Free Republic

Dr. Susan Crockford is one of the world’s leading experts on polar bears. As such, she has repeatedly reported the inconvenient fact that polar bears are thriving, with their populations burgeoning. Why is this fact inconvenient? Because climate change activists have chosen polar bears–considered to be cute by people who don’t have to deal with them–as a propaganda tool. We have quoted Dr. Crockford’s work a number of times: here, here, here, on walruses, here, and more. Crockford has written a book called The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened. To my knowledge, no competent scientist has taken issue with...

Nobody has done more to sink the claim that climate change is endangering polar bears than zoologist Susan Crockford — and she may have paid for it with her job. After 15 years as an adjunct assistant professor, Ms. Crockford said the University of Victoria refused without explanation in May to renew her contract, despite her high profile as a speaker and author stemming from her widely cited research on polar bears and dog domestication. Ms. Crockford accused officials at the Canadian university of bowing to “outside pressure,” the result of her research showing that polar bear populations are stable...

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.”

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...

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)

A very well-preserved 33,000 year old canine skull from a cave in the Siberian Altai mountains shows some of the earliest evidence of dog domestication ever found. But the specimen raises doubts about early man's loyalty to his new best friend as times got tough. The findings come from a Russian-led international team of archaeologists. The skull, from shortly before the peak of the last ice age, is unlike those of modern dogs or wolves. The study is published in the open access journal Plos One. Although the snout is similar in size to early, fully domesticated Greenland dogs from...