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Chukchi Polar Bears Thriving As Arctic Ice Recedes | Heartlander Magazine

Evolutionary biologist and polar bear expert Susan J. Crockford, an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, confirmed polar bears are doing quite well with less Arctic sea ice.

“A longer ice-free period in summer has increased the number of ringed seals because summer is the primary feeding period for seals. This means more seal pups in the spring, which is the primary feeding period for polar bears,” Crockford explained. “Chukchi bears are not feeding longer in the spring; they are just eating more. Apparently, this was not what the researchers expected.

“Before climate change became the cause du jour, it was pretty clear that polar bears in the Canadian portion of the Beaufort suffer because of the thick ice that occasionally develops there in the spring,” Crockford noted. “It’s a phenomenon unique to the Eastern Beaufort. In other words, there is ample evidence that too much ice in the spring is much worse for polar bears than less ice in the summer.”

Bigger Than That: (The Difficulty of) Looking at Climate Change

Sometimes I wish media stories were organized in proportion to their impact. Unfortunately, when it comes to climate change, there is not paper enough on this planet to properly scale up a story to the right size. If you gave it the complete front page to suggest its import, you would then have to print the rest of the news at some sort of nanoscale and include an electron microscope for reading ease.

ICECAP - Snow season off to a roaring start

Some are trying to blame the snow and winter cold on the lack of arctic ice. Of course trying to blame the late winter and spring blizzards last year to the lack of ice that had returned by the previous October should raise a question in any truly objective mind.The early snows following the recovery to arctic ice and the coldest summer on record in the arctic according to DMI questions that theory. As you know we attribute the cold winters and increased hemispheric snows to the +AMO and negative PDO (with help from low solar and high latitude volcanos) in recent winters. The positive AMO favors a negative AO and NAO which delivers the cold and snow.