No evidence for BBC claim that Churchill is simply getting too warm for polar bears
By Paul Homewood
Latest lies from the BBC:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-63603489
Dr Susan Crockford responds:
No evidence for BBC claim that Churchill is simply getting too warm for polar bears
Another pronouncement from conservation activists at Polar Bears International taken without a single check of facts makes the BBC look ineffective and gullible.
The photo above of a ‘green dot’ bear was taken 10 November 2022 by a Churchill resident. Bears released from the ‘polar bear jail’ when there is enough sea ice for them to resume hunting are marked with a green dot.
From a BBC article today (18 December 2022), ‘Canada’s polar-bear capital Churchill warms too fast for bears‘:
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.”
The simple fact is that sea ice in Western Hudson Bay, where Churchill is located, has not been declining more and more with rising CO2 emissions, according to data published by polar bear specialists (e.g. Castro de la Guardia et al. 2017).
Since 2015, there has been only one ‘late’ freeze-up year (2016)–but five very early ones–and at most one relatively early breakup year (with some bears ashore in June). This year (2022) freeze-up was about as early as it was in the 1980s, as was the case in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020, as the chart below indicates (dark blue is more ice than usual compared to 1991-2020). Breakup happened in July in 2022, so also not early.
In other words, there has been no escalation of poor Churchill-area sea ice conditions in recent years as stated by the BBC.
The BBC and others only get away with such blatantly false statements because polar bear specialists simply do not update their published data on Western Hudson Bay sea ice or condition of bears. Data for ice is now 7 years out of date and information on the condition of the bears is decades out of date.
Moreover, the models predicting the demise of polar bears by 2100 are implausible prophesies based on discredited RCP8.5 scenarios that assume an unrealistic 500% increase in coal and a 60C rise in global temperature (Hausfather and Peters 2020) and out-of-date information on WH bears (Molnar et al. 2010, 2020).
This bit of PR possing as science comes as PBI’s ‘chief scientist’ announces his retirement from the organization. His comments are telling about why he quit the US Geological Survey in 2010 to join PBI:
I originally planned to stay with PBI for about five years—thinking that, by then, societies would have moved toward more sustainable CO2 emissions pathways and the future for polar bears would be more secure. I had many reasons to be optimistic, but boy was I wrong. I didn’t fully appreciate the power of the denial movement. I also didn’t imagine that our policy leaders, many of whom are smart people, would choose to literally ruin the world in exchange for the further enrichment of a very few. So, the initial five years stretched into more than a decade—and we still have far to go.
The announcement states that Amstrup “plans to step up to an emeritus position while passing the baton to two hand-picked successors, Dr. John Whiteman and Dr. Flavio Lehner.” Hand-picked, by Amstrup, means more of the same from PBI.
It’s no wonder the BBC promotion piece for PBI includes so many statements from Lehner, who is not a polar bear biologist but an activist climate scientist. Like the BBC, I expect Lehner also believes everything that Amstrup says without checking for himself.
Crockford’s assessment of Dr Flavio Lehner is spot on; he has zero experience of polar bears, neither is he a biologist. Instead he is simply a bog standard climate activist scientist:
Biography
Flavio Lehner obtained a PhD in Climate Science from the University of Bern in Switzerland in 2013. After a brief engagement as Science Officer in the Technical Support Unit for the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, he joined the Climate and Global Dynamics Lab at NCAR with a fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation in 2014. Being awarded a NOAA postdoc fellowship, he continued on in NCAR’s Research Applications Lab. He then transitioned to a Project Scientist position at NCAR, leading and co-leading projects across NCAR labs. For the past year Flavio has been working as a Senior Scientist at ETH Zürich in Switzerland, before joining Cornell as an Assistant Professor in fall of 2020.
Research Interests
Dr. Lehner’s research investigates the influence of internal and externally-forced variability on our ability to understand and project climate change on global to regional scales. It aims to improve our understanding of the dynamics that govern this variability and hence the uncertainties involved in climate projections.
He is interested in questions such as: Why are climate projections uncertain? Can we reduce this uncertainty by improving models through dissection and better understanding of the physical processes involved? What are the dynamic and thermodynamic contributions to regional changes in temperature and precipitation and its associated impacts such as heatwaves, droughts and compounded extreme events? How do ongoing and projected changes impact society, ecosystems and natural resources that humans depend on?
