By the Right-Wing Teen
Have you ever heard of archaeozoology, paleozoology, or forensic zoology? Don’t feel bad. Not many people have. They’re niche specialties among biologists. But these scientific disciplines are crucial to understanding one of the world’s most iconic species: polar bears (Ursus maritimus).
To natives of the Arctic region, polar bears are ferocious creatures that they hunt for food and furs; the animal has been critical to human survival for thousands of years.
To children around much of the rest of the world, polar bears are fluffy white cuddly critters with which one snuggles down for a nap.
To environmental scientists, activists, and politicians, the polar bear is like the canary in the coal mine—a key species threatened with extinction by catastrophic global warming.
For decades, this last group has predicted the devastating loss of the polar bear population, driven by the disappearance of Arctic sea ice, the habitat from which, during the summer, the bears hunt the seals on which they fatten themselves to survive their long winter hibernation.
However, Canadian zoologist Dr. Susan Crockford—a veteran scientist who has focused decades of work on polar bear ecology—reveals in her new book The Polar Bear Catastrophe that Never Happened, the predictions have turned out to be not just exaggerated but wildly and even laughably wrong.
Crockford has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology, and has worked for 35+ years in the fields of archaeozoology, paleozoology, and forensic zoology. She is an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria, British Columbia; she co-owns a private consulting company, Pacific Identifications; and also writes a blog called PolarBearScience. Crockford takes an interdisciplinary approach to zoology and has a special interest in the interactions between polar bears and humans.
Environmentalists apparently chose the polar bear as a poster child for global warming because the bears are considered cute, although no one who had a close encounter with a polar bear would describe it that way.
Why exactly global warming would be harmful to polar bears was never persuasively explained, given that the bears had already survived many previous climatic changes over the millennia. In any event, today there’s no need to be alarmed.
In The Polar Bear Catastrophe that Never Happened, published in March 2019, Dr. Crockford uses the latest data while revisiting some of the absurd values used in official estimates, and concludes that after almost 50 years of protection from overhunting, polar bears are not just surviving but thriving.
Polar bear numbers could easily exceed 40,000, up from a low point of 10,000 or fewer in the 1960s. Far from the 2007 predictions of a 67% decline in global polar bear numbers, Dr. Crockford’s research reveals that their numbers have risen to the highest levels in decades. She states, “My extrapolated estimate of 39,000 (range 26,000-58,000) at 2018 is not only plausible but scientifically defensible.”
Dr. Crockford further explains, “My scientific estimates make perfect sense and they tally with what the Inuit and other Arctic residents are seeing on the ground. Almost everywhere polar bears come into contact with people, they are much more common than they used to be. It’s a wonderful conservation success story.”
However, it seems that success stories are the last things environmental activists want to hear when it comes to climate change. Dr. Crockford describes in her book how, despite the good news, other scientists have consistently tried to low-ball polar bear population growth figures.
“In general, this is a cautionary tale of scientific hubris and of scientific failure, of researchers staking their careers on untested computer simulations and later obfuscating inconvenient facts…. There is also a blunt account of what truly abundant populations of bears mean for the millions of people who live and work in areas of the Arctic inhabited by polar bears.”
There are many reputable zoologists conducting valuable research to save animals from extinction, and they should be supported. But any scientists who manipulate data to further an agenda really should be ashamed of themselves.
Read this book, and then share it with others. Lend it to a college student, or a public school teacher, or a teacher in your local Christian school. You can buy the book at Amazon.
10/22/19 UPDATE: “Nobody has done more to sink the claim that climate change is endangering polar bears than zoologist Susan Crockford — and she may have paid for it with her job. After 15 years as an adjunct assistant professor, Ms. Crockford said the University of Victoria rejected without explanation in May her renewal application, despite her high profile as a speaker and author stemming from her widely cited research on polar bears… Ms. Crockford accused officials at the Canadian university of bowing to “outside pressure,” the result of her research showing that polar bear populations are stable and even thriving, not plummeting as a result of shrinking Arctic sea ice, defying claims of the climate change movement. Her dismissal, which she announced Wednesday in a post on her Polar Bear Science blog, has spurred alarm over the implications for academic freedom.” Source: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/oct/20/susan-crockford-fired-after-finding-polar-bears-th