May 19 Arctic sea ice extent is above the average since 1989, and higher than 1995, 1997, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2010, 2001, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021. Ice extent loss so far this month has been the lowest in over 30 years.
One of his commenters asks
“Where are all of the apologies from those (Al Gore, etc.) who predicted that summer sea ice would be gone by dates that have long come and gone.”
Recently, in 2014, the United Nations declared a climate “tipping point” by which the world must act to avoid dangerous global warming. “The world now has a rough deadline for action on climate change. Nations need to take aggressive action in the next 15 years to cut carbon emissions, in order to forestall the worst effects of global warming, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” reported the Boston Globe.
But way back in 1982, the UN had announced a two-decade tipping point for action on environmental issues. Mostafa Tolba, executive director of the UN Environment Program (UNEP), warned on May 11, 1982, that the “world faces an ecological disaster as final as nuclear war within a couple of decades unless governments act now.” According to Tolba, lack of action would bring “by the turn of the century, an environmental catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust.”
In 1989, the UN was still trying to sell that “tipping point” to the public. According to a July 5, 1989, article in the San Jose Mercury News, Noel Brown, the then-director of the New York office of UNEP was warning of a “10-year window of opportunity to solve” global warming. According to the Herald, “A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ‘eco-refugees,’ threatening political chaos.”
But in 2007, seven years after that supposed tipping point had come and gone, Rajendra Pachauri, then the chief of the UN IPPC, declared 2012 the climate deadline by which it was imperative to act: “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.”
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced his own deadline in August 2009, when he warned of “incalculable” suffering without a UN climate deal in December 2009. And in 2012, the UN gave Planet Earth another four-year reprieve. UN Foundation president and former U.S. Senator Tim Wirth called Obama’s re-election the “last window of opportunity” to get it right on climate change.
Heir to the British throne Prince Charles originally announced in March 2009 that we had “less than 100 months to alter our behavior before we risk catastrophic climate change.” As he said during a speech in Brazil, “We may yet be able to prevail and thereby to avoid bequeathing a poisoned chalice to our children and grandchildren. But we only have 100 months to act.”
To his credit, Charles stuck to this rigid timetable—at least initially. Four months later, in July 2009, he declared a ninety-six-month tipping point. At that time the media dutifully reported that “the heir to the throne told an audience of industrialists and environmentalists at St James’s Palace last night that he had calculated that we have just 96 months left to save the world. And in a searing indictment on capitalist society, Charles said we can no longer afford consumerism and that the ‘age of convenience’ was over.”
At the UN climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009, Charles was still keeping at it: “The grim reality is that our planet has reached a point of crisis and we have only seven years before we lose the levers of control.”
As the time expired, the Prince of Wales said in 2010, “Ladies and gentlemen we only—we now have only 86 months left before we reach the tipping point.”
By 2014, a clearly exhausted Prince Charles seemed to abandon the countdown, announcing, “We are running out of time. How many times have I found myself saying this over recent years?”
In the summer of 2017, Prince Charles’s one-hundred-month tipping point finally expired.26 What did Charles have to say? Was he giving up? Did he proclaim the end times for the planet? Far from it. Two years earlier, in 2015, Prince Charles abandoned his hundred-month countdown and gave the world a reprieve by extending his climate tipping point another thirty-five years, to the year 2050!
A July 2015 interview in the Western Morning News revealed that “His Royal Highness warns that we have just 35 years to save the planet from catastrophic climate change.” So instead of facing the expiration of his tipping point head on, the sixty-nine-year-old Charles kicked the climate doomsday deadline down the road until 2050 when he would be turning the ripe age of 102. (Given the Royal Family’s longevity, it is possible he may still be alive for his new extended deadline.)
Former Irish President Mary Robinson issued a twenty-year tipping point in 2015, claiming that global leaders have “at most two decades to save the world.”
Al Gore announced his own ten-year climate tipping point in 2006 and again in 2008, warning that “the leading experts predict that we have less than 10 years to make dramatic changes in our global warming pollution lest we lose our ability to ever recover from this environmental crisis.” In 2014, with “only two years left” before Gore’s original deadline, the climatologist Roy Spencer mocked the former vice president, saying “in the grand tradition of prophets of doom, Gore’s prognostication is not shaping up too well.”
Penn State Professor Michael Mann weighed in with a 2036 deadline. “There is an urgency to acting unlike anything we’ve seen before,” Mann explained. Media outlets reported Mann’s made a huge media splash with his prediction, noting “Global Warming Will Cross a Dangerous Threshold in 2036.”
