Polar Bears Are Thriving

Not only he doesn't have one he doesn't realize that for hundreds of years at a time there were little to ZERO summer sea ice earlier in this interglacial time, yet Polar Bears are here today.......

 

Its a POLITICAL document thus contaminated and parts of it is obvious bullcrap.

 

I think one of the funniest things about those that scream about "polar bear extinction" is that they are almost completely ignoring actual science like evolution.

We know that polar bears are actually a relatively recent evolution of the American brown and black bears. And the fact that all three species can interbreed freely shows that. And biologists are now tending to the fact that "polar bears" have likely appeared and disappeared multiple times in the last few million years. And when the planet warms in an interglacial, the white coating and unusual hairs are no longer an evolutionary advantage, so over time they "devolve" to be closer to the "norm" for brown and black bears.

And during a Glacial cycle, that white coating and hair becomes an evolutionary advantage, so the recessive gene that dictates that once again becomes dominant in the species in that region and it becomes the norm again.

But nobody should cry for the polar bear, they are going to continue even when the Arctic Ice Cap is gone. They will simply evolve back to a brown-black coloring, as that is far more beneficial to them in that kind of environment. And when things grow cold again, they will resume their white coloring.

 

More like thousands of years during almost all of the year. And the Polar Bear as a species have survived through multiple such cycles. Likely becoming brown-black during interglacials, and returning to white during glacials.

 

I am basing it on published science research papers for the current Interglacial period which I have a bunch of at my forum I make no claims further back in time.

 

Actually, geologically speaking we are still in a glacial period. We will not really enter a "full interglacial" for several thousand more years, when the Arctic Ice Cap almost completely vanishes.

 

The correct words are Interglacial (the current phase) and Glaciation (when glacial caps form and grow to cover large areas)

The planet has been in Ice age for the last 2.6 Million years.

 

Yes and no, as under the most "correct" geological definitions, so long as the Antarctic Ice Sheet remains we will be in one form of Ice Age or another. So one would actually have to return to around 14 mya to fully leave one.

But yes, somewhere around 2.5 mya is when the land rose between North and South America. Cutting off the equatorial current that moderated the climate of the planet and starting the current cycle of alternating freeze and thaw periods.

As for myself, I am actually excited to have been living as a great number of "new" geological discoveries have been made. I am just old enough to have remembered the time when Plate Tectonics was finally accepted as the reason why our planet is the way it is now. I even remember when geologists were still arguing if Yellowstone was actually a volcano or not. And when a field trip took us to see some of the older calderas (like the Bruneau-Jarbridge and Owyhee-Humbolt), the belief was still that they had been huge stratovolcanoes that had simply exploded and collapsed, not unlike how Mount Mazama became Crater Lake. It was not until much more recently that geologists now realize that the moving caldera never really spawned large stratovolcanoes, but instead large but never very high lava domes that would explode over and over again.

It still amazes me how much we have learned about geology in my lifetime. And even today 9 times out of 10 if I am relaxing with time to kill on YT, I am watching lectures and documentaries about geology. And that a huge amount now accepted today was "radical" and fiercely debated just 30-40 years ago. And things realized only a decade or so back are only now starting to become widely accepted.

 

The Ice age became global about 2.6 Million years ago before that it was a cold southern hemisphere and a warm northern Hemisphere that land bridge LINK you mention came about around 3 million years ago that eventually caused the North to start cooling down enough to make it glaciate in the far north.

 

Same lack of historical perspective that makes them call Little Ice Age temperatures "pre-industrial."

 

Well, to be honest most of it was pre-industrial. It started in around 1300, and the "Industrial Revolution" did not start until around 1760.

Of course, I also remember back when it was taught that the LIA ended in the early 1900s. And now they have pushed it back to at least 1850.

 

But calling it "pre-industrial" sneaks in the assumption that the Industrial Revolution caused the increase in temperature, not the increase in solar activity or the natural rebound from the LIA.

It's not clear exactly when the LIA ended, and it was certainly not the same everywhere. The last London Frost Fair was in 1814, and the global "year without a summer" (caused by the 1815 Tambora eruption) was in 1816. Weather records from many locations worldwide indicate that climate was already warming by the 1830s, well before CO2 emissions could possibly have had any significant effect.

So the point is, calling LIA temperatures "pre-industrial" is dishonestly intended to imply that if not for the Industrial Revolution and use of fossil fuels, temperatures would not have increased after the LIA, even though solar activity went from the lowest sustained low in thousands of years -- including the Sporer, Maunder and Dalton minima -- to the highest sustained high over the latter two thirds of the 20th century.

 

True. But then again, the London Frost Fairs also ended mostly because right afterwards they channeled the Thames more, causing the river to flow faster, filling in the estuaries where the ice would start before freezing into the river itself, and making it harder for ice to form. Even if we returned to Frost Fair Conditions tomorrow, the Thames will not freeze because of those changes alone.

