Sorry Facebook, 2020 Was Another Good Year For Polar Bears
A prominent Canadian zoologist says that Facebook’s polar bear claims are gravely out of date and 2020 was another good year for polar bears.
In the State of the Polar Bear Report 2020, published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) to coincide with International Polar Bear Day (27 February), zoologist Dr. Susan Crockford explains that while the climate narrative insists that polar bear populations are declining due to reduced sea ice, the population surveys and the scientific literature don’t support such a conclusion.
Crockford clarifies that the IUCN’s 2015 Red List assessment for polar bears, which Facebook uses as an authority for ‘fact checking’, is seriously out of date. New and compelling evidence shows that bears in regions with profound summer ice loss are doing well.
Included in that evidence are survey results for 8 of the 19 polar bear subpopulations, only two of which showed insignificant declines after very modest ice loss. The rest were either stable or increasing, and some despite major reductions in sea ice.
As a result, the global population size is now almost 30,000 – up from about 26,000 in 2015.
Dr. Crockford points out that in 2020, even though summer sea ice declined to the second-lowest levels since 1979, there were no reports of widespread starvation of bears, acts of cannibalism, or drowning deaths that might suggest bears were having trouble surviving the ice-free season.
As Crockford’s report reveals, plankton growth – the critical health measure of marine life in the Arctic – reached record highs in August 2020.
More plankton (‘primary productivity’) due to less summer ice means more fodder for the entire food chain, including polar bears. This explains why bears are thriving in areas such as the Barents Sea, which have seen reduced levels of sea ice.
Dr. Crockford notes that, ironically, polar bears in Western Hudson Bay experienced excellent ice conditions for the fourth year in a row in 2020. Bears were fat and healthy when they arrived on shore for the summer.
Some spent as little as three months onshore – about one month less time than most bears did in the 1980s and two months less than bears did in the 1990s and 2000s.
Dr. Crockford explains that polar bears are more flexible in their habitat requirements than experts assumed and less summer ice has so far been beneficial rather than detrimental.
“Polar bears continue to be described as ‘canaries in the coal mine’ for the effects of human-caused climate change, but the evidence shows they are far from being a highly-sensitive indicator species. It’s not a myth: 2020 appears to have been another good year for polar bears.”
Susan Crockford: State of the Polar Bear Report 2020 (pdf)
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