Other global warming activists chose 2047 as their deadline, while twenty governments from around the globe chose 2030 as theirs, with Reuters reporting that millions would die by 2030 if world failed to act on climate: “More than 100 million people will die and global economic growth will be cut by 3.2% of GDP by 2030 if the world fails to tackle climate change, a report commissioned by 20 governments said on Wednesday. As global avg. temps rise due to ghg emissions, the effects on the planet, such as melting ice caps, extreme weather, drought and rising sea levels, will threaten populations and livelihoods, said the report conducted by the humanitarian organization DARA.”
As we saw in chapter five, top UK scientist Sir David King warned in 2004 that that by 2100 Antarctica could be the only habitable continent.
Tipping point rhetoric seems to have exploded beginning in 2002. An analysis by Reason magazine’s Ron Bailey found that tipping points in environmental rhetoric increased dramatically in that year…..
John Kerry FLASHBACK!
MOONABATTERY hat-tip: Kerry ridicules Inhofe on science, then predicts ice free Arctic summer in 5 years
Please enjoy this 2009 clip of John Kerry warning that “state-of-the-art science” predicts our 1st “ice-free Arctic summer” should’ve been here 7 years ago
John Kerry must know what he is talking about on climate issues, or Biden’s handlers would not have made him Climate Czar, putting him in charge of sacrificing our freedom, standard of living, and national interests to the quixotic campaign to improve the allegedly problematic weather. According to Kerry’s sonorous bloviations, which are based on the unassailable holy writ of politically approved Scientists, the Arctic likely started having ice-free summers 7 years ago
[….]
now The Scientists say Arctic summer sea ice could disappear by 2035. They are learning to push their predictions back a little further so that people won’t laugh as hard when they have to push them back yet again…..
MOONABATTERY hat-tip: Kerry ridicules Inhofe on science, then predicts ice free Arctic summer in 5 years
Please enjoy this 2009 clip of John Kerry warning that “state-of-the-art science” predicts our 1st “ice-free Arctic summer” should’ve been here 7 years ago
John Kerry must know what he is talking about on climate issues, or Biden’s handlers would not have made him Climate Czar, putting him in charge of sacrificing our freedom, standard of living, and national interests to the quixotic campaign to improve the allegedly problematic weather. According to Kerry’s sonorous bloviations, which are based on the unassailable holy writ of politically approved Scientists, the Arctic likely started having ice-free summers 7 years ago
[….]
now The Scientists say Arctic summer sea ice could disappear by 2035. They are learning to push their predictions back a little further so that people won’t laugh as hard when they have to push them back yet again…..
…Unfortunately, despite Attenborough’s despicable attempts to yank on heartstrings, the population of dangerous polar bears is not falling.
The actual victims here are children young enough to take this crap seriously; ecoanxiety can be a serious psychiatric disorder, as Greta Thunberg demonstrates.
Hoo Boy… now Netflix and other Media and environmental orgs are saying Walruses are a proof of Global Warming… except… this phenomenon has been observed for a long, long time. And IS NOT NEW like shown in popular media:
…Hype from the *Netflix/Attenborough ‘climate change is gonna destroy the world’ fearmongers earlier this year notwithstanding – or the media this summer trying to stir up climate change fever – the US Fish and Wildlife Service determined in October 2017 that the Pacific walrus is not being harmed by climate change and is not likely to be harmed within the foreseeable future (USFWS 2017). The IUCN Red List (2015) lists the Pacific walrus as ‘data deficient‘.
Large herds onshore are a sign of population health, not climate change, and walruses have come ashore in the Chukchi Sea during the ice-free season in summer and/or fall for more than 100 years (Crockford 2014; Fischbach et al. 2016; Lowrey 1985). Those are the relevant scientific facts….
Dr Susan Crockford explains why the media coverage and statements by scientists and environmental organisations mislead people about the massive walrus haulout seen in Sept/October 2014. Read Susan Crockford’s paper, which refutes claims that Arctic walruses are in distress and danger due to global warming at: On The Beach: Walrus Haulouts Are Nothing New (PDF)
I had an opportunity last night to watch the original Netflix ‘Frozen Worlds’ walrus episode and have some addition thoughts.
