Where are the Polar Bear....Stories?
Where are the Polar Bear....Stories? by Ryan Welch
Shortly after Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth” came out in 2006 a research paper was published by American biologist Steven Amstrup predicting a rapid decline of the global polar bear population. Amstrup et al predicted a 67% decline in polar bears by the year 2050 due to lower summer sea ice levels.
The Amstrup paper was used by global warming alarmists to promote their theory of Catastrophic Anthropogenic/man-made Global Warming (CAGW) and dying polar bears became the poster-boy for their theory of doom.
The CAGW alarmists barraged the public with images of ‘stranded’ polar bears on photoshopped small bits of floating ice.
They even produced graphicly bloody video of a polar bears falling out of the sky among high rise buildings to the ground below.
But the rapid decline in polar bears did not occur as the models predicted. Instead of declining, the polar bear populations have increased globally. According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the global polar bear population has increased from about 22,500 in 2005 to about 26,000 in 2015.
Once it was revealed that polar bears are semi-aquatic mammals who regularly swim for more than 30 miles and have been recorded swimming as far as 220 miles, and that polar bear populations were increasing instead of declining, climate alarmists switched from showing stranded bears to showing pictures of thin and ‘starving’ polar bears.
However, those pictures were likely of sick, diseased, or old bears and not typical of all bears in that population. Continuing research on polar bear populations, like Regehr et al. 2018, showed that polar bear populations are growing and getting fatter even with the loss of some summer sea ice.
This should come as no surprise to scientists who study polar bears. Canadian Biologist Ian Sterling showed in the 1970s that thicker summer sea ice causes seals to move other fishing grounds. At least a dozen other research papers support Sterling’s observations. Since Polar bears eat seals as a primary source of food, thicker summer sea ice causes polar bear numbers to decline, not thinner summer sea ice as predicted by Amstrup and other climate alarmists.
Dr. Susan J. Crockfod, a Zoologist, and an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, is the author of the book “State of the Polar Bear Report 2017.” Crockford has been publishing research and blogging about the flaws in the Amstrup paper and the deceptive use of the polar bear as an icon of climate alarmists since 2012. Crockford points to multiple research papers that reveal that polar bears are getting fatter, not thinner and the populations are growing, not declining as predicted by the flawed computer models.
Crockford’s website www.polarbearscience.com is a must read for anyone who wants to learn the truth about polar bear populations.
We can see then that because polar bear populations are growing and becoming fatter that climate alarmists and their allies in the media have abandoned the use of the polar bear icon. I wonder if Al Gore will admit to this ‘inconvenient truth’.