Polar bear habitat update: ice forming along Hudson Bay, Wrangel & Franz Josef Islands surrounded
Posted on November 10, 2022 | Comments Offon Polar bear habitat update: ice forming along Hudson Bay, Wrangel & Franz Josef Islands surrounded
Western Hudson Bay polar bears near Churchill will be able to leave shore within days, at most one week later than in the 1980s, although you wouldn’t know that from the climate change activists at Polar Bears International who have spent the last week promoting some egregiously false and misleading statements. PBI controls the narrative surrounding Western Hudson Bay bears through their partnership with the biggest polar bear tourist outfits in Churchill and online.
Yesterday, it was “See how the climate crisis is changing their world”.
Developing no slower than it did in 2007 (16 years of no change), Arctic sea ice is providing polar bears in southern regions with their second-most critical feeding opportunities while in areas like Wrangel Island and Franz Josef Land, they now have easy access to and from important summer refuge/maternity denning islands. And contrary to predictions of increased ‘conflict’ between polar bears and people around Churchill, there have been fewer problem bear reports there in recent years, this year included. In other words, there is no ‘climate crisis’ for polar bears, even in Western Hudson Bay, and recent models of a dire future for polar bears are based on totally implausible worst-case climate scenarios. Sea ice loss since 1979 has been so gradual that polar bears have been able to adapt, either through natural selection or changes in behaviour.
Arctic Sea Ice Conditions
From the NSIDC, October summary shows no declining trend in sea ice coverage since 2007, despite repeated claims by some activists that sea ice conditions have been continuously deteriorating:
What the ice charts show
Close-up images take from the chart above for 9 November 2022 (overall ice coverage 9.5mk2)
Western Hudson Bay
Freeze-up this year has been a bit slower than 2020, which was as early as the earliest freeze-ups in the 1980s, but not by much. In the 1980s, most bears left for the ice at freeze-up (10% sea ice coverage) about 16 November ± 5 days (Castro de la Guardia 2017, see graph below). The earliest the bears left the ice was in 1991 and 1993, on 6 November (Julian day 310)–in 2020, most bears were gone by 8 November, one of the earliest dates on record.
https://polarbearscience.com/