One big eye-opener was the final shot of the walrus sequence: a polar bear approaching from the water to feed on the carcasses below the cliff at Cape Kozhevnikov. This is additional proof that polar bears were in the area while the crew were filming. Yet the narrative in the film was silent on the risk to walruses on the cliff from polar bears and not a word was spoken of the hundreds of walruses that had fallen off that very cliff just days before after being spooked by approaching bears.
Oddly, I have also discovered that the Russian scientific advisor to the film, Anatoli Kochnev, wrote a scientific report in 2002 (translated into English) on walrus deaths at two regularly used beach haulouts on Wrangel Island from 1989-1996, when walrus population numbers were much lower than today and summer sea ice extent was higher (Kochnev 2002). He concluded that stampedes initiated by polar bears were responsible for most of the walruses found trampled to death.
This means Kochnev knew that polar bears nearby were a huge risk factor for walrus stampedes over the cliff but went along with the official ‘Our Planet’ narrative that no polar bears were involved and only lack of sea ice and poor eyesight were to blame for the carnage presented in the Netflix film.
In addition, a Google-translated photo-essay published by Kochnev’s friend Yevgeny Basov who had been invited to witness the spectacle at Cape Kozhevnikov in the fall of 2017 (posted 11 November 2017, original link here)(h/t WUWT commenter “it doesn’t add up”). The metadata on the photos in this essay shows that Kochnev was there on 16 Septmber 2017 (photo #2) and that walruses were already dying from falls off the cliff on 17 September (photo #22, see below), two days beforethe ‘Our Planet’ footage was shot.
This is almost certainly the event reported in The Siberian Times, when 20 polar bears were said to have spooked walruses at the top of the cliff, with hundreds fell to their deaths on the rocks below…..
Two decades ago, the UN came up with several models that all predicted that by 2015, the Earth would have warmed by at least a degree Fahrenheit. Yet in the last two decades, there has instead been virtually no warming according to satellite temperature measurements….
RPT’s addition: NASA has said that the “Abyss” has not gotten warmer since 2005, and do not know why [if taking into account global warming realities] why the earth has stalled in temperature… even getting slightly colder globally since 2005 (see chart of CO2 output and temperature, below). It is called a “mystery” by NASA.
[…..]
2) All Rainforest Species Will Be Extinct
Dr. Paul Ehrlich, the President of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University, got famous for his 1968 book “the Population Bomb” which predicted that increasing human populations would spell doom.
One part of that doom, he warned in his 1981 book “Extinction,” was that all rainforest species would likely soon go extinct due to environmental destruction.
“Half of the populations and species in tropical moist forests would be extinct early in the next century [the 2000s] and none would be left by 2025,” he warns on page 291. He added that that his model indicated that, on the upper bound, complete extinction would occur as soon as 2010….
RPT’s addition: The New York Times makes point that “…for every acre of rain forest cut down each year, more than 50 acres of new forest are growing in the tropics on land that was once farmed, logged or ravaged by natural disaster.” This doesn’t sound too alarmist to me. Speaking of alarmists, William Shatner, Captain Kirk of Star Trek fame, mentioned in a National Geographic video that, “rainforests [are] being cleared at the rate of 20 football fields per minute.” If this were truly the case, the forests would have been completely wiped out years ago. In fact, the co-founder and long-time director of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore, said:
“All these save-the-forests arguments are based on bad science…. They are quite simply wrong… [Phillip Stott and I] found that the Amazon rainforests is more than 90% intact. We flew over it and met all the environmental authorities. We studied satellite pictures of the entire area.”
Phillip Stott, who has 30 years of studying tropical forests under his belt as well as being professor of biogeography at London University mentioned that, “there are now still – despite what humans have done – more rainforests today than there were 12,000 years ago.”
3) Oil will run out by 2015
A Pennsylvania state government “Student and Teacher Guide” reads: “Some estimates of the oil reserves suggest that by the year 2015 we will have used all of our accessible oil supply.”
Yet the Earth still has oil: at least 1.6 trillion gallons of proven reserves, according to the Energy Information Administration, a US government agency. In fact, proven reserves have more than doubled over the last couple decades, as technological innovation made more oil accessible….
RPT’s addition: Yes, the U.S. has hit an all-time high in production:
More than that though, “According to the Institute for Energy Research’s calculations, the U.S. actually sits on 1.442 trillion barrels of recoverable deposits. That’s over 60 times the amount we usually hear about. Merline writes that this larger number would be enough to meet all U.S. oil needs for about the next 200 years” (Business Insider).
Let me repeat that, 200-years of oil!
4) Arctic sea ice will disappear by 2015.
“Peter Wadhams, who heads the Polar Ocean Physics Group at the University of Cambridge… believes that the Arctic is likely to become ice-free before 2020 and possibly as early as 2015,” (Yale Environment 360 reported in 2012). Yet government data shows that arctic sea ice has increased since then….
RPT’s addition: Here I will post information from a previous post about Polar Bear population levels, in which I point the following out:
Recent Population Increase Partly Due To Lots of Sea-Ice
Canada (CBC News via the Canadian Coast Guard, 3/2014) [ARCTIC Sea Ice] The Canadian Coast Guard is pleading with merchant ships to plan their voyages well in advance this year as the organization’s icebreaker fleet confronts some of the worst ice conditions on the Atlantic Ocean in decades.
“Plan your voyage and we’ll all get through this,” said Mike Voight, the Atlantic region’s director of programs. “We’ve got a pretty bad or challenging ice year.”
The Canadian Ice Service, an arm of Environment Canada, said there is 10 per cent more ice this year compared to the 30-year average.
“We probably haven’t seen a winter this bad as far as ice for the past 25 years,” said Voight, referring to both the amount and thickness of the ice….
The American Geophysical Union (AGU) Abstract (12/2014) [ARCTIC sea ice] Despite a well-documented ~40% decline in summer Arctic sea ice extent since the late 1970’s, it has been difficult to estimate trends in sea ice volume because thickness observations have been spatially incomplete and temporally sporadic. While numerical models suggest that the decline in extent has been accompanied by a reduction in volume, there is considerable disagreement over the rate at which this has occurred. We present the first complete assessment of trends in northern hemisphere sea ice thickness and volume using 4 years of measurements from CryoSat-2. Between autumn 2010 and spring 2013, there was a 14% and 5% reduction in autumn and spring Arctic sea ice volume, respectively, in keeping with the long-term decline in extent. However, since then there has been a marked 41% and 9% recovery in autumn and spring sea ice volume, respectively, more than offsetting losses of the previous three years. The recovery was driven by the retention of thick ice around north Greenland and Canada during summer 2013 which, in turn, was associated with a 6% drop in the number of days on which melting occurred – climatic conditions more typical of the early 1990’s. Such a sharp increase in volume after just one cool summer indicates that the Arctic sea ice pack may be more resilient than has been previously considered.
Talking About Weather (7/2014) [ANTARCTIC sea ice] Antarctic sea ice has hit its second all-time record maximum this week. The new record is 2.112 million square kilometers above normal. Until the weekend just past, the previous record had been 1.840 million square kilometers above normal, a mark hit on December 20, 2007, as I reported here, and also covered in my book.
Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, responded to e-mail questions and also spoke by telephone about the new record sea ice growth in the Southern Hemisphere, indicating that, somewhat counter-intuitively, the sea ice growth was specifically due to global warming.
Let us compare this to Al Gore saying the northern ice-caps will be gone
NewsBusters makes the point another way, in that the “media” is derelict in their duty:
The same year that former Vice President Al Gore predicted that the Arctic sea ice could be completely gone, Arctic ice reached its highest level in two years, according to a report by the Danish Meteorological Institute.
According to that report, which was cited by the Daily Mail (UK) on Aug. 30, “[t]he Arctic ice cap has expanded for the second year in a row.” The U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) confirmed this trend, but didn’t go into as much detail as the Danish Meteorological Institute.
But an examination of ABC, CBS and NBC news programs since the Daily Mail story was published found that all three networks ignored news that Arctic sea ice was at a two-year high….
From a FaceBook discussion… I incorporate Al Gore’s thinking:
Look, it is simple:
Either polar bears are dying because of CO2 emissions via man ~ hence, we should stop producing high levels of CO2;
or [following the train of thinking FROM Al Gore],
Polar bears are at their highest recorded population levels because of CO2 emissions via man, hence, we should produce high levels of CO2.
If “a,” why not “b”?
This is meant mainly as a supplement to a Christmas Eve-Eve gathering/discussion I was at. I will make this post a little different than other posts, as, it will be “minimalist.” This is the fourth installment of the topics covered, which are polar bears, rising sea levels, CO2, Inconvenient Truth (the movie), nuclear power, warmest year, electric vehicles (EVs)/hybrid cars, and bullet trains.
