A Canadian university has frozen a zoologist out of her adjunct professor post as punishment for saying the unsayable about polar bears: arguing that populations are thriving, arguing that they are not endangered, and arguing that stories about how they are being caused to starve by melting summer sea ice are junk science #FakeNews.
Dr Susan Crockford is one of the world’s leading experts on polar bears and had held her post as Adjunct Professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada for 15 years.
But by speaking an alternative perspective about polar bears she fell foul of environmental activists who have long treated Ursus maritimus as one of the poster children for their “the Earth is doomed and it’s all our fault” narrative. As a result, without explanation, Crockford was ousted from her position at the university.
In an interview with Crockford this week for Breitbart News, I ask: ‘Do you think you’ve been blacklisted for telling inconvenient truths?’
She replies:
“Oh I absolutely do.”
Crockford’s “crime” was to critique environmentalists’ computer projections that polar bear populations would decrease over the past decade due to “global warming.”
“What happened was that in 2007 there was a prediction that when sea ice declined to about 42 per cent below what it would have been in 1979 that two-thirds of the polar bears in the world would be gone. That would be 10 out of the 19 sub populations that exist.
But what has happened, we find from research, is that bear numbers have not gone down but in fact have gone up by at least 16 per cent and probably more. So the bears are thriving despite the fact that sea ice has declined dramatically.”
The “polar bears starving because of melting sea ice” story has been a staple of the green scare narrative.
In 2017, for example, footage of an emaciated polar bear rummaging pitifully through trash cans became a huge international story.
The video for National Geographic attracted over two million views. It was set to tear-jerking music and accompanied by the utterly dishonest and misleading message “This is what climate change looks like.”
In fact, as Crockford declares, this was the purest green #FakeNews.
“Starving is the leading natural cause of death for polar bears. It just happens.”
If the polar bear was starving to death, she says, it was likely the result of its being old or sick — not because of melting summer sea ice.
Crockford says:
“Polar bears do most of their feeding in the spring time, not the summer. Starving polar bears don’t tell us anything about populations.”
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to more clearly attribute scientific claims from Dr. Crockford, which Breitbart News has not independently verified, as her own and not as established fact. In addition, the headline of this article has been changed to reflect it is an opinion column from James Delingpole.
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