More BBC Polar Bear Lies Exposed
By Paul Homewood
I’ve a couple of points to add to Susan Crockford’s earlier excellent take down of that BBC article:
![image_thumb[1]](https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/image_thumb1.png "image_thumb[1]")
In Churchill’s frozen Hudson Bay, bears use the sea-ice as a platform to hunt seals.
But the sea-ice-free season in this part of the Canadian Arctic is lengthening, leaving bears unable to hunt for long periods.
But as the polar bear becomes an icon of climate change, the bears’ plight in Churchill embodies the inextricable link between preserving the natural world and fighting global warming. The polar-bear capital of the world is simply getting too warm for polar bears.
“Looking over the last couple of decades, it forms later and later and it breaks up earlier and earlier in spring,” Dr Flavio Lehner, of conservation charity PBI, says.
“So this season in between – where the bears are on land and can’t take advantage of those hunting opportunities – that’s is getting longer and longer, with warming.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-63603489
The BBC could not be any clearer – Churchill is getting warmer and the Hudson Bay sea ice is melting more and more every year.
The facts don’t support that claim:
The Canadian Ice Service monitor ice coverage on a daily basis, and their data for Hudson Bay is below. Sea ice during November, when the polar bears usually return to the ice, has been stable now for three decades. Prior to that there was a sharp decline, coinciding with the switch of the AMO to its warm phase. Undoubtedly the Pinatubo eruption in 1991 also was a factor in the high ice extents in 1992 and 1993. It is therefore arguable that the ice has been stable since the late 1980s.
https://iceweb1.cis.ec.gc.ca/IceGraph/page1.xhtml?lang=en
We see a similar picture when we look at ice in July, when the bears usually come ashore.
By August the ice is gone completely, regardless of the July extent:
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The BBC also reported this claim:
“Back in the 1980s, polar bears would only spend a couple of weeks onshore each summer,” USGS research wildlife biologist Dr Karyn Rode says.
“Now, many spend nearly two months ashore each year.”
Heaven knows where Dr Rode got that load of old drivel from, as even as late as mid-October there has normally been no ice, with the exception of a few odd years:
As the actual experts in Churchill know, the bears have always come ashore in July and stayed till November:
The most spectacular and beloved residents of Hudson Bay are polar bears. The largest land carnivores on earth, polar bears leave the sea ice and arrive on the Hudson Bay coastline in July, where they roam and rest along the coast or prowl around our Lodges until the ice forms again in November. The bears then venture back out on to the ice in search of seals, their primary food source and favourite meal.
https://churchillwild.com/ecosystems-of-the-hudson-bay-coast/
Indeed their comment about “roam and rest” is highly relevant. Polar bears don’t really need to eat during their time ashore, as they have stored up enough energy in spring. But their time ashore is a welcome opportunity to rest, effectively chill out!
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
I hope we’re all sending complaints to the BBC
I was once contracted to make a film about polar bears in Churchill. Don’t know anything about the variation of ice and weather, but I do know it was common for bears to venture into the town for food. The locals had large passenger vehicles, where the passengers were at upper level height, so they could see the bears who came and watched the buses – and went up on their hind legs to look into the passenger compartments. It was a regular visitor attraction and probably still is. Persistent bears were immobilized with a shot of tranqulizer and then carried in a sack beneath a helicopter well out of range.
The film never got made as the backer was killed, flying his own jet plane after major service. Very sad – for him and his passengers. My loss trivial…
I thought this old chestnut had been shut up years ago. Doesn’t the BBC read anything?
Of course not. They are ideologically driven. That is why they regurgitate debunked faux science and activist tripe. What is so compelling is despite hundreds of billions of dollars wasted on this religion all they have in the shop window is the recycling drivel about polar bears, non-sinking atolls and the “it died but then it got better” Great Barrier reef. It is not good enough that they hide behind weasel words like” Oh we only quote what others say” garbage when they ONLY quote shamans belonging to the religion. No fact checkers credible or not in sight. It is time the supposed new broom Director General earned his keep and insisted they check and verify any “science” they promote otherwise heads will roll. Chance would be a fine thing!
“We’re dedicated to conserving polar bears and the sea ice they depend on.” – PBI
Sea ice is a weather condition. Conserving a weather condition is bizarre. How ’bout conserving summer?