Read more. Here are some designations I will use in stories linked to:
...More Than opinion
Either the polar Bear population is at record levels/health, or they are not.
Either one is true and the other false. Both cannot be true. So where do we align our opinion with that reflects the evidence closest?
In other words… we are asking a question or drawing a distinction that is beyond opinion:
“…there are about 25,000 polar bears across Canada’s Arctic. ‘That’s likely the highest [population level] there has ever been’.”
(more below)
Main-stream (MS) news sources such as the New York Times or CNN;
As well as non-main-stream sources or “new media” (NMS), which include blogs by either specialists or new media news sources. These typically reference and link to main-stream news sources or “neutral” media [see below];
I will also try to include more “neutral” media (NM), such as the World Wildlife Fund or NASA.
I do this in the hopes that those reading this from the conversation will have a better recourse — outside of myself — to complete a picture I was trying to (not too well considering the new wines and beer making their rounds for our tasting pleasure). I will first, however, deal with Polar Bears.
If someone were to happen across this post I would at least like them to think long and well on this one issue. And it is this: we may hold an opinion, yes… but we cannot “own” our own facts.
So… for instance. From the conversation polar bears were brought up as an evidence for man-caused global warming impacts. The “Inconvenient Truth” was mentioned as a source for this dilemma… and… I must say… this is a great commentary on the power of media. As we will see. I own and have watched the Inconvenient Truth. But I own and also have watched the Great Global Warming Swindle. This isn’t to “toot” my own horn but is how I challenge my children to think critically. Look at both sides and make a fully informed decision.
Which is much needed in our political and social discourse. For instance, Ronald Reagan and Tipp O’Neil were ideological foes, coming to conclusions on most things as opposites can allow. HOWEVER, Reagan and Tipp would regularly meet to talk, smoke cigars, and debate vigorously their ideas and would try and compromise. [Obama has met once with John Boehner, FYI]
In our current dialogue one side often finds solace in demonizing the other as anti-science, or sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist, bigoted.
Who would have a serious discussion with someone who is a believer in a flat-earth (anti-science)?
Who would want to talk about anything with someone who is a racist?
Which brings to a 21-second blurb by a very left-leaning professor saying that this type of thinking is damaging to the young liberal student:
To wit….
Either the polar Bear population is at record levels/health, or they are not.
Either one is true and the other false. Both cannot be true. So where do we align our opinion with that reflects the evidence closest? In other words… we are asking a question or drawing a distinction that is beyond opinion.
POLAR BEARS
...The Narrative Falls Apart
ABC television in Australia, on a show called “Media Watch,” recently debunked the entire issue
Sources Of Myth
(MS) JUNEAU, Alaska (AP 7/2011) — Just five years ago, Charles Monnett was one of the scientists whose observation that several polar bears had drowned in the Arctic Ocean helped galvanize the global warming movement….
(MS) JUNEAU, Alaska (The Guardian via the AP, 12/2013) An Alaska scientist whose observations of drowned polar bears helped galvanize the global warming movement has retired as part of a settlement with a federal agency.
[….]
…In 2004, during an aerial survey of bowhead whales, Monnett and another researcher saw four dead polar bears floating in the water after a storm, observations that were later detailed in a peer-reviewed article. They said they were reporting to the best of their knowledge the first observations of the bears floating dead and presumed drowned while apparently swimming long distances.
They said their findings suggested drowning-related deaths of polar bears may increase in the future if the regression of pack ice or periods of longer open water continues. The observations helped make the polar bear a symbol for the climate change movement.
(NMS) American Thinker (5/2014, via Polar Bear Science) The greatest scientific fraud in history is slowly but surely unraveling, and the breadth of the corruption revealed is stunning. As any good con man knows, and emotional appeal is necessary, and the warmists found their cuddly-looking icon of endangerment in the polar bear, an animal frequently chosen as stuffed toys for children to hug. Pictures of polar bears on ice floes, presumably doomed to death by drowning as the Arctic ice disappeared, were used to tug on the heartstrings of adults and children alike, in order to scare them into willingly handing over power over their economic destiny to global mandarins who would reduce their standard of living.
But it was necessary to come up with “scientific” estimates of polar bear populations that showed them in danger. With all the billions of dollars available for global warming-related research, and the level of peer pressure that money generates, it wasn’t that difficult….
