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There are too many polar bears in parts of Nunavut and climate change hasn't yet affected any of them, says a draft management plan from the territorial government that contradicts much of conventional scientific thinking. The proposed plan -- which is to go to public hearings in Iqaluit on Tuesday -- says that growing bear numbers are increasingly jeopardizing public safety and it's time Inuit knowledge drove management policy. "Inuit believe there are now so many bears that public safety has become a major concern," says the document, the result of four years of study and public consultation. "Public safety...

Susan Crockford is a polar bear expert with a message that climate alarmists don’t want to hear: polar bear populations are thriving and are certainly in no danger from thinning summer sea ice supposedly caused by ‘man-made global warming.’ That’s why the alarmist establishment is currently trying destroy her. First came a hatchet job in Bioscience, described by climate scientist Judith Curry as “absolutely the stupidest paper I have ever seen published.”

Zeb Cadzow and Paul Herbert are experienced hunters who live north of the Arctic Circle in Fort Yukon, Alaska. In late March of 2008, residents of Fort Yukon, Alaska become concerned because a bear was not exhibiting any fear of humans near their town. Peter John originally saw the bear eating lynx carcasses near a cabin on the edge of town. People did not believe the white bear was a polar bear. Polar bears had never been seen in the area. They thought it was an albino grizzly or a grizzly bear covered with frost. The hunters, who depend for...

A favorite technique of the propagandists of the Global Warming scare is to find cute and cuddly creatures that they can claim are “threatened” by global warming. For years, an iconic picture of a polar bear on an ice floe was used to frighten children into clutching their stuffed teddy bears and demanding Mommy and Daddy act to save them. But the bloom started coming off that rose when a scientist who had made population estimates that allowed the bears to be classified as threatened admitted that the estimates were: “A guess to satisfy public demand” but wrapped in...

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Some polar bears in the Arctic are shedding pounds during the time they should be beefing up, a new study shows. It’s the climate change diet and scientists say it’s not good.

Several years ago, we were warned that bears were starving due to global warming and would be irretrievably lost. I recall the first interview I did with Alaska's then-governor, Sarah Palin, about the polar bear situation in 2008, before she got famous. I asked her if the news reports were right that polar bears were starving. I only have a reference to the link, unfortunately, but I vividly recall her most memorable quote: "Our bears are healthy bears!" She added that maybe that could be the situation in Canada, but it certainly wasn't in Alaska. Now ABC News and NBC...

The apocalyptic religion of global warming/climate change stumbled upon the best animal mascot nag since Smokey the Bear when someone snapped a photo of a polar bear on an ice floe. Of course, polar bears are great swimmers, so the notion that a poor bear could be stranded on the last piece of ice remaining from the North Pole melt-off is absurd. But the religious frenzy of the Warmists holds such a myth as sacred, so the picture became its icon of compassion for cute furry objects of pity, the victims of the very carbon dioxide upon which its metabolism...

I call this fake news because it’s not news – media headlines around the world today (New York Times, Washington Post, DailyMail) are trumpeting the release of a final version of a draft report released with (similar fanfare) more than a year ago, announced today by the US Fish & Wildlife Service in the official US government publication, (Federal Register).(Without action on climate change, say goodbye to polar bears”) is exactly the kind of sensationalized nonsense I address in my new detailed science book, (Polar Bears: Outstanding Survivors of Climate Change) (announced (here) and discussed (here)

The Obama administration warned Monday that polar bears may disappear unless something is done about climate change, despite recent research indicating that the bears are actually thriving. In its final Conservation Management Plan, the Fish and Wildlife Service painted a grim picture for the future of the massive Arctic-dwelling mammal, warning that its fate will be determined “by our willingness and ability to address climate change.” “The current global polar bear population is estimated to be 26,000,” said the FWS press release. “If greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at the current rates throughout the 21st century, polar bears will...

When a young Inuit hunter took aim with his rifle he thought he had spotted a polar bear or an Arctic fox in northern Canada. But the photographs of his kill posted on social media by Didji Ishalook, 25, have sparked feverish interest among scientists and a fascinated public. "They're saying it's a grizzly-polar bear hybrid," he said. Mr Ishalook had actually shot a rare cross between the two species, who normally live in very different climates. Determining whether it is a grolar or a prizzly will have to wait for the results of DNA testing. But its existence adds...