I found this research paper for you Paul and Fig 4 may be of special interest : ” The Influences of NAO and the Hudson Bay sea ice on the climate of Eastern Canada , Qian et al , Aug 8 , Climate Dynamics 31 [2] : 169 – 182
Fig 4 is a time series juxtaposing the North Atlantic Oscillation index and Hudson Bay sea ice anomalies for the month of November spanning the period 1972 – 2000. As one can see the NAO – HB sea ice anomaly correlation is striking and I submit Flavio Lehner and the BBC could have easily have researched the information . Sure the last 20 years are missing
but so are the 1920s 30s and 40’s unless someone can mine the old records . The Hudson Bay polar bears ephemeral habitat changes have virtually nothing to do with global warming. The NAO and its influence on the Icelandic Low are the dominant regional climatic influences . To quote from the paper :
” analyses suggest that HB sea ice anomalies and downstream temperature anomalies over eastern Canada may be both caused by NAO variability ……….NAO atmospheric variability is the major control on climate variability over eastern Canada and …this NAO variability is the ultimate cause of anomalies in both HB sea ice and climate conditions over eastern Canada “
“Churchill warms too fast”
I guess Churchill is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world. Like all other places on this planet. :-p
Thx
My mother objected when I made schist up.
I guess these experts didn’t have mothers.
There is a Hudson Bay Region summer sea ice time series in this research publication Paul that extends to 1968 . What is of interest with that cut off date is the Polar Continental Shelf Project sea ice chart that recorded a period between August 26 – September 5 1962 when the Northwest Passage was open water and navigable just as it was under similar conditions in 2007 .. Fancy that . If we could peer back in time and reconstruct the Canadian Arctic sea ice patterns from 1920 – 1962 , I would guess there would be less ice cover than the corresponding 1980 – 2022 period
” Trends and variability in summer sea ice cover in the Canadian Arctic based on the Canadian Ice Service Digital Archive , 1960 – 2008 and 1968 – 2008 , Tivy et al , Journal of Geophysical Research 5 March , 2011
Do they even read their own rubbish?
“The full-on gas pedal will invigorate warming over the coming year and continue into the future, along with more severe wet, dry and hot extremes, until policies are in place to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions,” Richard Allan, professor of climate science at University of Reading told BBC News.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-64032458
Paul, in your last paragraph, before the graph of October ice percentage, you wrote: “even as late as mid-October there has NEVER been no ice, with the exception of a few odd years” Did you mean to write “NORMALLY been no ice”, which is what the graph depicts?
Yes. Well spotted
Once again, I turned to Wikipedia for some information on the age of the species. Following their obligatory “the climate sky is falling” they got down the the business of real science.
“The oldest known polar bear fossil is a 130,000 to 110,000-year-old jaw bone, found on Prince Charles Foreland in 2004.” This means they have survived a couple of interglacial warming periods between ice ages.
In botany we say such a species is “genetically predisposed”. Or “been there done that”.
And presumably Ice Ages, when the sea ice must have been extremely thick and it was very difficult to hunt seals anywhere near where they hunt today?
Correct….if they survived it before they have the genetic make-up to survive it all again.
“Phoenix44 ” during ice ages there are always marginal ice flows and oceans inhabited by seals and other marine mammals If the ice sheets were hundreds of meters thick over the Hudson Bay rimming Virginia and North Carolina and the coastlines were miles further out to sea of course there would be no seal colonies ” anywhere near they hunt today” . What a silly argument . Australian aborigines probably hugged the northern advances of the Antarctic ice sheets during the Pleistocene glaciations in watercraft hunting seals , fish and sea-birds to nourish them on their ocean voyages to South America .
So the oldest polar bear skeletal remains date back to the salubriously warm Eemian interglacial when hippopotamuses swam in the Thames estuary and atmospheric carbon dioxide spiralled out
of control to er ………………….. 290 – 320 ppm? …What happened to the ‘runaway global warming ” of the Eemian epoch when temperatures were 2C warmer than today ?
..I think its reasonable to surmise the bears adapted and thrived then too
What we see is that the intermittent very high coverage years have now gone. In the past we had plenty of low coverage years, but then years with 70-80% coverage in November and those generally correspond with high levels in July. What is unclear is why the extent matters? Provided there is some sea ice, isn’t that enough? Or if not, what is the minimum required? It’s obviously absurd to claim bears need the maximum there’s ever been – indeed doesn’t that just mean they have further to go from the shore?
As ever, this is just nonsense combined with alarmism.
Of course it’s rubbish.
They are sea bears not ice bears.
They are intelligent and opportunistic shoreline feeders capable of smelling and swimming and walking vast distances, they exploit whatever food sources and conditions they encounter. The ice merely acts as an extension of the shore.
If the ice goes, then the seals land on the shore and are easy meat, or the seals go elsewhere and the bears follow.
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