“It was convenient with the new environmental paradigm and attribution of all change to humans to claim global warming causing melting [sea] ice was killing the polar bears. It was wrong and policy based on it is unnecessary and unjustified. The Inuit are victims of what Paul Driessen wrote about in his book EcoImperialism, the forceful imposition of western environmental values on other cultures, usually to their detriment.
“Nobel Physicist Richard Feynman said, “Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
“Polar bears have successfully adapted to nature for eons before civilization began. That must be the basis for policy, not data severely limited and distorted by emotional, anthropomorphic, political agendas presented under the guise of the precautionary principle.”
The PBSG first provided a global population range estimate for polar bears in 1993. The range specified at that time, 21,470-28,370 polar bears, included statistically solid estimates (e.g. based on studies to estimate population abundance) for many of the identified polar bear subpopulations, and estimates (based knowledge of habitat quality and input from scientists) for several other subpopulations. Recognizing the false precision implied by a range of 21,470-28,370, the estimate was rounded to 22,000-27,000 in 1997. After some new population estimates were developed and after more discussion of the possible numbers in areas without estimates, the range was adjusted to 21,500-25,000 in 2001, and further simplified to 20,000-25,000 in 2005. The variation in ranges reflects the absence of rigorous estimates of subpopulation size in several areas and the consensus desire to express a reasonable round number range that could not be interpreted as more reliable than it really is.
Over the years following the first global population range estimate, the PBSG has refined subpopulation size estimates in some areas, but there still are areas where we have only educated hypotheses regarding numbers of animals present. Currently, the PBSG recognizes 19 subpopulations in the circumpolar Arctic. Scientific estimates are available for 14 (Baffin Bay, Barents Sea, Davis Strait, Foxe Basin, Gulf of Boothia, Kane Basin, Lancaster Sound, M’Clintock Channel, Northern Beaufort Sea, Norwegian Bay, Southern Beaufort Sea, Southern Hudson Bay, Viscount Melville Sound, and Western Hudson Bay). Abundance in these 14 populations was estimated using accepted inventory methods (e.g., mark and recapture or aerial survey). These estimates, descriptions of how they were developed, and the history of how they have been improved over the years, can be viewed in the population status tables (to be viewed in the proceedings). Until 2005, the PBSG status table also included estimates for 3 subpopulations (Chukchi Sea, Kara Sea, and Laptev Sea) where accepted methods never had been applied. These estimates were removed because including them in the table suggested they were more reliable than they really were. The PBSG has never provided estimates for two other regions (Arctic Basin and East Greenland). Bear numbers in the Arctic Basin are very low and bears present there may simply be passing through rather than representing a true subpopulation. East Greenland appears to have a resident group of polar bears but the PBSG has never ventured an estimate of their abundance.
For the 14 subpopulations with scientific estimates, the sum of the mid-point estimates is 18,349 bears (see http://pbsg.npolar.no/en/status/status-table.html for estimates). The PBSG expects that the number of bears ranges from several hundreds to a few thousands in each of the subpopulations in Chukchi, Kara, Laptev and East Greenland, bringing the midpoint estimate to approximately 25,000.
Because the global population estimate range includes subpopulation estimates of variable quality it is not used as a monitoring benchmark or other status assessment tool. Rather, it simply expresses a reasonable range in numbers, based on a combination of the best available information and understandings of polar bear habitat. Conservation assessments focus on the trends in subpopulations for which statistical estimates are available. Some of those subpopulations are declining, others are stable, and some may be increasing.
(MS) WINNIPEG, Canada (Globe and Mail 4/2012) The number of bears along the western shore of Hudson Bay, believed to be among the most threatened bear subpopulations, stands at 1,013 and could be even higher, according to the results of an aerial survey released Wednesday by the Government of Nunavut. That’s 66 per cent higher than estimates by other researchers who forecasted the numbers would fall to as low as 610 because of warming temperatures that melt ice faster and ruin bears’ ability to hunt. The Hudson Bay region, which straddles Nunavut and Manitoba, is critical because it’s considered a bellwether for how polar bears are doing elsewhere in the Arctic.
[….]
But many Inuit communities said the researchers were wrong. They said the bear population was increasing and they cited reports from hunters who kept seeing more bears. Mr. Gissing said that encouraged the government to conduct the recent study, which involved 8,000 kilometres of aerial surveying last August along the coast and offshore islands.
Mr. Gissing said he hopes the results lead to more research and a better understanding of polar bears. He said the media in southern Canada has led people to believe polar bears are endangered. “They are not.” He added that there are about 25,000 polar bears across Canada’s Arctic. “That’s likely the highest [population level]there has ever been.”
