In my State of the Polar Bear 2023 report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, I discuss recent news relevant to polar bear conservation and science issues. The most startling of these is the revelation that Western Hudson Bay polar bear numbers have not declined since 2004.
50 years after hunting ban polar bears are thriving, new report shows
London, 27 February: 2023 marked 50 years of international cooperation to protect polar bears across the Arctic. Those efforts have been a conservation success story: from a population estimated at about 12,000 bears in the late 1960s, numbers have almost tripled, to just over 32,000 in 2023.
Despite this dramatic increase in polar bear populations, claims that their numbers are falling due to climate change still dominate most media coverage.
Since 2004 we have been told that polar bear numbers in Western Hudson Bay have been steadily declining, but a new study made public in 2023 reveals that this isn’t actually true. In the State of the Polar Bear Report 2023, published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) on International Polar Bear Day, zoologist Dr. Susan Crockford provides the details on this explosive news.
Among other issues addressed in this year’s report, Crockford explains that population surveys of Western Hudson Bay polar bears completed in 2011, 2016, and 2021 generated lower estimates than a survey done in 2004. However, these differences in bear counts are not statistically significant from each other, which means there has been no negative trend during the last 20 years.
Crockford said the consequences of this survey are enormous.
“It means there has been no statistically significant trend in Western Hudson Bay polar bear numbers since at least 2004. This result absolutely guts computer model predictions of future polar bear catastrophe that assume Western Hudson Bay numbers have been steadily declining.”
She also said the Western Hudson Bay survey raised questions about previously-unknown movements of hundreds of bears across subpopulation boundaries in Hudson Bay.
“There is now fairly strong evidence that the subpopulation boundaries in Hudson Bay need to be adjusted and have their previous population estimates recalculated. A similar issue is acknowledged in Alaska, where for decades fairly large numbers of Southern Beaufort polar bears have moved back and forth over the current boundary between the Chukchi Sea to the west and the Northern Beaufort Sea to the east. This means that if you count Southern Beaufort bears in one area at one point in time, it may look like a population decline has taken place when it actually hasn’t.”
Crockford added, “Western Hudson Bay and the Southern Beaufort are the only polar bear subpopulations which appeared to show strong support for the premise that sea ice declines blamed on human-caused global warming have reduced bear abundance. Now we know previous claims are almost certainly incorrect.”
PERCEPTION RESET 