From Polar Bear Science
This morning, self-professed ‘climate campaigner’ Mike Hudema posted a short video of two polar bears seemingly struggling to survive as they repeatedly break through newly-formed ice, with the message “Polar bears are up against a huge problem. They are losing their habitat. As the Arctic becomes increasingly warm & sea ice disappears its harder to find a mate & food.”
This was clearly designed to elicit an emotional response from viewers but it’s every bit as manipulative and false as the video of the emaciated polar bear shamelessly promoted by National Geographic as ‘what climate change looks like’, which I describe in detail in my new book, Fallen Icon (Crockford 2022a).
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While there are implausible predictions that polar bears may in the future struggle to survive due to declining sea ice (e.g. Amstrup et al. 2007), polar bears are currently thriving (Crockford 2019, 2022b). One reason they are thriving is that a longer open-water season at the end of summer allows more phytoplankton growth, which means more food for the entire Arctic food chain, including polar bears (Crockford 2020).
In other words, contrary to predictions, areas where recent summer sea ice loss has been the greatest (especially the Barents Sea and Chukchi Sea), polar bears are doing better than expected, and better than they were when sea ice coverage was greater(Lippold et al. 2020; Rode et al. 2018).
Hudema is blatantly wrong as well as dishonest: scientific facts do not back up his assertions. Just more evidence that these climate activists will stop at nothing to promote their ludicrous agenda and groundless beliefs.