Polar Bears Piercing Thin Ice Is Not Evidence of Climate Change, But Drone Chases – Floating With That?

By Polar Bear Science

Susan Crockford

This morning, self-proclaimed ‘climate campaigner’ Mike Hudema posted a short video of two polar bears seemingly struggling to survive as they repeatedly pierce the newly formed ice, with the message “Polar bears are fighting a big problem. They are losing their habitat. As the Arctic gets warmer and sea ice disappears, finding a mate and food is getting harder and harder.“

This is clearly designed to elicit an emotional response from the viewer but it is a bit manipulative and wrong like the video of a dilapidated polar bear shamelessly advertised by National Geography like ‘what climate change looks like’, which I detail in my new book, Fallen icon (Crockford 2022a).

The truth is that these bears didn’t struggle to survive: they were chasing a drone. Original video (2:55m long) posted by ‘LADBible’ on January 18, 2020, it took me all 30 seconds to locate through Internet search. The title of the original video is Polar Bears Chase Drone Camera Through Ice (2: 55m) and describes it as: “When these polar bears spotted a drone tracking them, they decided to go after the ice.”

Hudema cut the video short down to 25 seconds for his tweet. He was intentionally dishonest by posting this video with his message: the whole thing is fake.

While there Unbelievable prediction that polar bears can Future struggle to survive due to reduced sea ice (e.g. Amstrup et al 2007), polar bears currently thriving (Crockford 2019, 2022b). One reason they thrive is longer floating season late summer allows more phytoplankton to grow, which means more food for the entire Arctic food chain, including polar bears (Crockford 2020).

In other words, contrary to expectations, the areas where recent summer sea ice loss was greatest (especially the Barents Sea and the Chukchi Sea), polar bears are doing better than expected, and better than them when the sea ice cover is larger (Lippold et al. 2020; Rode et al. 2018).

Hudema was blatantly wrong as well as dishonest: scientific facts did not support his claims. There is only more evidence that these climate activists will stop at nothing to promote their ridiculous agenda and baseless beliefs.

Postscript. Here is a similar video (from December 2019) of Russia Polar bear cubs playing on thin iceas they learn to deal with an ever-present aspect of their environment: