Polar bear expert: Activist fact-checkers are misleading the public
By Paul Homewood
Press Release
16 January 2023
Canadian zoologist Dr. Susan Crockford warns that some polar bear specialists are attempting to cast a smoke-screen over the growth of global polar bear numbers.
A ‘fact check” by AFP yesterday, picked up by Yahoo News, claims a graph used by statistical analyst Bjorn Lomborg (author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and False Alarm), which shows polar bear populations rising over five decades, “uses unreliable data”.
The critique insists that the message conveyed by the graph – that polar bear numbers are growing “in spite of global warming” – is “misleading”, and that experts say “human-driven climate change poses a threat to polar bears.” However, zoologist Dr. Susan Crockford counters that some polar bear specialists are attempting to cast a smoke-screen over the relevant facts of the matter.
Regarding the assertion that estimates of polar bear population abundance in the 1960s are “pure guesswork”, Crockford points out that sea otter specialists, without shame or apology, routinely use a benchmark figure of “about 2,000” for the pre-protection population size of the species, even though it is based on similar “guesswork”. No one insults these biologists for citing this figure.
In fact, polar bear specialists are unique in the conservation field for refusing to accept a benchmark figure for the 1960s population size, despite eight published estimates made by their peers. Crockford uses an overall average of these, about 10,000 (range 5,000-15,000), as a reasonable compromise, as did polar bear specialist Markus Dyck, who died doing Arctic field work in 2021.
In 2008, the US Fish and Wildlife Service used a figure of about 12,000 in a “frequently asked questions” document: this is the number used by Lomborg in his graph.
As for more recent numbers, PBSG members continue to insist that none of the global population estimates they’ve ever made can be used to assess the conservation health of the species.
Crockford asks:
“How can the public be expected to assess the effectiveness of polar bear conservation measures if there is no way of determining whether numbers have increased or decreased over time – yet are expected to accept without challenge the output of a recent computer model that predicts a catastrophic future, as this ‘fact check’ encourages readers to do?”
Crockford says summer sea ice has declined dramatically since 1979 and especially so in the Svalbard region of the Barents Sea over the last 20 years. However, Svalbard polar bear health and abundance have not been negatively affected, which data from field work and peer-reviewed scientific studies done by polar bear specialists show to be true.
Empirical evidence like this explains why computer models predicting a dire future for polar bears are worthless: much less summer sea ice does not inevitably lead to a decline in polar bear numbers as these models assume.
Susan J. Crockford is a zoologist and author of the books The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened and Fallen Icon: Sir David Attenborough and the Walrus Deception. She writes about polar bears and other polar animals at PolarBearScience.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
I have a superb jpeg ideal for comments in these situations.
A small girl about 2 to 3 years old clearly very upset, tears streaming down her face and she is screaming “Stop Using Facts”.
Everything cuddly must be in trouble, everything ugly or nasty must be increasing. Climate change is clever like that.
Cuddling polar bears isn’t an option. Maybe some people feel sorry for them when seeing pictures of them roaming the bleak-looking Arctic.
“….experts say “human-driven climate change poses a threat to polar bears.”
If polar bear numbers are declining from an increasing AGW CO2 threat there should be numbers, estimates, guesses as to how many there were before the threat. Numbers that should be higher than current counts. Where are these data? Who published them?
Jet setter Gore and a whole host of millionaires, not least media moguls have a lot riding on indoctrinating the young, naive and gullible.
‘Polar bears became an icon for environmentalists who claimed that melting Arctic sea ice could kill thousands of bears. Former Vice President Al Gore heavily promoted this viewpoint by featuring polar bears swimming for their lives and drowning in his 2006 film on global warming.’
I see the BBC is recycling the turtle vs. plastic bag version of the polar bear on the ice floe.
ELSEWHERE – the BBC are defendants in an anti trust lawsuit in the USA where their founder status in TNI (The “Trusted News Initiative”) loks as if some feet might end up in the fire.
