Polar bear numbers in Canada have increased in 11 of 13 regions in recent years.
Another report shows that polar bear encounters on the North Slope oil fields have risen to record levels the last two years. The global warming religionists blame the increase in polar bear sightings on shrinking ice flows. So, now the alarmists are blaming manmade global warming on both increased and decreased polar bear populations.
There are 5 times as many polar bears today as there were 50 years ago:
and meanwhile, back at the ranch…
“Canada’s top authority on polar bears is barred from ….
……an international meeting on polar bears, of course!
Dr Mitchell Taylor has been researching the status and management of polar bears in Canada and around the Arctic Circle for 30 years, as both an academic and a government employee. More than once since 2006 he has made headlines by insisting that polar bear numbers, far from decreasing, are much higher than they were 30 years ago. Of the 19 different bear populations, almost all are increasing or at optimum levels, only two have for local reasons modestly declined.
Dr Taylor agrees that the Arctic has been warming over the last 30 years. But he ascribes this not to rising levels of CO2 – as is dictated by the computer models of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and believed by his PBSG colleagues – but to currents bringing warm water into the Arctic from the Pacific and the effect of winds blowing in from the Bering Sea.
He has also observed, however, how the melting of Arctic ice, supposedly threatening the survival of the bears, has rocketed to the top of the warmists’ agenda as their most iconic single cause. The famous photograph of two bears standing forlornly on a melting iceberg was produced thousands of times by Al Gore, the WWF and others as an emblem of how the bears faced extinction – until last year the photographer, Amanda Byrd, revealed that the bears, just off the Alaska coast, were in no danger. Her picture had nothing to do with global warming and was only taken because the wind-sculpted ice they were standing on made such a striking image.
Dr Taylor had obtained funding to attend this week’s meeting of the PBSG, but this was voted down by its members because of his views on global warming. The chairman, Dr Andy Derocher, a former university pupil of Dr Taylor’s, frankly explained in an email (which I was not sent by Dr Taylor) that his rejection had nothing to do with his undoubted expertise on polar bears: “it was the position you’ve taken on global warming that brought opposition”.
Dr Taylor was told that his views running “counter to human-induced climate change are extremely unhelpful”.
By the way, the average temperature in the arctic this year is still below zero, “the latest date that this has happened in 50 years of record-keeping”.
I’ve been to Churchill Man. You don’t have to get on a bus to go see them. Just hang out downtown, and sooner or later you’ll see one walking down mainstreet such as it is.
ps That’s the coldest damned place I’ve ever been.