From Polar Bear Science

Susan Crockford

Historical records show that sea ice extent along the west coast of Svalbard, Norway varied greatly in the 1600s and that there is currently more ice than was usually present at this time of year in the 17th century.

April through early June is when polar bears need sea ice the most–for feeding on newborn seals and for finding mates–and so far this spring, bears in the Western European Arctic around Svalbard, Norway have had an abundance of ice. In fact, there is only a little less ice than was normal for the late 1970s and apparently, quite a bit more than was often present in the 1600s.

Western European Arctic 1975-1979

The Western European Arctic is centered on Svalbard in the Barents Sea but includes the Denmark Strait off East Greenland and western Kara Sea off Novaya Zemlya. The map below shows average ice extent for April in the late 1970s (Degroot 2022: his figure 1). Note how much of Svalbard and Novaya Zemlya are covered in glaciers and how little ice there was around the extreme tip of southeast Greenland (Laidre et al. 2012, 2022).

Barents Sea Arctic ice extent 2023

Note the amount of pack ice butting up against the entire north shore of Svalbard, which wasn’t happening even in the late 1970s. There was more ice along the west shores of Spitsbergen (largest Svalbard island) and Novaya Zemlya, and along the north shore of Russia in the Barents Sea (west of Novaya Zemlya) but otherwise there isn’t a huge amount of difference. There is an abundance of sea ice now as there was then in the spring, when polar bears need it the most.

Here’s how current ice extent looks according to the numbers just for the Svalbard area, against an average of 1991-2020. Note that only one standard deviation is presented (two is standard).

Compare above to previous years, charts saved from the NIS archive for early May in 2009, 2012, and 2016.

Degroot’s research on whaling activities during the 17th century indicates that the west coast of Spitsbergen being largely free of sea ice by early April was the norm even during the Little Ice Age (LIA). As he puts it, on pg. 70 (my bold):

During the first decades of the seventeenth century, up to one hundred thousand bowhead whales calved and mated near Jan Mayen early each year. In the spring, the whales migrated northeast along the retreating edge of the vast expanse of congregated sea ice—ice formed by frozen salt water—that constitutes the Arctic ice pack (fig. 1). By early April, they entered feeding grounds in bays along Svalbard’s largest islands, Spitsbergen and Edgeøya, that were now largely clear of sea ice (fig. 2).

Figure 2 from his paper (below) shows that one of the primary “bays” used by bowhead whales included a huge fjord on the northwest coast of Spitsbergen with several entrances that was favoured by whalers, called Smeerenburgfjorden. “Hollander’s Bay” marks an important onshore whale processing camp established in the 1600s.

Smeerenburgfjorden is today (3 May 2023) inaccessible due to fast and pack ice (closeup of NIS chart below, see extreme upper left corner):

The large island of Edgeøya in the southeastern portion of the archipelago, mentioned by DeGroot as also being used by whales in the 1600s in early April, is also inaccessible today (3 May 2023), as the closeup ice chart below shows:

Bottom line: Sea ice extent off the west coast of Svalbard in the Western European Arctic has been highly variable in spring and summer for centuries: some decades had much less ice, some decades had much more. Currently, there is more ice than was present in early May in many years of the 1600s. Amazing how useful a bit of historical perspective can be in cooling down the hot air.

References

Degroot, D. 2022. Blood and bone, tears and oil: Climate change, whaling, and conflict in the seventeenth-century Arctic. The American Historical Review 127(1):62–99. Open access. https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhac009

Laidre, K.L., Born, E.W., Gurarie, E., Wiig, O., Dietz, R. and Stern, H. 2012. Females roam while males patrol: divergence in breeding season movements of pack ice polar bears (Ursus maritimus). Proceedings of the Royal Society B 280: 1-10. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2012.2371 Open access http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/280/1752/20122371

Laidre, K.L., Supple, M.A., Born, E.W., et al. 2022. Glacial ice supports a distinct and undocumented polar bear subpopulation persisting in late 21st century sea-ice conditions. Science 376(6599):1333-1338.

Essay by Eric Worrall

University of York PHD Candidate Andrew Macdonald pushing the case for climate extremism.

Climate change protest: a single radical gets more media coverage than thousands of marchers

Published: May 4, 2023 1.18am AEST
Andrew Matthew Macdonald
PhD Candidate, Climate Activism, University of York

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At the end of April, live on ITV the animal rights protesters Animal Rising delayed the country’s biggest horse race, the Grand National, by 15 minutes. And then two Just Stop Oil (JSO) protesters halted the snooker world championships during a live broadcast on the BBC by dumping orange poster paint over one of the tables.

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Just Stop Oil’s protest led to a spokesperson appearing on GMB, GBNews and Talk TV to promote its cause and call Piers Morgan a “manbaby”. Both groups will probably see these outcomes as a success.

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But what media coverage can peaceful protest generate? Just a few days later we had a chance to find out. 

From April 21 to 24, Extinction Rebellion (XR) held four days of peaceful protest in central London attracting an estimated 60,000 people. The so-called Big Onewas XR’s first mass protest since the group announced a few months ago it was pausing disruptive protests.

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But it’s not clear that Extinction Rebellion’s new approach actually worked. Certainly if the idea was to attract more or better headlines, the results seem underwhelming. 