Tucker Carlson interviews lawyer in the TNI suit – Robert Kennedy Jnr.
The BBC has a standard response to any complaint.
(The BBC is not responsible for content found on non-BBC websites.)
We acknowledge the weight of scientific consensus around climate change and this underpins all of our reporting of the subject. The scientific community has reached a significant consensus on man-made global warming. We therefore reflect that with due weight when reporting on the science involved.
Fran Unsworth and the 28 members of the climate panel at the Corporation are that “weight”. TNI! TNI! TNI!
I doubt that arguments deployed in the UK to deflect criticism of the BBC’s lies are going to stand up in a US Federal Court in Amarillo, Texas
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. versus the BBC: https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/TNI-Complaint-1.10.22.pdf
The antitrust lawsuit filed on Tuesday 10th January in a federal court in Texas, targets the British Broadcasting Corp (BBC) lead Trusted News Initiative (TNI), a self-described “industry partnership” formed in 2020 among legacy media giants and big tech companies.
Prior to being censored, shadow-banned, and ultimately de-platformed, Kennedy’s use of Internet platforms owned and operated by TNI members Facebook, Google, and Twitter allowed him to publish COVID-related news and opinion reaching millions of people, which in turn drove traffic to The Defender and was critical to fundraising and to sales of Kennedy’s books. Kennedy had 800,000 followers on Instagram and millions of viewers on YouTube. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is joined by Creative Destruction Media, Trial Site News, Truth About Vaccines founders Ty and Charlene Bollinger, independent journalist Ben Swann, Health Nut News publisher Erin Elizabeth Finn, Gateway Pundit founder Jim Hoft, Dr. Joseph Mercola, and Ben Tapper, a chiropractor. The plaintiffs, the lawsuit alleges, are among the many victims of the TNI’s “group boycott” tactic, defined as a coordinated effort to facilitate monopoly by cutting off the competitors’ access to supplies and necessities. In this case, the TNI members are accused of engaging in group boycott—in concert with their big tech partners—against small, independent news publishers by denying them access to internet platforms they need to compete and even survive in the online news market. This alleged effort by the BBC to establish a dominant media narrative by shutting off nonestablishment outlets, according to the lawsuit, has violated both American federal antitrust and freedom of speech laws. “Federal antitrust law has its own name for this kind of ‘industry partnership,’” the lawsuit states. “It’s called a group boycott and is a per se violation of the Sherman Act.” The BBC’s criminal censorship and propaganda operation of its U.S. online website, bbc.com, reaches an American audience of over fifty million and transacting substantial business in every American state and district. It started in July 2019, when the BBC director-general Tony Hall announced, “Last month I convened, behind closed doors, a Trusted News Summit at the BBC, which brought together global tech platforms and publishers. The goal was to arrive at a practical set of actions we can take together, right now, to tackle the rise of misinformation.” By March 2020, these “global tech platforms and publishers” had formed the TNI. As described by a high-ranking BBC executive in 2020, the TNI is an “international partnership initiative convened by the BBC, which links media organisations and social-media platforms. The group has developed a shared early-warning system to alert partners. According to the BBC, TNI members agreed in early 2020 that their “ground-breaking collaboration” would target online news relating to COVID-19 and that TNI members would “work together to ensure harmful disinformation myths are stopped in their tracks.”
The antitrust lawsuit, filed in a US district court in northern Texas, also mentions interference in the US presidential election by the BBC. The BBC’s Director General, Tony Hall, committed the BBC/TNI to a shared early warning system of rapid alerts to combat the spread of disinformation during the US presidential election.