[Editors note: perhaps to 27,000-32,000?]
(NM) United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP, 2001):
(NMS) Gateway Pundit (7/2011) of the same, but updated info of populations:
(NM) “The total number of polar bears worldwide is estimated to be 20,000-25,000.” [pg. 33]
[….]
“The world’s polar bears are distributed in 19 subpopulations over vast and sometimes relatively inaccessible areas of the Arctic. Thus, while the status of some subpopulations in Canada and the Barents Sea is well documented, that of several others remains less known [sic]. Thus, it is not possible to give an accurate estimate of the total number of polar bears in the world, although the range is thought to be 20-25,000.” [pg. 61, press release]
Aars, J., Lunn, N. J. and Derocher, A.E. (eds.) 2006. Polar Bears: Proceedings of the 14th Working Meeting of the IUCN/SSC Polar Bear Specialist Group, 20-24 June 2005, Seattle, Washington, USA. Occasional Paper of the IUCN Species Survival Commission 32. IUCN, Gland (Switzerland) and Cambridge (UK). http://pbsg.npolar.no/en/meetings/
(NM) “The total number of polar bears worldwide is estimated to be 20,000-25,000.” [pg. 31]
[….]
“The total number of polar bears is still thought to be between 20,000 and 25,000. However, the mixed quality of information on the different subpopulations means there is much room for error in establishing that range. That potential for error is cause for concern, given the ongoing and projected changes in habitat and other potential stressors.” [pg. 86, press release]
Obbard, M.E., Theimann, G.W., Peacock, E. and DeBryn, T.D. (eds.) 2010. Polar Bears: Proceedings of the 15th meeting of the Polar Bear Specialists Group IUCN/SSC, 29 June-3 July, 2009, Copenhagen, Denmark. Gland, Switzerland and Cambridge UK, IUCN. http://pbsg.npolar.no/en/meetings/
Recent Population Increase Partly Due To Lots of Sea-Ice
(MS) Canada (CBC News via the Canadian Coast Guard, 3/2014) [ARCTIC Sea Ice] The Canadian Coast Guard is pleading with merchant ships to plan their voyages well in advance this year as the organization’s icebreaker fleet confronts some of the worst ice conditions on the Atlantic Ocean in decades.
“Plan your voyage and we’ll all get through this,” said Mike Voight, the Atlantic region’s director of programs. “We’ve got a pretty bad or challenging ice year.”
The Canadian Ice Service, an arm of Environment Canada, said there is 10 per cent more ice this year compared to the 30-year average.
“We probably haven’t seen a winter this bad as far as ice for the past 25 years,” said Voight, referring to both the amount and thickness of the ice….
(NM) The American Geophysical Union (AGU) Abstract (12/2014) [ARCTIC sea ice] Despite a well-documented ~40% decline in summer Arctic sea ice extent since the late 1970’s, it has been difficult to estimate trends in sea ice volume because thickness observations have been spatially incomplete and temporally sporadic. While numerical models suggest that the decline in extent has been accompanied by a reduction in volume, there is considerable disagreement over the rate at which this has occurred. We present the first complete assessment of trends in northern hemisphere sea ice thickness and volume using 4 years of measurements from CryoSat-2. Between autumn 2010 and spring 2013, there was a 14% and 5% reduction in autumn and spring Arctic sea ice volume, respectively, in keeping with the long-term decline in extent. However, since then there has been a marked 41% and 9% recovery in autumn and spring sea ice volume, respectively, more than offsetting losses of the previous three years. The recovery was driven by the retention of thick ice around north Greenland and Canada during summer 2013 which, in turn, was associated with a 6% drop in the number of days on which melting occurred – climatic conditions more typical of the early 1990’s. Such a sharp increase in volume after just one cool summer indicates that the Arctic sea ice pack may be more resilient than has been previously considered.
(NMS) Talking About Weather (7/2014) [ANTARCTIC sea ice] Antarctic sea ice has hit its second all-time record maximum this week. The new record is 2.112 million square kilometers above normal. Until the weekend just past, the previous record had been 1.840 million square kilometers above normal, a mark hit on December 20, 2007, as I reported here, and also covered in my book.
Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, responded to e-mail questions and also spoke by telephone about the new record sea ice growth in the Southern Hemisphere, indicating that, somewhat counter-intuitively, the sea ice growth was specifically due to global warming.