BARROW, Alaska — Most Alaskans and Canadians have a bear story — tales of fearsome grizzlies, even polar bears. But a mix of the two? They’re known as pizzlies or grolars, and they’re a fusion of the Arctic white bear and their brown cousins. It’s a blend that’s been turning up more and more in parts of Alaska and Western Canada. Last week, a strange-looking bear was shot by a hunter in Nunavut, a remote territory that curves around Canada’s Hudson Bay. Its head was large, like a grizzly’s, but its fur was white. The bear’s genetics were not...

The Norwegian Polar Institute has carried out a counting of polar bears in Svalbard, financed by the Ministry of Climate and Environment. The results show that there are probably more polar bears than the last time the bears were counted in this area in 2004, in spite of the fact that there have been many years with poor ice cover during this period. "The Barens Sea Bears" migrate between Norwegian and Russian territory. Polar bears on the Russian side were included in the previous counting, but as the Russians did not take part this time, the results are uncertain. The...

You might think this would be great news for all those scientists who have been warning us over the last few years about the impending horrors of “man-made global warming” but in fact they are not happy about it, not one bit. Here for example is Dr Jay Zwally, the lead author of this week’s surprising Nasa study that confirms that the Antarctic is gaining far more ice than it is losing. “I know some of the climate deniers will jump on this and say this means we don’t have to worry as much as some people have been making...

For 15 years, Irish anthropologist Martina Tyrrell has studied the relationship between humans and animals in Arviat, an Inuit community on the west coast of Hudson Bay, where the townspeople are increasingly having to cope with a large and dangerous visitor - the polar bear. It's a Sunday afternoon in mid-October. I'm standing near the cemetery at the eastern end of Arviat, with a handful of other people. All eyes are fixed on the newly formed sea ice where a polar bear bellyflops into the sea, hauls itself back on to the broken ice, and bellyflops again. Inuit men...

Kaktovik residents and visiting biologists worked together to free a large polar bear that became entangled in a fishing net near a Beaufort Sea barrier island Saturday night. The “large male” polar bear got stuck in a net near the North Slope village of about 300 people Saturday evening, the U.S. Geological

Polar bears are at risk of dying off if humans don't reverse the trend of global warming, a blunt U.S. government report filed Thursday said. "The single most important step for polar bear conservation is decisive action to address Arctic warming," the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said in a draft recovery plan, part of the process after the agency listed the species as threatened in 2008. "Short of action that effectively addresses the primary cause of diminishing sea ice, it is unlikely that polar bears will be recovered." Halting Arctic warming will require a global commitment, said Jenifer Kohout,...

The rebounding of polar bear populations over the past several decades has been a huge success story. Far from being endangered, vulnerable, or threatened, polar bears are thriving; their populations have exploded in virtually all of their habitats of the circumpolar nations. That’s good news for the polar bears, but bad news for the Polar Bear Specialist Group, the highly politicized organization of wildlife “scientists” that receives massive funding and favorable media coverage for regularly claiming that hoary arctic predators are perilously close to extinction due to human-caused global warming.The Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG) is, perhaps, the best-known...

Despite dire predictions that the North Pole would be ice-free in the near future, Arctic Sea ice levels have been more stable than scientists predicted.  So far this winter, Arctic Sea ice levels are above where they were at the same time last winter and are well within the the standard deviation of the 1981 to 2010 variation, according to daily sea ice data.Europe’s CryoSat-2 satellite found that sea-ice volumes for the fall of 2014 were above the average extent for the last five years. Sea-ice levels were up sharply from 2011 and 2012, according to the satellite– only slightly...

THE North and South Poles are “not melting”, according to a leading global warming expert. In fact, the poles are “much more stable” than climate scientists once predicted and could even be much thicker than previously thought. For years, scientists have suggested that both poles are melting at an alarming rate because of warming temperatures – dangerously raising the Earth’s sea levels while threatening the homes of Arctic and Antarctic animals. But the uncertainty surrounding climate change and the polar ice caps reached a new level this month when research suggested the ice in the Antarctic is actually growing. And...

Are hybrids -- such as polar/grizzly bear offspring -- a bad thing? Conventional wisdom suggests that when an endangered species -- such as a polar bear -- mates with a close relative -- such as a grizzly, or brown, bear -- the resulting hybrid speeds the endangered party to the affair along the path to extinction more quickly. In fact, creatures like the one described -- called “pizzly” or “grolar” bears -- already exist. But perhaps hybridization isn’t as bad as biologists feared, a possibility the New York Times explores in a lengthy Sunday magazine piece titled “Should You Fear...