BBC Replay The Fake “Polar Bears Will Starve” Scare Story
By Paul Homewood
h/t Ian Magness
Susan Crockford debunks the latest polar bear scare:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-68253819
Susan’s response:
Is it a coincidence that a paper reporting the results of a no-news study on polar bears, but which predicts future starvation due to climate change, was published two weeks to the day ahead of a climate change marketing event made up by the activist organization Polar Bears International? I doubt it.
And do I think the high-profile journal Nature Communications would not only agree to publish such a useless bit of propaganda but also rig the timing to advance the climate change emergency narrative? Silly question. And the media worldwide are of course lapping it up, happy for an excuse to promote the perils of climate change, see here, here, and here using images of fat polar bears. Image above is from the BBC headline, 13 February 2024.
They believe this strategy is effective because they think the public is stupid, but they are deluding themselves. Most people are now laughing at their obvious acts of desperation.
Polar bears are highly specialize for consuming large amounts of fat that they get from Arctic seals, whales, and walrus. Only a few vocal researchers outside main-stream polar bear science insist that polar bears could ever survive year-round by eating terrestrial foods (e.g., Ilses et al. 2013; Iverson et al. 2014; Gormezano and Rockwell 2013a,b; Prop et al. 2015; Rogers et al. 2015; Tartu et al. 2016).
I agree with leading polar bear specialists that, based on polar bear biology, only a few individual bears derive any survival benefit from foods they find or catch on land, like birds, eggs, and reindeer — with the exception of beached carcasses of whales, walrus and seals that still have fat on them (Crockford 2022; Rode et al. 2015). I’ve said this a number of times on this blog, and in my Polar Bear Evolution book (Crockford 2023) and the Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened (Crockford 2019).
As I’ve said before:
Whatever food polar bears consume in the summer – whether they are on land or on the ice – doesn’t really matter. What matters is how many fat-rich seals they can consume between March and June each year. The fat put on in late winter/spring from gorging on baby seals carries polar bears over the summer, no matter where they spend it. … Well-fed bears throughout the Arctic have enough fat to see them through a 4-5 month fast and even the worst-case scenario models devised suggest that most bears in productive regions like Hudson Bay [and probably, Southern Davis Strait] would survive a 6 month fast. …Chukchi Sea and Southern Davis Strait bears, for example, are doing very well – contrary to all predictions – despite marked declines in summer sea ice because they have ample food during their critical spring feeding period when sea ice is abundant.”
Full post here.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
The only real threat to polar bears is hunters. This claim was comprehensively debunked years ago. Presumably the BBC are wheeling it out again in the hope that most people have forgotten that it was nonsense.
The BBC is now staffed by hordes of copy paste kids in cubicles awaiting ‘science’ form approved ‘sayers’, and who have been briefed as to what is ‘news’ and likely were not there the last time it was shown not to be.
It’s staffed by activists who believe that they know everything, understand everything and have the solution to everything. They are incapable of independent thought, scepticism or analysis yet are convinced they have no need of such things.
“The only real threat to polar bears is hunters.”
My, how ignorant we are.
If the buggers were really worried about the future of Polar Bears they’d start a couple of colonies of them in the Antarctic.
Tick vg! 😃
My God don’t give them ideas!!!
where they can eat penguins … assuming they can get the wrapper off
The BBC frequently inspires the same reaction with its #prasnews as a spontaneously appearing sub orbital bowl of petunias.
Not sure about petunias.
They just make me puke.
HHGTTG link spotted.
Oh no, not again!
When Al Gore was born there were about 7000 polar bears; now there are just 30,000 left.
Which would explain that there might be too many bears for the food supply.
That’s a decent call. Without a corresponding increase in seal numbers – for which I’m unaware of any evidence, the expanded polar bear population will each have to make do with fewer juicy lunches.
Lots more seals as hunting is much reduced.
Nature has a way of limiting numbers. Slightly off topic but whales are also suffering over-population. Having been saved by the Oil industry (since the 1850s), they have few predators as man ceased to hunt them for their oil.
Nature has a way of limiting numbers.
And Nature isn’t very nice about it.
Human management aims for balance. Nature does extremes. Gross overpopulation with big die-offs are Nature’s way.
Early on the future-story was that all the sea ice would be gone in the late summer (Sept) of some year.
See this {one of many}:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/sep/17/arctic-collapse-sea-ice
The quoted expert was Prof Peter Wadhams and the collapse was to be in four years – that is, by late 2016. Oops!
The next “save face” attempt was to change the concept to under 1 M sq. kilometers. This became known as one Wadhams. “climatedepot” has a summary of these failed predictions by P. W. and others.
Most surprising is that the British press keeps reporting the demise of the Great White Bears despite all the evidence to the contrary.
A couple of pejoratives:
A few bricks short of a hod
Their elevator doesn’t go to the top floor
Not the brightest bulb in the bunch
One oar in the water
Not the Sharpest Tool in the Box.
🙂
The lights are on but there is no one in.
a pork pie short of a picnic?
I’m still taking bets that ice will bottom out at above 4 Wadhams at the autumn equinox. I’d have lost in 2012 and 2020 . Hundred quid? Come on, roll up
Is Wadham still a forward thinker on global warming at Cambridge, following his very serious false forecast in 2016? Or has he moved the goal posts as every fanatic has done since the GW scare was found to be a wonderful source of income for the last 40 years.
Y’know, I wouldn’t even bother contacting the bbc or similar. on these matters. I’d say it just gives them some sort of kick. Pity it wasn’t a Size 14. And funny how their talk of Feb Temps etc today / yesterday (?) is matched by the german tv Weather girlies … Must all have gone to Davos too then, or their Church is sending out the same hymnsheets
I was watching this further attempt by our blundering BBC to falsify this topic again. It’s common knowledge that polar bears eat very little during the summer months, having stored up body fat in the spring. Also, if the ice didn’t melt there would be no plankton to start the food chain. No plankton no fish, no fish no seals, no seals no bears. Will the BBC ever stop their propaganda?
“Will the BBC ever stop their propaganda?”
No. BBC delenda est.
However, in truth, it is very late in the game. The more general “They” have wiped the floor with us in the first clashes. Whether they will succeed in leveraging this success into a “forever crusade” and finally establish the new religion – with a helpless, impoverished, laity squirming under the thumb of a monstrous tribe of watchful priests – is a question. What is clear is that most of the world will not be converted.
On another subject. The Ice damned lake which broke in N America. It caused a surge of cold water into the North Atlantic
https://www.youtube.com/@SocietyofAntiquariesofScotland
Mesolithic climate in U K affected ?
This BBC version of the story consumed about 3-5 minutes (I did not measure, just a recollection) on the BBC News at Six (television). Follows the BBC’s normal track:
: Victim. The polar bears, and I guess us since we’ll miss the polar bears when they are all gone
: Expert: someone from the USGS, demonstrating authority by wearing a fleece with “USGS” brand on chest.
Narrated with that “this is serious” tone.
The actual question is how much ice is optimum for polar bears? It’s unclear thar maximum, very thick ice is optimum. But the “science” isn’t about answering real questions, it’s about the narrative.
It is a fact of ecology that the animal biomass in a system forms a pyramid so that, as you progress upwards in the “what preys on and eats what” line of dependency, there is a severe reduction in the equilibrium amount at each stage. The niche of “top” predator will always be filled with a few, highly specialised, species with only a few (generally big) individuals in each species. That is the situation with polar bears.*
Top predators go extinct easily and often, exactly because they are specialised with a small breeding population (Tigers and Cheetahs are on their way out, for example). The ecological niche at the top will continue to exist, however, and be filled again in short order. From the point of view (if one may speak thus) of Nature, top predators (including Man) are unimportant “chancers.” Here today, and gone tomorrow.
*Polar bears are thought to have split off from (vegetarian) brown bears quite recently, in evolutionary terms. About 400,000 years ago, variants of certain genes which control fat metabolism in all mammals became more prevalent in brown bears around the Arctic, evolved somewhat, and enabled the “gorge on fat and starve for a while afterwards” carnivorous life style of polar bears. There is nothing abnormal in them starving for a few months. So long as they are only living off stored fat, they are not going to fret or feel pangs of hunger. They are not modern, settled, humans, who, ever since the Neolithic, have tended to become addicted to carbohydrates, and who often live to eat instead of eating to live.
Cheetahs are on their way out
True. Because hunting them was banned. They are listed in
CITES I. Hunters returning from Africa told me farmers asked them to shoot the damn cheetahs. Without the value derived from hunting, they are simply a nuisance species now, no different from hyenas to farmers.
When you can get a hunter to pay 10k to hunt them, they become worth protecting. Not to the Madison Avenue eco-nazis, but to the farmers who must put up with them.
There is an additional issue with Cheetahs. Fairly recently, they seem to have gone through “a choke” when the breeding population was extremely small. As a result they lack diversity in the pool of genetic resources for their immune systems and a novel infection would spare few.
isn’t this good news for seals?
Polar bears have been anthropomorphised and because we know we could never go months without food we also assume the bears couldn’t either.
Is BBC not concerned about polar bears’ whiteness?
https://x.com/nightingales2_2/status/1758481913033961592?s=20
bazza
“that is unbelievable.. sadly with climate change this type of flooding is only going to become more frequent :(“
It has been suggested a story about flooding thanks to EA flood management is shared with the BBC.
It will be interesting how flood defence systems to protect new housing fit into the CC narrative.