We can see that all over much of the US. Rivers that used to freeze solid no longer do, and likely never will again because we have channeled them and diverted them so they are simply not able to anymore. Hell, the Mississippi is starting to see problems because that river normally moved courses regularly. And for the last century we have worked increasingly harder to prevent that from ever happening again. And that also is someday going to result in a disaster. As no matter how hard we are trying to prevent that from happening at like the Old River Control Structure and all the diversion ponds to remove sediment from the river to prevent that, someday nature will win and the Mississippi will divert to a new course.

But one must remember, ice ages and "cold snaps" do not end simply because things warm. In geology, the general terminology is when the climate is clearly returning to the point it was in before the cold period started. So to see the "LIA" end, it does not simply need to get warm again, but become at least a long enough trend where things are clearly not going to slip back again until it meets that surpasses conditions before it started. And the same way with the start, unless there was a single massive event that tipped everything radically it did not sink from Medieval Warm to Little Ice in just a couple of years. There were years of decreasing temperatures, more severe winters, and cooler summers before hand. But it starts when those were not just the average variables and became the pattern that remained.

Doing otherwise is the thing hucksters do. Like look at a decade or two of cooling in the late 1960s to the late 1970s and screaming "New Ice Age!"

But yes, I agree that the movement of the end of the LIA being shoved back farther and farther was tor political purposes, to try and tie it into the Industrial Revolution. I still remember many of the books tying the end of the LIA with WWI. And every few years they pushed it back more and more. Which had the irony of allowing their "new baseline" to fall in the same period that the first really accurate scientific instruments were developed. So that is what many are insisting is the "correct temperature" that the planet must be, and anything warmer is wrong.

I wonder what they would be saying if we had highly accurate scientific instruments in the late 13th century when we were still in the Medieval Warm Period? And by putting the "baseline" during the coldest era in the last thousand years, is why I compare that to checking the temperature inside your house by putting the thermometer inside your refrigerator.

This all as well as "pre-industrial" is just Newthink tactics to confuse people and get them to think as they want them to think. It's nothing knew, old Eric Blair knew about this over 7 decades ago. When I was younger, books like "Animal Farm" and "1984" were cautionary tales, quotes often used to scare us into not following them. Now, people appear to be using them as blueprints to force others to think as they do. I look at cancel culture and the attempts to silence any dissent as the exact same thing Eric warned us about in newspeak, doublespeak, and newthink.

Don't dare have any opinion other than that they tell you to have. Any that does not accept the newspeak must be re-educated to speak and think the right way.

And I guess we should throw out "science", and maybe realize it is "new science". Where questioning that they tell us are facts is not allowed, and should be accepted no matter what. Ignoring anything other than the New Science they tell us we have to believe.

 

In fact, there is no defined "baseline" surface temperature of the earth: it has always been on its way from one temperature to another on some time scale, and indeed often moving in opposite directions on different time scales because of the multitude of overlapping cycles and non-cyclical factors involved. Defining the baseline as whatever the temperature happened to be when reliable instruments first came into widespread use -- i.e., as it happens, at the close of the coldest 500-year period in the last 10,000 years -- is clearly nonscience.

Temps had been declining since at least the mid-1940s, likely as part of the ~60-year oceanic circulation cycle.

I don't recall anyone actually saying that, but it is certainly implied in their terminology and rhetoric.

It's more like 10,000 years; and the analogy is more like taking the temperature in February and panicking about runaway warming when it gets warmer in June, or taking the temperature at sunrise, and panicking when it gets warmer in the afternoon.

Exactly. North Korea has basically used "1984" as an instruction manual, and those who want power have seen that it works, and are following the same blueprint.

 

Actually, there is. One can look at the average temperatures over the past 4.5 billion years. In doing so, it quickly becomes obvious our current temperatures are not the norm for the planet.



Now of course it is much lower than only a few times in the history of the planet, but we also have a continental arrangement that has never happened before that we are aware of, which is why it took a huge dive about 2.5 mya. And anybody that knows paleontology should know that the times where it was warmest also had the greatest diversity of life on the planet, with the widest variety and dispersion across the planet.

And somebody claiming it has never been warmer is lying through their teeth, or does not know science. But I expect that we will be at close those temperatures again, in about 250 my when we become part of Pangea Ultima.

And what all you posted above is why I consider much of what is said by many more like "junk science" and religion than anything else. We just have to accept what they say on faith, and never question it.

 

An average is not a norm, it's just a statistic. For example, you can take the average waist measurement of Americans, and say that's the "norm," but in fact it has increased a lot in the last 50 years, and does not represent a healthy or "normal" waist size. Similarly, because the sun, the earth's atmosphere, the arrangement of the continents, etc. have all changed so much over the earth's 4.6Gy history, you can't just take the average temperature over that whole span of time and say that is what should be considered "normal" now.