His toolbox includes analysis of coupled climate, atmosphere-only, and hydrologic model simulations, climate reconstructions, and observations. His motivation to solve not only disciplinary but also interdisciplinary problems has led to a broad set of applications from paleoclimate reconstructions to hydroclimate impact studies, allowing him to build an extensive network of collaborators at the intersection of fundamental science and applications.
https://www.engineering.cornell.edu/faculty-directory/flavio-lehner
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
It was the second item on the news, the first was the world cup which had finished minutes earlier, it was out and out propaganda, ignoring all the more serious events in the world at this time. Just who at the BBC authorised this?
It was to support COP15 – yes there’s more than one, again bypassing all due democratic process, the elite just gave themselves more excuses/power to seize and control everything.
I bave a feeling the BBC promoted the news item at some point before the news, not sure when as I’ve been trying to escape from Wall to wall football for what seems like months
Ben, You mean hours before ?
or weeks ? Main tweets about @BBCnews & polar bears
Sometimes the BBC re-broadcasts their 2017 prog
Wildlife cameraman Gordon Buchanan heads north at the peak of bear season to discover what life is really like in the tiny town that has become known as the ‘polar bear capital of the world’.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b087vfxj
Jun 17 “Some Greenland polar bears adapt to hunt without sea ice”
.. https://twitter.com/BBCNews/status/1537749487770292226
Hour/minutes
Geoff, it was probably the BBC’s Climate Editor, Justin Rowlatt, who authorised the article. The BBC have a Climate Editor (and no doubt a Deputy or Assistant Editor) and perhaps numerous Climate Correspondents as well. The propaganda has to be pushed for the BBC to get good value of money.
On BBC News at Six, Rowlatt was having an orgasmic overload as – having been given the lead item(!!) – he reported on the COP15 findings and agreements – which he failed to see had no democratic support AT ALL! The man is worse than the old bible-bashers/money-grubbers we used to see on US TV when we were there many years ago.
My wife only just managed to save our TV when this fake-news came on.
Disgraceful, lying-to and clear brainwashing-of the populace. It does not take a scientist to check the facts.
Me too!
If he’s interested in questions, Lehner should ask himself: could the models be wrong? Or even, is it possible to disprove the null hypothesis?
“Lehner should ask himself: could the models be wrong?”
That would be like asking the Pope to ask himself if the Scriptures could be wrong.
He would suffer the modern academic equivalent of being burnt at the stake if he did that.
Looking at the Smithsonian’s World Weather Records monthly average temperatures in the 1930s at Churchill and comparing them with climate normals, there doesn’t seem to be a statistical difference.
“He is interested in questions such as: Why are climate projections uncertain? Can we reduce this uncertainty by improving models……”
I think he just answered his own question.
More truthfully the question should be ‘Why are climate projections so wrong?’
True. But then that’s not a question he’d be interested in.
Well yes but the real question is can we improve models? And the answer to that is no because we don’t understand the physical processes driving climate and if we did, we still couldn’t model them.
But as with so much these days, impossible and unknowable numbers are somehow good enough to decide all sorts of polices.
Agreed!
“and if we did, we still couldn’t model them.”
Precisely.
We can’t effectively model one of the commonest phenomena in fluid dynamics – turbulence – to any significant extent, Navier-Stokes can give useful approximations, but only up to a point, see “Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem”, and there’s a LOT of that in climate.
Non-linear relationships are computationally intractable – hell we haven’t even the capability to solve the good old travelling salesman problem for any significant number of drops and that isn’t even non-linear, simple as that.
And all that throwing more computing power at such problems is to give you the wrong answer quicker.
Paul, you said “…he is simply a bog standard climate activist scientist…”.
I think we should stop referring to people such as Lehner as scientists. They are not – simply by their words and actions.
The correct characterization of Lehner is: He is simply a bog standard climate activist. (And that is being kind.)
We shouldn’t really be surprised anymore. It has long been decided upon high that this is the way to go to cripple the west. We have students from a local university allegedly demanding all courses contain the following:-
climate justice and the social and economic consequences of climate breakdown;
how it is relevant to their chosen subject and career
and a breakdown on the magnitude of the crisis.