In late 2020 and 2021, the BBC’s Jessica Cecil, then the head of the TNI, made numerous public statements in print and at TNI conferences describing how the TNI functioned. Cecil stated that the TNI’s members work together “in the fight against disinformation” by “agreeing” to “standards” and to a “system” making possible a suppression of news content that, individually, TNI members “couldn’t do on our own.” She stated that the TNI’s members had agreed to adopt, and did adopt, a “fast alert” system in which members would alert one another to items of supposedly “unreliable” information that had appeared online. She stated that TNI members had “signed up” to a set of “expectations” about the actions they would take on their own to suppress reporting identified by the TNI as “misinformation.” There were “clear . . . expectations,” said Ms. Cecil, that all members had “signed up” for to “choke off” such reporting online. These “clear expectations” included a commitment by the TNI’s Big Tech Members to censor such reporting on their platforms, to shadow-ban such content, to deplatform publishers who persisted in such reporting, and to work in tandem with one another. The goal of this cooperation “between tech and media” and “across platforms,” according to Cecil, was to find “practical ways to choke off” the online publishing of news deemed by TNI members to be misinformation. Cecil took evident pride in the assertion that the TNI’s suppression of others’ online reporting did not “in any way muzzle our own journalism”; it was apparently of no consequence that the BBC through the use of the TNI, muzzles other news publishers, except GB News (see Neil Oliver, Mark Steyn and Laurence Fox).
Jamie Angus, Former Senior News Controller for BBC News (now working for Saudi Arabia’s state broadcaster) said he was fighting a “tidal wave of unchecked, incorrect, or in fact explicitly-malicious nonsense that’s being piped out mainly through digital platforms.
“experts say “human-driven climate change poses a threat to polar bears.”
AGW CO2 from our use of fossil fuels for energy is not a threat. If polar bears are dwindling in numbers because of CO2 there should be data, numbers on the polar bear populations prior to our additions of CO2 that exceed those in current counts. Where are these data and who published them?
This discussion is more a reflection of the total collapse of data-based management of polar bears than anything else. There are no references cited for any estimates, no discussion of sampling protocols or analysis methodology, no variance estimates, and no informed discussion of the accuracy of any polar bear subpopulation estimates. That information is avaialble in the scientific literature, and a critical reader can quickly learn that all subpopulation estimates are not equal. Some estimates are are quite good (provide an unbiased estimate of numbers and the variance of the estimate). Other published estimates vary from dreadful to ambigious to useless political drivel.
The decline sound field estimates for polar bear subpopulations since the 2006 onset of panic about sea ice decline has resulted in a mish-mash of out-dated and ambigious subpopulation estimates that defy objective and accurate determination of polar bear population trends. The post-2006 estimates seem more concerned with trying to demonstrate climate warming effects than providing an unbiased and accurate subpopulation estimate. So now the “expert’s” of the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist’s Group determine the status of polar bear subpopulations based solely on changes in sea ice, in spite of the failure of similar predictions to be documented for any polar bear subpopulation. This card trick makes it much easier of the PBSG to keep their status report politically aligned with the anthropogenic climate warming “hypothesis” since it eliminates the need to estimate polar bear numbers. It’s all driven by sea ice now.
I was dissapointed to see this empty “discussion” provided uncritically on this forum.
Not an IT expert, however some experience in the computing field. Can anyone tell me is the same “damping” code thats used in all computer models of doom and gloom?
28 gate anyone. How did we achieve consensus on the introduction of that politburo.It’s not called CONsensus for nothing!
Firstly, polar bears would not exist today were it not for climate change cooling the planet which began about 50 million years ago. Secondly, the inhabitants of the Northeast territory of Canada, Nunavut, are saying there are now so many bears they have become a safety hazard for them. Thirdly summer sea ice melting is necessary for polar bears to survive. The sunshine on the water produces phytoplankton which feed the plankton, which feed the fish, which feed the seals, which feed the polar bears.
Brought to you by the same people as “a man wearing a dress is 100% a woman” and “white people are the only racists”.
How does one count polar bears?
They all look the same to me
I recommend that Climate Howlers be recruited and given spray paint cans to paint black numbers on the white bears. Probably a temporary job, but it has to be done to get an accurate count by helecopter.