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via JoNova
June 4, 2024 at 09:49AM
Month: June 2024
Researchers at the Norwegian Polar Institute have finally updated their spring data, which show male polar bears in 2024 were even fatter than they were in 1993 and litter sizes of new cubs were just as high, despite continued low sea ice in the region over the summer months especially.
The region
Area surveyed in August 2015 where polar bears were found, as shown below (Aars et al. 2017) included the pack ice north of Svalbard. Spring surveys done in March/April appear to include only land areas of the Svalbard archipelago.
Sea ice conditions
This year, at the end of May around Svalbard:
In the wider area of the Barents Sea:
Unfortunately, Norwegian Ice Service data only go back to 1997, so we can’t see specifically what conditions were like in 1993, but other sources show sea ice was more extensive then in all seasons.
Hopen Island, circled on the map below, is so far south that bears are only able to den there when Barents Sea fall ice is extensive (Andersen et al. 2012; Derocher et al. 2011).
The graph below, copied from the MOSJ polar bear webpage, shows the number of days from 1979-2024 when sea ice cover around Hopen Island in the fall (1 October – 31 December) exceeded 60%. In the early 1990s, ice cover around Hopen was unusually abundant (black line). By 1994, many females used the island for maternity denning (peak of blue line) but after 2007, few if any bears did so due to lack of sea ice.
Spring 2024 Data
The newest Norwegian data show that cub recruitment (the number of cubs per litter), copied below, was as high in 2024 as it has ever been and just as high as it was in 1993 before sea ice declines began, although in 2023 it was the lowest since 1993.
Data for the body condition of male bears in spring (March-May, copied below), which has been tracked since 1993, show a slight decrease up to the year 2000.
However, after 2000, body condition increased over the next two decades to 2024 despite a significant decrease in sea ice cover, leaving bears in better condition overall in 2024 than they had been in 1993 and any year since.
Conclusions
This 2024 data from male Svalbard bears mirrors that of female bears captured up to 2017, which showed a similar pattern (Lippold et al. 2019): less sea ice in recent years has meant bears have been in better condition than they were in the 1990s when there was more sea ice.
Lippold and colleagues (2019: 988) stated this clearly for female polar bears (my bold]:
“Unexpectedly, body condition of female polar bears from the Barents Sea has increased after 2005, although sea ice has retreated by ∼50% since the late 1990s in the area, and the length of the ice-free season has increased by over 20 weeks between 1979 and 2013. These changes are also accompanied by winter sea ice retreat that is especially pronounced in the Barents Sea compared to other Arctic areas. Despite the declining sea ice in the Barents Sea, polar bears are likely not lacking food as long as sea ice is present during their peak feeding period. Polar bears feed extensively from April to June when ringed seals have pups and are particularly vulnerable to predation, whereas the predation rate during the rest of the year is likely low.”
As I’ve explained previously, this is almost certainly due to the fact that less sea ice in summer causes increased primary productivity — more plankton feeds more fish, which feeds more seals — which produces an abundance of seals for polar bears to feed on when sea ice is present in the spring (Crockford 2023; Frey et al. 2022).
The Norwegian authors concluded their 2024 polar bear report by stating [my bold]:
Even though the loss of sea ice has been marked around Svalbard in recent years, and is expected to continue in the coming decades, the size of the subpopulation may still be below the carrying capacity.
It is therefore possible that the subpopulation currently is still growing, or at least is stable, even though the availability of habitats has become poorer for much of the year. …
Observations so far are unable to document that changes in the climate have had clear effects on the subpopulation.
References
Aars, J., Marques,T.A, Lone, K., Anderson, M., Wiig, Ø., Fløystad, I.M.B., Hagen, S.B. and Buckland, S.T. 2017. The number and distribution of polar bears in the western Barents Sea. Polar Research 36:1. 1374125. doi:10.1080/17518369.2017.1374125
Andersen, M., Derocher, A.E., Wiig, Ø. and Aars, J. 2012. Polar bear (Ursus maritimus) maternity den distribution in Svalbard, Norway. Polar Biology 35:499-508.
Crockford, S.J. 2024. State of the Polar Bear 2023. Briefing Paper 67. Global Warming Policy Foundation, London. Download pdf here.
Derocher, A.E., Andersen, M., Wiig, Ø., Aars, J. and Biuw, M. 2011. Sea ice and polar bear den ecology at Hopen Island, Svalbard. Marine Ecology Progress Series 441:273-279.
Frey, K.E., Comiso, J.C., Cooper, L.W., et al. 2022. Arctic Ocean primary productivity: the response of marine algae to climate warming and sea ice decline. 2020 Arctic Report Card. NOAA. DOI: 10.25923/Oje1-te61 https://arctic.noaa.gov/Report-Card/Report-Card-2022/Arctic-Ocean-Primary-Productivity-The-Response-of-Marine-Algae-to-Climate-Warming-and-Sea-Ice-Decline
Lippold, A., Bourgeon, S., Aars, J., Andersen, M., Polder, A., Lyche, J.L., Bytingsvik, J., Jenssen, B.M., Derocher, A.E., Welker, J.M. and Routti, H. 2019. Temporal trends of persistent organic pollutants in Barents Sea polar bears (Ursus maritimus) in relation to changes in feeding habits and body condition. Environmental Science and Technology 53(2):984-995. Get the paper here.
via polarbearscience
June 4, 2024 at 09:39AM
By Paul Homewood
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command"
.