That graphic is a little misleading because the time scale before 550mya is compressed.

Right. Warmer is generally better, especially for people, as we evolved in the tropics and still seek out warmer temperatures when we e.g., go on vacation.

Sometimes they are honest enough to say, "on record," or "since the instrument record began," but often they are not. Also, they often claim that it is now warmer than during the Medieval Warm Period, which is far from being established by the evidence, or even that it is now warmer than the Holocene Optimum, which is baldly contradicted by the evidence.

The sun will continue getting hotter on the geological time scale, which is one reason you can't take the earth's average temperature over time as a norm.

 

Churchill so far has few problems with polar bears despite predictions of a record bad year
Posted on October 26, 2023 | Comments Offon Churchill so far has few problems with polar bears despite predictions of a record bad year
Despite misleading warnings in mid-August that a record number of incidents had already taken place, and that Churchill was on track for a record-number of bear problems this fall, the number of incidents and bears captured so far have been well below other years after the same number of weeks ashore. And while this is shaping up to be the longest ice-free season on record for Western Hudson Bay bears, it may not be a record year for problem bears in Churchill.


“On average, officers receive around 250 calls from residents and detain around 50 bears every year, according to statistics provided to Live Science by the Manitoba government. The record number of bears captured in a single year was 176, in 2003.” LiveScience, 16 August 2023

Pro

 

Polar bear sea ice habitat update at 15 November & problem bears in Western Hudson Bay
Posted on November 16, 2023 | Comments Offon Polar bear sea ice habitat update at 15 November & problem bears in Western Hudson Bay
Abundant polar bear habitat this fall across the Arctic so far, with only Hudson Bay sea ice formation a bit behind schedule. However, Churchill has not seen the anticipated spike in problem bear reports, given the vocal pronouncement by polar bear specialists that it should be experiencing more and more problems with bears when they spent more than 4 months ashore in summer and fall.


News of the most egregious attack by a bear I could find world wide this fall is shown in the video below, filmed 14 November 2023: apparently, the offending bear had spent several days displaying this offending behaviour.

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Western Hudson Bay polar bears on their way offshore to hunt seals: freeze-up has begun
Posted on November 30, 2023 | Comments Offon Western Hudson Bay polar bears on their way offshore to hunt seals: freeze-up has begun
Official confirmation has come in this morning that polar bears that have spent the summer fasting along Western Hudson Bay now have enough ice to move offshore. That makes this year a bit later than usual (average is 16 November) but is not one of the extremely late freeze-ups, as happened in 1981, 2016 and 2021 when bears didn’t leave until the first week of December (Castro de la Guardia et al. 2017; Miller et al. 2022). Since breakup of sea ice came earlier than usual this summer, this means (as of 30 November) many bears will have been off the ice and without food for 166 days or 5.5 months.


However, so far, there have been no reports from this region of incidents of cannibalism, starving bears found wandering the landscape like zombies, or desperate attacks on people that polar bear specialists have warned us to expect (Abrahms et al. 2023; Stirling and Derocher 2012; Wilder et al. 2017).

 

Despite hand-wringing about Churchill polar bears this year, 2023 wasn’t their worst summer
Posted on December 9, 2023 | Comments Offon Despite hand-wringing about Churchill polar bears this year, 2023 wasn’t their worst summer
For months, the media has been bleating about the poor polar bears of Churchill suffering from lack of sea ice blamed on human-caused climate change during the so-called ‘hottest year’ on record: in April, July, August, November, and December.


From a Churchill Wild report on the condition of WH polar bears, January 2023
However, while breakup of sea ice on Hudson Bay was indeed early this year and freeze-up came earlier than usual, Western Hudson polar bears apparently spent only the fifth-longest time on land since 1979, according to a polar bear specialist. How is that even possible, given that sea ice conditions should be getting worse and worse as CO2 levels increase and average global temperatures rise? As I’ve pointed out before, it is apparent that Arctic sea ice is not closely coupled to CO2 levels (as the ‘experts’ claim), which makes me wonder if there is any ecologically-relevant correlation between CO2 and sea ice at all.

Money quote from Geoff York, from Polar Bears International: “As of Nov. 28 this year, the bears in western Hudson Bay had spent 164 days on shore, he said. That’s tied for the fifth-longest amount of time the bears have spent off the ice since 1979.” CBC, 9 December 2023 [my bold]

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It's all good.
Churchill end-of-season problem polar bear reports finally published
Posted on December 12, 2023 | Churchill end-of-season problem polar bear reports finally published
Today the Town of Churchill finally published the final problem bear reports of the season, which presents an opportunity to do a quick comparison to recent years.


