictions I’ve ever heard:
“Hudson Bay could experience its first free winter within 5-10 years.”
You heard it here, folks. It appears Ferguson thinks Hudson Bay was never ice-free in winter even during the Eemian Interglacial, when the Bering Sea was ice-free in winter – something that has not come close happening in recent years (Polyak et al. 2010:1769).
Sounds like a bit of ill-advised grandstanding to me.
Arctic sea ice tied 2007 for extent at the September minimum less than 3 weeks ago but with the refreeze proceeding much faster than 2007, seals will soon be returning to the ice edge and polar bears will be back to feeding like they did in 2010.
Sea ice extent less than 5.0 mkm2 lasted less than 6 weeks (23 August – 28 September), according to NSIDC.
Posted in Conservation Status
Tagged Barents Sea, Chukchi Sea, extent, feeding, freeze-up, habitat, Hudson Bay freeze-up, hunting, ice-free, polar bear, sea ice, seals, September ice minimum
It’s still based on the same flawed ecological premise as all previous models – it assumes that sea ice was a naturally stable habitat until human-caused global warming came along. It also uses slight-of-hand maneuvers to correlate declining summer sea ice and declining polar bear population numbers.
Just because they keep repeating the same hype doesn’t make it true.
Posted in Advocacy, Conservation Status, Sea ice habitat
Tagged activist, AGW, Amstrup, Arctic, Atwood, climate warming, decline, ecoregions, emissions, extinction, fallacy, flawed, global warming, greenhouse gas, ice-free, models, polar bear, polarbearscience, population, press release, science, sea ice, sea ice loss, summer, thick spring ice, threat, threatened, USGS, variation