A ‘mass exodus’ of polar bears from Alaska to Russia
By Paul Homewood
As you might have expected, the Telegraph has got the wrong end of the stick, as Susan Crockford explains:
An article in a UK newspaper yesterday contains a claim made by local residents that polar bears which used to hang around Utqiagvik (formerly known as Barrow) in western Alaska, are ‘moving to Russia’ (i.e. the Chukchi Sea) in a ‘mass exodus’. It’s certainly possible but if so, it should come as a surprise to no one and is good news for polar bears.
If the allegation is upheld by scientific evidence, polar bears will not have been pushed out of Alaska by lack of summer sea ice (i.e. ‘forced to migrate’) but rather pulled into the Chukchi Sea by abundant food resources that did not exist when summer ice cover was more extensive. It’s a big difference and it speaks to the benefits of less summer sea ice that no one wants to discuss.
Moreover, moving temporarily to where conditions suit them best is what polar bears do all the time: it’s not a new phenomenon, it’s a prominent feature of their biology (Crockford 2019).
The article in question appeared yesterday in the UK Daily Telegraph (1 Jan 2020), “Polar bears forced to migrate from America to Russia because of climate change”. The piece oddly conflates a record high temperature on Boxing Day 2021 in Kodiak (located in the Gulf of Alaska, which is nowhere near the Beaufort Sea and well south of polar bear territory) with lack of summer sea ice much further north.
At issue here is the claimed ‘mass exodus’ of bears.
In fact, it’s been known for decades that most of the bears that visit Utqiagvik really belong to the Chukchi Sea subpopulation: virtually all of these visitors have always been Russian bears, not Alaskan (see below from Amstrup et al. 2005; see also Amstrup et al 2001).
In fact, movement of bears into and out of the Southern Beaufort at both ends has confounded efforts to get an accurate population size estimate (AC SWG 2018; Atwood et al. 2020; Bromaghin et al. 2015; Conn et al. 2021; Rehehr et al. 2018).
Moreover, very few Southern Beaufort or Chukchi Sea bears ever come to land at all: these are subpopulations where most bears remain on the sea ice year-round (Crockford 2018, 2019; Rode et al. 2015).
And while these folks blame lack of sea ice in the Southern Beaufort for driving the bears away, the author of the piece neglects to explicitly state the obvious alternative explanation (although he alludes to it): that abundant food in the Chukchi Sea in recent years caused by greater primary productivity during the longer ice-free seasons has made ice over Russian waters a more attractive place to live for polar bears (Frey et al. 2021; Rode et al. 2014, 2018).
It’s the back-handed way of presenting one of the great benefits of reduced summer sea ice in the Arctic that’s blamed on ‘climate change’ (Crockford 2021). Get used to it: this is something we will likely be seeing more of in the next few years as the predicted summer sea ice ‘decline’ remains stalled (see graph below from Meier et al. 2021).
Full post here.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Well, rather than “Climate Change”, it is much more likely that the bears are pissed off at having to fend off bunches of bearded, malodorous, GangGreen, woke farts trying to hug them.
A white bear has little to fear from even the Russian fuzz. They perhaps also realise that, those in charge may be wicked but, at least, still have a few functional brain cells.
Thank you, Martin – you’ve just made my day!
Good analysis of the situation. It is a relief to know that it is not due to bear “wokeness” driving them to Marxism.
Thanks for providing the necessary balance.
Shame on Telegraph journalists.
This is the sort of rubbish I would expect from the BBC, Guardian, etc.
I used to think that the Telegraph was slightly better than other rags, obviously I was wrong.
This conflation is one of the most egregious examples of gas-lighting I have ever seen
An an example of a geographically risible inept false-flag it is hard to beat.
As is correctly stated by Dr Crockford Kodiak Island is not even in the Arctic, it is located in the Gulf of Alaska some 960 miles due south of Point Barrow. This is like comparing the climate of the Island of Corfu in the Ionian Sea with the Baltic Sea coast of Poland some 1,000 miles further north across the continent of Europe!
I have now checked ogimet.com which lists the direct SYNOP weather data from tens of thousands of weather stations on-line. I could not find the record temperature for Kodiak that they claimed – 19C. And since the New Year I now notice that the temperature data for much of December for Kodiak have been deleted, which may indicate errors in the sensors. 19C would be utterly out of line with the data for other stations in the Gulf of Alaska area – such as Homer, Middleton Island or Cold Bay, which were between 3-6C on the relevant days. Seems like another ‘incorrect’ (ahem) warming ‘fact’ (sic)
Nothing to do with abundant food in the Chukchi Sea !
Polar bears are now so fed up with western values (& the WWF using them to make a pack of cash ), they are turning to the east & communism … by traveling west.
Although part of Alaska was on the warm side most of it was very/record cold – a deep cold plunge means a warm plume somewhere else – it just happened that the border between the 2 air masses was over the edge of Alaska this time.
Turbulent Times picked this up and basically put it down as just publishing a pack of lies and shame of the Telegraph for allowing this inaccurate rubblsh to be published.
As usual, no comments allowed by the DT.
The first part of the article was a head scratcher for me because I was on Kodiak Island for a thankfully few short hours a few decades ago when I was in the Navy. There wasn’t much to remember about it other than being barren(in the part where we were) and cold to an extreme at the time that I was there.
One thing I do remember is that we were absolutely nowhere near the Arctic ocean, circle or anything that might be legitimately be called Arctic. Ditto for the Beaufort Sea. (except for being unpleasantly cold) Not only were we not near the Arctic or its approaches but there was a honking great land mass of a thousand miles or so between us.
I was going to look it up on Google maps or whatever when I finished the article but then the authors themselves pointed out how totally clueless the Telegraph article writers are. It used to be a bit complicated to keep a geographical perspective. But now it takes two clicks and a few seconds to verify anything you are going to write about when it comes writing something that has geographical features as an important component. I mean the people writing for the Telegraph get paid to write. Whenever I post something I try to check it out before posting even if I am sure I know what I’m writing about and nobody pays me to write anything.
I make mistakes sometimes but confusing the South coast of Alaska with the North coast…..I don’t think so in a comment that placed great importance on conditions on the North coast. I wouldn’t confuse Scotland with England and they are one hell of lot closer to each other in appearance and climate than the North and South coasts of Alaska.
Interestingly I tried checking out this alleged record temperature at Kodiak island on two reputable sources of meteorological data and could not find the claimed high temperature reported in this newspaper report. The values I found were 10c below the reported value.
How quickly things change in a week’s time:
Funny thing about the not always around Bering Strait: