By Paul Homewood
Booker follows up the latest polar bear scare story:
The global warming-obsessed BBC has yet again been wonderfully caught out on one of its favourite memes: those supposedly vanishing polar bears due to that supposedly disappearing Arctic ice. They recently went to town with a film from a bunch of American scientists who had fixed cameras to nine mother bears in the Beaufort Sea off Alaska, showing what difficulty they had in finding their favourite food, seal pups. As recorded on the BBC Science website under the heading “Polar bears ‘running out of food’”, this was blamed on the “dramatic effects” climate change is having on Arctic sea ice, which has been “decreasing at a rate of about 14 per cent per decade”.
It is true that, since 1979, satellites have shown a declining trend in how much ice was left each September after its summer melt. But the average ice extent for last September was higher than it has been in seven of the past 11 years. The real problem for the bears in the area those scientists were studying, as Susan Crockford, the zoologist and polar bear expert, showed in a recent article, was not that the ice had disappeared but that, in the years of their study, US Navy and other data showed there was not just more of it than in the previous few years, but that it had thickened to depths of up to 16ft. As Crockford explains, this is much too thick for seals to breed, because they give birth in ice that must be thin enough for them to breathe through boreholes.
So in the years in question, the reason for the scarcity of polar bear prey was that the mother seals had all moved east and west to where the ice was thinner. In other words, the problem was not the absence of ice, as the BBC wanted us to believe, but that there was too much of it.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
February 11, 2018 at 05:13AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 