While at the same time images of large fluffy animals at risk is certainly finding its chosen targets :-
https://www.bristol247.com/podcast/behind-the-headlines/the-impact-of-climate-anxiety-in-bristol/
Indoctrination of the young, a well tried and tested method.
What they are demanding is their simplistic, ignorant version of how they think society should be and how we all should behave. They are nothing more than Red Guards, fascistic and dangerous, without reason or intelligence.
Douglas, thanks for the link. I have had a listen and have written up my thoughts about the podcast at https://cliscep.com/2022/12/20/climate-anxiety-in-bristol/
Hi Jit. The psychologist seems to have a doom and gloom approach from the get go. Then those labels again. Not great. I hope someone responsible for educating students reads your article and takes heed. Nature has the answers but can we humans learn them ?
Yesterday, the BBC’s Environmental Doomster-In-Chief Justin Rowlatt reported the extinction of a million species. Recycled tosh, old hat, or what? We’ve certainly been here before, e.g.
There’s been another lot of doom laden research, aka modelling, that says 25% of species will be gone by a week on Wednesday or the year 2000 whichever comes first.
20th century warming in Canada has been beneficial for nature, fewer exceptionally cold nights, but temperatures remain very much sub-zero in the long winter nights. I wonder if the trucker protests in Ottawa would have lasted as long as they did without this warming.
Is that not a fair bit of UHI do you think? I saw some work a year or so ago that showed how modern structures and infrastructure retain heat for very long times, which ight go some way to explaining the apparent warming of nights.
Susan Crockford has documented this schist for years.
Put her blog on your reading list.
When her posts are put up at WUWT comments are allowed and she will sometimes respond.
She has a new book in progress. See:
I posted a similar reaction on Twitter straight after it went to air.
No facts at all in the entire piece. Propaganda is exactly what it was.
Deserves a serious complaint of its own.
Not according to the number of outfits advertising “Polar Bear Safaris “
Including some in partnership with “Alarmists”.
Instead of pumping out lying nonsense about Polar Bears (and a million other fashionable subjects), it might have been useful if the MSM had given all those who had apparently forgotten what Winter is like, a polite reminder that young children should always be supervised if they are likely to go anywhere near a body of water.
Of course, the story of the four little lads who got killed is tragic. You’d have to have a heart of stone not to feel sorry for the parents.
But bearing in mind how big they have treated the story, might they not have made at least an attempt to give some safety advice? (It’s not as if they are not usually very keen indeed to offer unwanted advice about hazards.)
One can only think they are hoping for more tragic events to try to boost their Climate Agit-prop.
The worm is turning.
Globally, ever-decreasing numbers believe climate change is a serious problem, now down to less than half:
Heh – “AS THREAT GROWS”!
Seems the increasingly frantic alarmist propaganda efforts of the AGW hoaxers are globally failing and they’re starting to panic, doesn’t it?
As the old saying goes, “you can fool some of the people some of the time and all of the people some of the time but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time”.
The AGW hoax is dying on its feet.
But the bedwetters don’t need to worry, the Globalists will dream up something else to make them hand over all their money, lose sleep over, lock themselves up, terrorise their kids and hide behind the sofa very soon now.
In fact I think they’ll find they already have – GLOBAL PANDEMICS.
So be afraid, be very afraid!
Is it true or did you hear it on BBC.
Reblogged this on Climate Collections.
Data for ice is now 7 years out of date
How do they explain that?
Data for ice excludes the recent growth which contradicts our truth.
The BBC’s chief partner in lies, the WWF, have been approached under FoI, as a direct result of their advert involving polar bears where the advert claims the sea ice, vital for their ability to hunt and feed, is retreating , their habitat is therefore at risk and in consequence “they” are engaged in rebuilding polar bear habitats and are seeking financial assistance.
I have asked how they intend to rebuild sea ice; initial response is as big a laugh as you can imagine. My follow up even more specific and their response is that it has been passed onwards and if someone is available to answer they will.
Perhaps Santa will arrive early with the naked truth…not.
Perhaps they are going to build piers for them. I can just picture the bears strolling out on them. Cue a cartoon from Josh!