Narrative Fail: Polar bears vanish . . . from media as their population explodes

Posted by Leslie Eastman

A BBC crew was surprised to find themselves surrounded by a swarm of bears.

Once upon a time, stories of polar bears starving to death were regular features of environmental and science “reporting.” The fuzzy fur-balls of ferocity were the beloved icons for the crusade against global warming.

However, they have been seemingly absent from recent “climate change” discussions.  Could this be due to rapidly increasing number of polar bears, a fact which counters all the doom-and-gloom assertions made by supposed experts?

In a post last summer, I noted that there were indications that the population of Ursus maritimus was rapidly expanding.

The new population estimates from the 2016 Scientific Working Group are somewhere between 22,633 to 32,257 bears, which is a net increase from the 2015 number of 22,000 to 31,000. The current population numbers are a sharp increase from 2005’s, which stated only 20,000 to 25,000 bears remained — those numbers were a major increase from estimates that only 8,000 to 10,000 bears remained in the late 1960s.

A new book The Polar Bear Catastrophe that Never Happened by Dr. Susan Crockford uses the latest data and reviews the questionable values used in official estimates.  Crockford concludes that polar bears are actually thriving.

Anthony Watts of Watts Up with That highlighted the book, which projects that polar bear numbers have quadrupled, writing:

The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened explains why the catastrophic decline in polar bear numbers we were promised in 2007 failed to materialize. It’s the story of how and why the polar bear came to be considered ‘Threatened’ with extinction, and tracks its rise and fall as an icon of the global warming movement.

The book also tells the story of Crockford’s role in bringing that failure to public attention and the backlash against her that ensued – and why, among all others who have attempted to do so previously, she was uniquely positioned to do so. 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.

full story at https://legalinsurrection.com/2019/03/narrative-fail-polar-bears-vanish-from-media-as-their-population-explodes/