.
https://x.com/metoffice/status/1797631245666423247
The Met Office has now shredded the last bit of credibility it had.
Do they seriously expect people to believe this lie? And it is not just warmer by a few hundredths of a degree. They actually dare to claim it is a whole degree warmer than ever before.
First off, as they have now done three times in the last year, they have declared a record hot month, without even mentioning that longer running CET data shows it was much warmer in the 19thC. In this case, May 1833 was a full degree hotter. To not mention this fact is proof that the Met Office are no longer interested in facts, only political propaganda.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/data/meantemp_monthly_totals.txt
CET also shows that we had several similarly warm Mays in the 19thC, which raises the question – are we comparing like with like when we compare temperatures nowadays with those from 50 or 100 years ago?
Which of course brings us back to the junk nature of the Met Office’s weather station network. As we know, most of it is unfit to be used for climatological purposes, as poor siting means they can have margins of error up to 5C.
At no stage was the weather last month anything out of the ordinary. We had a few, pleasant days, but temperatures never got above the level regularly seen in other years. The highest temperature of the month on CET was only 24.3C, well below the record of 28.9C set in May 1944, and 28.6C in May 1947. There have been 33 years which recorded higher May temperatures.
And the second half of the month was distinctly cool.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/data/download.html
Compare last month with May 1947, for instance, which experienced a real heatwave:
https://digital.nmla.metoffice.gov.uk/IO_3a2c7ec8-d5af-44f1-ab15-8d6cab925b40/
Temperatures last month got nowhere near 90C. And the hot weather lasted for more than a few days. Apart from those two cool spells, the month was largely dominated by anti-cyclonic warmth. Yet according to the Met Office, May 2024 was 1.7C hotter than May 1947.
May 1953 was another hot month, but the Met Office say it was 1.9C cooler than last month:
The Met Office have argued that the warmth last month, according to their figures, was due to night time temperatures. However their data also shows a record for May based on daily max temperatures.
We are well familiar with the concerns about the accuracy of the Met Office temperature dataset. But let me give you one more example.
Ray Sanders, who has spent much time on this topic, noticed that the highest UK temperature of the day was set last week at Neatishead in Norfolk. He did not recognise this station and it was not on the Met Office’s classification list.
When he enquired with the Met Office, they told him that the station only began operations in December 2022. So their dataset now includes a station which almost certainly is in a hot spot, whether geographic or because of poor siting. And consequently, up goes the Met Office’s temperature for that part of Norfolk. (They also asked him why he was enquiring about the station classification – plainly they are desperate to stop the public finding out the truth about their stations!)
Multiply that out a hundred times, and you can quickly add a degree or two to the national temperature.
The Met Office obviously now feel emboldened enough to publish these sort of claims, no matter how outrageous. They know the public don’t believe them, but no longer care.
Finally let’s finish with the twitter, nearly all of which are highly critical and incredulous:
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
June 4, 2024 at 09:29AM
Arctic sea ice extent declined from 1979-2007, but since then the trend has been flat.
In 2008, Obama healed the planet.
He isn’t getting proper credit for this however from NASA, who predicted the Arctic would be ice-free several years ago.
“Summer Arctic sea ice extent is shrinking by 12.2% per decade due to warmer temperatures.”
Arctic Sea Ice Minimum Extent | Vital Signs – Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet
“The Modesto Bee Wed, Dec 12, 2007 -Page 3
“The Arctic is screaming,” said Mark Serreze, senior scientist at the government’s snow and ice data center in Boulder, Colo.
Just last year, two top scientists surprised their colleagues by projecting that the Arctic sea ice was melting so rapidly that it could disappear by the summer of 2040,
A blip or an ominous sign?
This week, after reviewing his new data, NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally said: “At this rate, the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions.”
Dec 12, 2007, page 3 – The Modesto Bee at Newspapers.com
“We see a tipping point occurring right before our eyes,” Hansen told the AP before the luncheon, “I’he Arctic is the first tipping point and it’s occurring exactly the way we said it would.”
Hansen, echoing work by other scientists, said that in five to 10 years, the Arctic will be free of sea ice in the summer,
Longtime global warming skeptic Sen, James Inhofe, R-Okla , citing a recent poll, said in a statement, “Hansen, (former Vice President) Gore and the media have been trumpeting man-made climate doom since the 1980s, But Americans are not buying it.”
But Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., committee chairman, said, “Dr. Hansen was right, ‘Twenty years later, we recognize him as a climate prophet.”
June 24, 2008
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via Real Climate Science
June 4, 2024 at 09:22AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 