Stop Lying To Children About Dying Polar Bears To Get Climate Action

The heartbreaking story of dying polar bears, told for more than a decade now, was meant to get kids on board the global warming action train.

It worked like a treat – except that it was never true.

The lie gave sensitive children nightmares and turned others into political activists full of groundless outrage who now pointlessly rant in the streets.

As the established icon of climate change and Arctic habitats, polar bears have been given center stage in the climate change narrative presented to young children and their teachers.

But the distressing tale of polar bears on the brink of extinction – dying for our fossil fuel sins – was never true, as I show in point form below.

Polar bear lies form the foundation of the baseless political activism of Greta Thunberg that other youngsters have since emulated.

Here are some of the false ‘facts’ children have been taught:

1. Polar bears are an endangered species and only a few hundred still exist
2. Polar bears numbers are declining
3. Polar bears now spend months on land because of climate change
4. There is not enough sea ice for polar bears: no sea ice, no polar bears
5. A bear falling through thin ice will drown & become a victim of climate change
6. Any skinny polar bear is a victim of climate change

Sixteen-year-old Greta Thunberg, shown above, told party leaders in the UK House of Commons that she had been shown pictures of starving polar bears in school (BBC, 23 April 2019); she had previously told Guardian reporter Jonathan Watts how upsetting those images were for her (my bold):

“I remember when I was younger, and in school, our teachers showed us films of plastic in the ocean, starving polar bears and so on. I cried through all the movies. My classmates were concerned when they watched the film, but when it stopped, they started thinking about other things. I couldn’t do that. Those pictures were stuck in my head.”

This shameful abuse of trust continues to this day. For example, in a photo included in a recent tweet posted by proud father David Rudolf on behalf of his middle-school-aged daughter, it’s clear she has been wrongly informed by her teachers that polar bears are one of several endangered species¹:

I know for a fact that here in Canada the experience of children has been very similar. In the 2016/2017 school year, I visited local schools to talk to middle-school aged students about the ability of polar bears to survive climate change.

Every single one of their teachers – more than a dozen in total – thought there were only a few hundred polar bears left in the world and were astonished to learn the official estimate was 26,000².

Most middle-school teachers have been ‘educated’ about polar bears by people with a strong agenda like Al Gore, organizations with a mission like National Geographic, Polar Bears International and WWF, and by trusted community facilities like zoos and museums.

Organizations promote ‘educational’ material that encourage teachers and kids to believe that polar bears are suffering because of climate change and that ‘action’ of some kind (including donations) will prevent this³.

Examples: National Geographic Kids; Polar Bears International for teachers 2013; WWF Education Toolkit; National Wildlife Federation 2012;

Even though some organizations have come to realize that thriving polar bears are a problem for their own agenda, they still push the ‘poor polar bear’ meme at every opportunity.

Organizations like National Geographic continue to promote the discredited video of an emaciated polar bear because it serves the immediate purpose of increasing their coffers.

A recent study showed this effect clearly (Swim and Bloodhart 2015):

“…portrayals of polar bears harmed by climate change motivated both environmentalists and non-environmentalists to donate money to environmental activist groups.”

Children have been frightened with images of drowning and starving polar bears for so long now that an entire generation of vulnerable teens and young adults only know how predictions of future climate change disaster make them feel.

These naive young people cannot think critically about these issues: they simply parrot the memes that match the anxiety instilled in them as kids – which all started with the polar bear lies.

Polar bear specialists, conservation activists, and the media are to blame for this situation: they continue to promote the idea that polar bears are on the brink of extinction despite strong evidence to the contrary (Crockford 2019).

Psychoanalyst Rosemary Randall, commenting on this phenomenon back in 2011, may have hit the nail on the head when she suggested that these adults are projecting their own powerlessness when they encourage kids to ‘act’ on climate change (my bold):

Climate change makes most adults working on it feel powerless. We compare the actions we are capable of with the scale of the problem and feel weak. We look at the extent of our influence and feel helpless. We struggle to combat our contrary desires to consume and feel shame. We feel like children. Children – who are actually socially and politically powerless – are an ideal receptacle for the projection of these uncomfortable and unacceptable feelings.

By focusing on the weakest members of society and influencing them, the not-very-powerful adults make themselves feel better at the expense of the absolutely-not-powerful children. By making them act, we prove that we are not as powerless as we feel.

FALSE FACTS ABOUT POLAR BEARS

1. Polar bears are an endangered species and only a few hundred still exist
2. Polar bear numbers are declining
3. Polar bears now spend months on land because of climate change
4. There is not enough sea ice for polar bears: no sea ice, no polar bears
5. A bear falling through thin ice will drown & become a victim of climate change
6. Any skinny polar bear is a victim of climate change

1. Being on the US Endangered Species List does not mean polar bears are considered endangered: this is a misunderstanding. Polar bears are listed as ‘threatened’ or ‘vulnerable’, which are much lower risk categories than ‘endangered’.

Virtually all ‘endangered’ species have only a few hundred animals remaining but ‘threatened’ species have many, many more. In addition, the polar bear’s ‘threatened’ status refers to what might happen in the future, not what is happening right now (Crockford 2019).

The polar bear conservation status is a special case that has left many teachers and students confused, and media hyperbole (as shown below) isn’t helping.

2. Polar bear numbers are increasing, not declining, despite a 40% loss of summer sea ice since 1979. As I explain in my new book, The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened, polar bears were the first species to be classified on the US Endangered Species List and the IUCN Red List (in 2006 and 2008, respectively) based on assumptions of how many bears might die by 2050 if summer sea ice declined as predicted rather than how many bears had been counted at the time (Amstrup et al. 2007).

As it turned out, both the sea ice predictions and polar bear survival models were wrong (Crockford 2017; 2019). The dramatic decline in summer sea ice level that experts predicted for 2050 came decades sooner than expected (in 2007), which allowed researchers to observe exactly how polar bears would respond.

The results have been astonishing: while the computer models said only about 8,100 polar bears should remain after so many years of low summer sea ice, the official estimate in 2015 (26,000) was higher than it was in 2005 (24,500) and may be higher still (see graph below).

In other words, polar bears are thriving: their numbers are going up even though sea ice has declined dramatically.

3. Polar bears in many areas have always come ashore for months during the summer, where they have little or nothing to eat. In fact, bears in Western Hudson Bay – one of the furthest south areas where polar bears live year-round – came ashore for four long months in the 1970s (before global warming and sea ice decline because of an issue).

There was little or nothing for them to eat. Yet this was one of the healthiest and most prolific subpopulations in the Arctic at the time: most females gave birth to triplet litters (which were rare everywhere else) and then weaned their cubs at least a full year earlier than mothers did elsewhere (Derocher and Stirling 1992, 1995; Ramsay and Stirling 1988; Stirling and Lunn 1997).

Since 1995, these bears have spent on average three weeks longer on shore than they did in the 1970s (almost 5 months): they are still thriving but litter size and weaning age are now more like polar bears elsewhere across the Arctic (Dyck et al. 2017; Stapleton et al. 2014; Stirling and Lunn 1997).

Since there is no evidence that polar bears from Western Hudson Bay are biologically different from any others, it means well-fed polar bears across the Arctic will still thrive while spending almost five months onshore in the summer with little or no food to eat.

Read rest at Polar Bear Science