This season lasted 24 weeks, the longest I can remember but apparently only the 5th longest on record. There were a total of 265 incidents by the end of November, more than 100 less than the most recent late-freeze-up year of 2016, which didn’t end until the first week of December (after bears had spent 22 weeks onshore). However, two recent years when freeze-up didn’t come until the end of November (2017 and 2020) had far fewer incidents (more than 100 less each compared to this year).

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Polar bears and sea ice fail to implode in 2023 as predicted, with special thanks for your support
Posted on December 29, 2023 | Comments Offon Polar bears and sea ice fail to implode in 2023 as predicted, with special thanks for your support
As this year draws to a close, it is worth noting that over the last 12 months — and contrary to predictions and headlines, including claims about “the warmest year ever” — polar bears have not been reported dying, starving, or eating each other in large numbers, or relentlessly attacking people. On top of that, summer sea ice coverage in the Arctic has stalled for the last 17 years, not melted out in a death spiral of rotten ice.


Except for the lying and obfuscation that most of us have come to expect, I’ve mostly been left to reiterate that polar bears are not “canaries in the coal mine” indicators of climate change and to point out that Arctic sea ice extent and polar bear survival are not inextricably tied. For example, in some specific areas of interest, like Western Hudson Bay, there has not been a consistent decline in sea ice over the last few decades and bears are not attacking people at increased rates because they are desperately hungry. In other areas, like the Svalbard area of the western Barents Sea, sea ice has declined dramatically in recent years yet polar bears have not been attacking people more than usual.

Contradictions and failed predictions abound.


All in all, a rather boring year for the anticipated implosion of polar bear health and survival, despite my constant tracking of publicly-available information. . . . .

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Polar bears adapt.
The Narrative That Polar Bears Need Sea Ice To Catch Prey Has Collapsed As More Evidence Piles Up
By Kenneth Richard on 1. January 2024

Arctic regions with 6+ months of sea ice coverage today were ice-free nearly year-round 9,000 to 5,000 years ago (2°C warmer) and 130,000 to 115,000 years ago (7-8°C warmer). And yet polar bears survived these periods.
Per a new study, today’s Scandinavian Arctic climate is so cold it is actually “comparable” to that of the late last glacial.

“…the occurrence of the polar bear as far south as 56°N during the Late Glacial in Scandinavia, when climate there was comparable to with modern low [temperature] Arctic climate.”

But during the early Holocene, when it was so warm that boreal forests expanded northward to Arctic regions that are today too cold to support anything other than tundra, there was also little to no sea ice – even in winter – in regions that are today covered in sea ice throughout the autumn, winter, and spring.

“Most sites in the Bering Sea, particularly the western and southern portions of the basin, contain no evidence of sea ice during most of the Holocene.”

Scientists are increasingly admitting polar bears may not need to rely on sea ice to hunt prey, as polar bear remains can be found in regions that had little to no sea ice just a few millennia ago.

“The findings from St. Paul and Unalaska islands are remarkable because they represent the southernmost polar bear presence in the Holocene and date to the Middle Holocene, when climate was generally warmer than today and sea ice in the Bering Sea was only present in winter, if at all.”

“…polar bears living on the St. Paul Island and Unalaska may not have relied only on the presence of sea ice for hunting…”

“…terrestrial-based hunting and foraging have been observed in several polar bear populations around the Arctic at present.”

Polar bears not only survived without sea ice during the warmer Early to Middle Holocene, but also 130,000 to 115,000 years ago, when the Arctic temperatures were “up to 7-8°C above present.”



Image Source: Seppä et al., 2023

 

She's the one who embarrassed the "old boys."
Tom Nelson interview with Susan Crockford about the failed polar bear narrative and rapid evolution
Charles Rotter

Susan Crockford, a zoologist, discusses the challenges in accurately estimating polar bear populations and the ongoing debate between Inuit communities and polar bear specialists regarding population sizes.

 

Alarmists' exploitation of polar bears in false climate narratives remains a dishonest ploy.
Activists just can’t stop using emotional blackmail to sell the climate change narrative
Posted on February 8, 2024 | Comments Offon Activists just can’t stop using emotional blackmail to sell the climate change narrative
Even though a big deal was made earlier this year about climate activists not using polar bears anymore to try and sell the climate change emergency narrative, they just can’t seem to help themselves.

So it’s not at all surprising that yet another amateur climate activist has resorted to using the emotional ploy of a photo of a polar bear on sea ice to win the 2023 Wildlife Photo of the Year People’s Choice Award sponsored by the Natural History Museum London (UK).


Said Museum director Dr Douglas Gurr of the photo taken by British amateur photographer Nima Sarikhani: “

His thought-provoking image is a stark reminder of the integral bond between an animal and its habitat and serves as a visual representation of the detrimental impacts of climate warming and habitat loss.“

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