By Paul Homewood
The BBC has been running its annual “Polar Bears Are All Going To Die” propaganda again:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yg344zz1ro
Having been forced to apologise for lying that overall polar bear populations have been declining, the BBC have now turned their attention to the West Hudson Bay area around Churchill.
According to a so-called polar bear expert, Alysa McCall, who is ferrying the BBC team around, half of the bears in the region have disappeared since 1980, due (you guessed it) to global warming.
Unfortunately Alysa is not a reliable source of information, because she works for Polar Bear International, (PBI), a lobbyist organisation. Their own website says they are a “conservation organisation”, and they are constantly appealing for donations, and publicity stunts like this one are crucial for their funding.
And her claims have claims have been demolished by the polar bear expert, Dr Susan Crockford. In her peer reviewed State of the Polar Bear Report 2023, she inconveniently pointed out that there has been no statistically significant change in West Hudson Bay bear numbers since 2004.
The issue, she pointed out, is that there has never been any consistent approach to counting bears in any of the surveys beginning in 1987. There have been aerial surveys, and very limited catch and release ones. Consequently the margin of error is huge, and the amount of guesswork is enormous.
One of the major problems is that most surveys have centred on the Churchill area – ( C ) on the map below.
Little is known about the areas further to the north – B and A. Yet, as Crockford shows, it is known that polar bears frequently migrate to find the best conditions. If sea ice conditions are not suitable in Churchill, bears would likely simply head further north, thus returning to the ice earlier in autumn.
None of the surveys made have attempted to take this migration into account.
As Crockford summarises:
“Journalists go to Churchill and PBI provides the talking points. It’s all just PBI propaganda, it’s what they do every fall to generate donations and the BBC go along”