Earlier this week, as I’m sure you know, was International Polar Bear Day. Usually I celebrate by tossing a well-marinaded bear haunch onto the barbecue ‚Äì note to novices: DO NOT eat the liver. It’s poisonous ‚Äì but I couldn’t this year because of pesky global cooling, so instead, I sat indoors by the fire and drank a toast to the world’s exploding polar bear population which has now reached record highs of 30,000.
30,000 polar bears is a lot. As someone else remarked (remind me where and I’ll link to it), when Al Gore was born the population was just 5,000. Even as recently as 2005 it was estimated at no more than 22,500.
When the population of something explodes six-fold in 70 years that’s a sign that it’s doing pretty well, right? In fact, frankly, at that point it ceases to be a species in any kind of danger and starts to look more like a pest.
So why do the greenies persist in treating it like it’s a rare and precious species on the verge of extinction due to man’s selfishness and greed (TM)?
This is the question asked and answered by the best short video you will ever see about the polar bear non-problem.
It has been made by Canadian polar bear expert Susan Crockford for the Global Warming Policy Foundation and it calls for the US Administration to reassess the polar bear’s (utterly bogus) classification as a “threatened” species.
As the film makes clear, the polar bear is not “threatened” and hasn’t been for many decades (not since hunting was mostly banned). When in May 2008 the US Fish and Wildlife Service listed it as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act this was a political gesture not a scientific one.
The flimsy justification for the polar bear’s “threatened” status was the dramatic decline in summer sea ice which ‚Äì so the fashionable theory ran ‚Äì would render polar bears unable to feed because whenever they pursued seals they’d collapse through the thin ice.
This is a plausible theory so long as you know nothing about the feeding habits, behaviour and seasonal cycle of polar bears.
Polar bears, it turns out, do most of their feeding in early spring when they consume 8 months’ worth of their total food needs.
Mostly, they eat ring seals which are abundant in spring but have largely disappeared from the bears’ hunting grounds by summer, leaving only the lest tasty and harder-to-catch adult bearded and harp seals.
You might think that polar bear experts would know such fairly basic stuff. It’s not like polar bears have radically changed their behaviour over the last few millennia. But instead, just like their counterparts in the field of climate “science”, most of the experts ‚Äì Susan Crockford being a rare exception ‚Äì preferred to put their faith in computer models.
According to this modelling polar bears would face a dramatic population decline in response to diminishing summer sea ice levels. Well of course: garbage in, garbage out. If your models are predicated on an untruth – that polar bears are reliant for their survival on summer sea ice – then clearly what they will prove is nonsense.
Inevitably ‚Äì again, just like the climate alarmists’ models of runaway global warming ‚Äì the polar bear population decline models have now hit the brick wall of reality.
Far from falling, the latest observational research has shown, polar bear populations have increased.
This has been most especially the case in the two eco-regions where “experts” predicted that dramatic decline due to summer sea ice levels. Between 2005 and 2015 the population grew by 3,000.