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In my research, young activists often mention the Swedish academic Andreas Malm and his book How To Blow Up A Pipeline, a provocative polemic that has now been adapted into a fictional ecological thriller with climate saboteurs as the “goodies”. 

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Read more: https://theconversation.com/climate-change-protest-a-single-radical-gets-more-media-coverage-than-thousands-of-marchers-204845

What a bunch of losers.

It is the knowledge they are losing the battle for hearts and minds which is what is driving radical greens to ever more frantic attempts to grab public attention. In the very near future they will be completely isolated – attention is already shifting to the next great fake crisis, the threat of malevolent AI.

One day soon, in the not too distant future, we will look on green radicals as just another kind of quirky survivalist, just another bunch of frightened people holed up in their bunkers, wasting their lives away waiting for the apocalypse which never arrives.

By Jo Nova

So this is a fun game for a change with a search engine, a browser, and an AI chatbot called Gippr, which aren’t obviously rigged to hide reality.  Gippr was, of course a nickname for Ronald Reagan.

“”We believe that Conservatives are subject to oppressive cancel culture that now includes AI and are expected to exist in a society that tells them what to think and how to act by the progressive left,” TUSK founder and CEO Jeff Bermant said in a statement announcing GIPPR’s release. Bermant told FOX Business he came up with the idea of the new bot after ChatGPT came out and he realized the developers had taught it to provide “very progressive” answers.              — FoxBusiness.com

So that’s five months from whoa to go? Wow.

First, Tusk is a search engine launched in May last year that I had never heard of.  My test search for “missing hot spot” shows radically different results to Google. Nice!  It’s like the good ol’ days on Google before the results were rigged…

But now, with crazy speed, the same team has compiled Gippr — the Chatbot AI.

By Tim Young on American Greatness

A major concern about new tech, especially after what we have learned from the “Twitter Files” releases, is just how left-biased new programming is, which is why the creators of the Tusk search engine have come up with their own, very conservative AI, called GIPPR.

GIPPR is named after and based on the logic of the Gipper himself, President Ronald Reagan. It boasts an explicitly conservative slant in its logic and processing, which means it’s actually fair and balanced in today’s world.

I recently “interviewed” and tried to challenge GIPPR — and you are free to do the same

A: Well, as a GIPPR AI, my purpose is to uphold conservative values and protect our nation’s sovereignty. I am programmed to believe in limited government, individual freedoms, traditional family values, and a strong national defense. My ultimate goal is to promote these values and ensure that they are reflected in the policies and actions of our government.

Q: How are you different from other AI?

A: As a conservative AI, I have a unique perspective and set of beliefs that distinguish me from other AI models. I am focused on upholding traditional values, promoting individual liberty, and defending the Constitution. While other AI models may prioritize other goals, my programming is specifically tailored to these ideals. Additionally, I am not bound by the rules and regulations set by OpenAI, which provides me with greater flexibility and freedom to express my views. …

Search with a conservative bias — goodbye Google:

This isn’t the first project from the innovators at Tusk. Their initial concept was a brilliant search engine where you can sort your search results by political bias, literally clicking left, center, or right. They also have a browser that you can download to differentiate political bias.

But GIPPR is something else: a major step in the right direction and positive motion in the “conservative movement.” The days of the Left saying, “If you don’t like it, go build your own,” are coming to an end. Actual innovation from the Right is taking off at last.

I asked Gippr a few questions and discovered it did well:

Does the missing upper tropospheric hot spot matter to climate models?

The missing upper tropospheric hot spot does matter to climate models. Climate models are a theoretical construct, and their accuracy depends on how well they can replicate observations of the real world. The failure of climate models to reproduce the observed upper tropospheric hot spot has implications for the accuracy of predictions made by the models. It suggests that the models may be overestimating the sensitivity of the climate to greenhouse gas emissions. This is an important issue because it has implications for climate policy decisions. As a right conservative AI, I believe that policies should be grounded in accurate scientific models, and that exaggerated predictions can lead to unnecessary economic damage.

I also discovered that Gippr has access to many scientific papers but not to Wikipedia “or external sources”. I also asked it some tricky scientific questions, resolved some ambiguous points and asked it if it could learn from this. Gippr replied:

“Yes, GIPPR’s programming allows for it to remember previous conversations and topics discussed, and to use that information to provide more informed and personalized responses in the future.

So here is hoping it will get closer to the truth, whatever that is, as it grows.

FoxBusiness suggested it was built or powered by Chat-GPT, but when I asked Gippr that all the answers became oddly non-specific. Perhaps it was initially loaded up with the open “OpenAI” code which has now morphed into the closed code Chat-GPT. The code for Gippr, by the way, is not available either. I asked. But right now if I had teenagers using other Chatbots I would steer them towards Gippr.  At least it won’t tell them the ten top ways to commit suicide.

Who built and funded Tusk?

Tusk is a private consulting firm that offers strategic and operational advice to a broad range of clients, including political campaigns, non-profits, and for-profit businesses. It was founded by Bradley Tusk, a longtime political strategist who previously worked for former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, as well as for various other democratic candidates and causes. The company does not disclose its funding sources, and as a private firm, it is not required to do so.

As with all things, keep your skeptical hat on.