Is it a coincidence that a paper reporting the results of a no-news study on polar bears, which predicts future starvation due to climate change, was published two weeks to the day ahead of a climate change marketing event made up by the activist organization Polar Bears International? I doubt it. [emphasis, links added]
And do I think the high-profile journal Nature Communications would not only agree to publish such a useless bit of propaganda but also rig the timing to advance the climate change emergency narrative? Silly question.
And the media worldwide are of course lapping it up, happy for an excuse to promote the perils of climate change, see here, here, and here using images of fat polar bears.
The image above is from the BBC headline, 13 February 2024.
They believe this strategy is effective because they think the public is stupid, but they are deluding themselves. Most people are now laughing at their obvious acts of desperation.
Polar bears are highly specialized for consuming large amounts of fat from Arctic seals, whales, and walruses.
Only a few vocal researchers outside mainstream polar bear science insist that polar bears could ever survive year-round by eating terrestrial foods (e.g., Ilses et al. 2013; Iverson et al. 2014; Gormezano and Rockwell 2013a,b; Prop et al. 2015; Rogers et al. 2015; Tartu et al. 2016).
I agree with leading polar bear specialists that, based on polar bear biology, only a few individual bears derive any survival benefit from foods they find or catch on land, like birds, eggs, and reindeer — [except for] beached carcasses of whales, walrus, and seals that still have fat on them (Crockford 2022; Rode et al. 2015).
I’ve said this a number of times on this blog, and in my Polar Bear Evolution book (Crockford 2023) and the Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened (Crockford 2019).
As I’ve said before:
Whatever food polar bears consume in the summer – whether they are on land or on the ice – doesn’t really matter. What matters is how many fat-rich seals they can consume between March and June each year. The fat put on in late winter/spring from gorging on baby seals carries polar bears over the summer, no matter where they spend it. … Well-fed bears throughout the Arctic have enough fat to see them through a 4-5 month fast and even the worst-case scenario models devised suggest that most bears in productive regions like Hudson Bay [and probably, Southern Davis Strait] would survive a 6 month fast. …Chukchi Sea and Southern Davis Strait bears, for example, are doing very well – contrary to all predictions – despite marked declines in summer sea ice because they have ample food during their critical spring feeding period when sea ice is abundant.”
The study
The paper by Pagano and colleagues (2024) looked at data from 20 Western Hudson Bay polar bears over three years (August-September, 2019-2022) to see what they ate and how much they were active during the ice-free period they spent onshore.
All but one of the bears still lost about 1kg per day regardless of what they ate, except the one bear that had found a seal carcass. The authors found a wide degree of individual variation in activity and terrestrial foods consumed among the bears, as any rational person would expect.
Polar bear specialist Jon Aars is quoted as saying:
“The area of this study is one where conditions may be very difficult for bears within a short time, if sea ice continues to disappear as predicted.”
However, sea ice in WH has not changed markedly since a step-change around 1998: although there is year-to-year variation, the amount of time that polar bears must spend onshore has not changed since then (about three weeks longer than in the 1980s), which is certainly not what was predicted given the increase in human-generated CO2 emissions over the last two and a half decades.
They never talk about the starving bears in Western Hudson Bay in 1983, before there was a sea ice issue.
The bear below was captured with three cubs in November weighing only 218 lbs; over the winter she lost her cubs but was captured in July the following year after she had gained almost 700 lbs over the spring feeding period and pregnant again (Ramsay and Stirling 1988:615).
Other bears were in similarly poor condition that year and the survival of cubs was low. While polar bear biologists have not been able to say why, it wasn’t a lack of sea ice (Derocher and Stirling 1992; 1995).
The “science” being touted in this new paper is a waste of precious time and money: it only confirmed what was already known. It did not advance our knowledge about polar bears in any meaningful way.
The last line of the paper confirms the whole point of the publication was propaganda:
“Ultimately, our findings reinforce the risk of starvation for polar bears on land with forecasted increases in the onshore period.” [my bold]
This is a pertinent time to remind everyone that when polar bears die, they almost always die of starvation because they have no natural enemies. Starvation is a natural cause of death for polar bears and is virtually never caused by a lack of sea ice.
Top photo by Hans-Jurgen Mager on Unsplash
h/t RO
Read rest at Polar Bear Science
The Eco-Freaks have been using the Polar Bear as their Climate Change Mascot especially the NRDC and Greenpeace
920-918-8098
Could you give me a call, Susan. We would like you to come on our Podcast.
Keep up great work.
Steve