Just in case you may have been tempted to allow your feelings of guilt and angst over your carbon footprint to subside, the New York Times is back with another polar bear alarm to boost your fear and anxiety quotient. The Times is not alone of course; The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Independent, National Geographic, and others are also sounding the hue and cry about the supposed demise (once again) of the furry, cuddly, hoary, Arctic killers. And, naturally, their lachrymose stories about these darling endangered icons are picked up and repeated, unchallenged, by countless other outlets in the establishment media echo chamber.
But relax. Ursus maritimus, the charming carnivorous mascot that is the cash cow primus maximus for the World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace, IUCN, and other “green” exploiters, is not in any danger of extinction. In fact, polar bear populations are thriving. That is the message of Dr. Judith A Crockford, who runs the polarbearscience.com website. “The more the polar bears fail to die in droves,” she wrote in a December 21 posting, “the shriller the message from activist polar bear researchers — via willing media megaphones — that the great death of the bears will soon be upon us, just you wait and see!”
Dr. Crockford, an adjunct professor of zoology at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, is one of the leading polar bear experts who have been debunking bogus polar bear “science” for years. In her recent posting, She notes that “in 2007, US Geological Survey (USGS) biologists said with absolute confidence” that when sea ice levels reached our current levels, “2/3 of the world’s polar bears would be gone. No bears at all would remain, they said, in Western Hudson Bay (the Churchill bears), Southern Hudson Bay, Foxe Basin, Davis Strait, Baffin Bay, Southern Beaufort, Chukchi Sea, Barents Sea, Kara Sea, and the Laptev Sea: ten out of 19 subpopulations would be extirpated.”
Well, is that what happened? Dr. Crockford answers:
But nothing of the kind happened. There are still lots of polar bears and not even struggling-to-survive bears but lots of fat healthy bears everywhere across the Arctic, in what were considered by USGS biologists to be the most vulnerable regions of all: Western Hudson Bay (i.e., Churchill), Chukchi Sea and Southern Beaufort (Alaska) and the Barents Sea (Norway).
This is the truth the world needs to hear: the experts were wrong. Polar bears have not been driven to the brink of extinction by climate change, they are thriving.
But don’t expect the Times¬∏ Guardian, National Geographic, CNN, MSNBC, etc. to tell this truth the world needs to hear. According to the global warming media chorus, the adorable Arctic critter is just one of many species that is being exterminated by anthropogenic (manmade) global warming, or AGW. This chorus has been repeating the polar bear lie over and over again, year after year, as we have repeatedly pointed out (see here, here, and here).
Still, miracles sometimes happen. As we noted in a 2014 article, even the far-left greenies at National Public Radio got this story right — at least once. “The NPR folks are about as hardcore AGW alarmist as it gets,” we wrote, “which made it nothing less than amazing when NPR last year produced a program entitled ‘The Inconvenient Truth About Polar Bears,’ a story about environmental activist Zac Unger, who moved with his wife and three kids to Manitoba to study, write about, and help ‘save’ polar bears.
To his surprise, he learned that there ‘are far more polar bears alive today than there were 40 years ago,’ and they are literally overrunning many areas, surpassing their habitat’s carrying capacity. This, of course, is what on-the-ground polar bear experts, such as Dr. Mitchell Taylor, have been saying (and documenting) for decades. Ditto for Dr. Susan J. Crockford, adjunct professor at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, who runs the very informative polarbearscience.com website. According to a posting by Dr. Crockford on July 1, 2013, the polar bear global population is booming and ‘has increased by 2,165-5,700 since 2001.'”
