Are polar bears dying out (John Eidson) USofA

Information Worth Sharing John Eidson | April 11, 2019

The Chloe girl schools the Climate Kids about global warming Lesson 1: Are polar bears dying out?

Hi, Climate Kids. The Chloe girl here. I’m Mr. Eidson’s rescue dog.

You know, we pets care about the planet too. Here’s some stuff I learned about these big white bears that live in the Arctic. They’re called polar bears.

I got worried when I heard that global warming is killing them off, so I decided to do some checking.

Last month, I contacted Dr. Mitchell Taylor.

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Dr. Taylor is a polar bear biologist at Lakehead University in Canada. He’s studied polar bears for more than three decades and has published on the high side of 50 scientific papers.

Not only that, he’s worked in the field studying most of the world’s 19 polar bear subpopulations.

The picture above shows him taking a blood sample from a BIG tranquilized bear. Brave man! A bit crazy, but brave.

I’d say Dr. Taylor is as close as it gets to being an expert on polar bears. Here’s what he told me.

He said there are more polar bears in Canada today than 30 years ago. He said that of the 13 polar bear subpopulations in Canada, 11 are stable, one is increasing and only one is in decline.

In his expert opinion, polar bears are not being wiped out by climate change or anything else. His research shows they’re flourishing!

Dr. Taylor is not the only polar bear scientist who feels that way. Ditto Dr. Susan Crockford.

Dr. Crockford is an evolutionary biologist at the University of Victoria in Canada. With 35 years experience, I’d say she’s a certified expert on the evolution of polar bears.

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I contacted her last week and here’s what she told me.

She says that in the 1960s there were an estimated 10,000 polar bears in the world. I found out from doing some poking around on the web that by 2015, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service estimated the number had risen to as high as 31,000.

To help celebrate International Polar Bear Day, Dr. Crockford recently wrote a paper reporting that polar bear numbers have continued to steadily rise, with 2018 data estimating there are more polar bears today than when they were first protected by an international treaty in 1973.

Arithmetic is not the Chloe girl’s strong suit, but it doesn’t look like polar bears are dying off.

Dr. Crockford also told me that polar bears are resourceful creatures that have survived many periods in Earth’s past where the warming was much greater than the warming we’ve had since the Industrial Revolution.

I didn’t know that. Did you?

If you want to not worry as much about the fate of polar bears, you might want to read her new book, The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened.

Because their good faith scientific opinions upset the people who try to scare kids by saying that polar bears are being killed off by global warming, Dr. Crockford and Dr. Taylor are demonized as “climate deniers.” That’s not a very nice thing to say, and it’s not true.

They’re not denying that climate change is real—the climate is always changing. Always has, always will. What they dispute is that polar bears are dying out. The best available population estimates support their view.

Anyway, that’s today’s global warming report from the Chloe girl. Stay tuned, Climate Kids. More to come!

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