Did the Climate Change Alarmists Ever Ask a Polar Bear? By James Reed

It is a long time ago, showing how time flies, but I recall when big Al Gore was big on the climate change trail, that images of polar bears getting stranded on melting chunks of ice and drowning at sea were being pushed. It struck me as totally absurd, yet no biologist called the climate change hysterics out on this. Polar bears are good swimmers and smart, and do not go so far from shore that they would end up on a melting chunk of ice, even if the ice was melting, which it was not. It is absurd, and most likely the photos were staged, or just a fluke shot where the bear did sit on a piece of ice, to take a break while contemplating whatever polar bears contemplate. Fishing?

Journalist Zac Unger was concentred about the plight of the polar bears and journeyed toChurchill, Manitoba, on the Hudson Bay in northern Canada, the polar bear capital, to document the alleged death of the polar bear. But what he found was an entirely different story from the one pushed by the environmentalists.

There is an interesting extract below of how people live with polar bears who often come into town. Most places and cars are unlocked just in case the bears attack, so people can jump into them. And there is even a polar bear jail, where bears who keep coming into town get locked up, with only ice to eat, and then after a while released back into the wild, hungry so that they hunt prey. But most of all it was found that the polar bears are doing fine, and more are alive today than 40 years ago.

Yet another climate change myth gets laid to rest, but here are plenty more where that came from!

https://www.npr.org/2013/02/02/170779528/the-inconvenient-truth-about-polar-bears

"In 2008, reports of polar bears' inevitable march toward extinction gripped headlines. Stories of thinning Arctic ice and even polar bear cannibalism combined to make these predators into a powerful symbol in the debate about climate change.

The headlines caught Zac Unger's attention, and he decided to write a book about the bears.

Unger made a plan to move to Churchill, Manitoba, a flat, gray place on the Hudson Bay in northern Canada accessible only by train or plane. For a few months out of the year, as the bay starts to freeze, tiny Churchill boasts as many polar bears as it does people.

Unger packed up his wife and three small kids, and set out with a big bold idea. He wanted to write the quintessential requiem of how human-caused climate change was killing off these magnificent beasts.

In the end, he came away with something totally different, Unger tells NPR's Laura Sullivan.

Interview Highlights

On wanting to write the next great environmental tract

"My humble plan was to become a hero of the environmental movement. I was going to go up to the Canadian Arctic, I was going to write this mournful elegy for the polar bears, at which point I'd be hailed as the next coming of John Muir and borne aloft on the shoulders of my environmental compatriots ...

"So when I got up there, I started realizing polar bears were not in as bad a shape as the conventional wisdom had led me to believe, which was actually very heartening, but didn't fit well with the book I'd been planning to write.

"... There are far more polar bears alive today than there were 40 years ago. ... In 1973, there was a global hunting ban. So once hunting was dramatically reduced, the population exploded. This is not to say that global warming is not real or is not a problem for the polar bears. But polar bear populations are large, and the truth is that we can't look at it as a monolithic population that is all going one way or another."

On moving his family to "Polar Bear Capital of the World"

"We were in this town in northern Manitoba where polar bears literally will walk down Main Street. There are polar bears in this town. People will leave their cars and houses unlocked, and it's perfectly good form just to duck into any open door you can find when there's a polar bear chasing you.

"People use what they call Churchill welcome mats, which is a piece of plywood laid down in front of the door or leaned up against the door with hundreds of nails sticking out so that when the polar bear comes up to pad across your porch, he's going to get a paw full of sharp nails."

On Churchill's strategies for living among bears

"There are definitely polar bears that come into town; there are definitely polar bears that will eat people's dogs. But Churchill has developed an innovative polar bear alert program. The way it works is you dial a phone number — 675-BEAR — if you see a bear, and a bunch of wildlife conservation officers will come by in a truck with a bunch of guns. And they try really hard not to harm the bears, and they kind of scare the bears out of town. They have a progression that they use: First, they will fire firecracker shells; then they move up to rubber bullets; and as a last resort, they'll move up to real bullets.

"They don't want to do that. These are conservation officers so their job is to keep bears safe. Churchill also has a polar bear jail. These are for bears who keep coming into town and can't be hazed out of town. And what they'll do is they will trap these bears and put them in the polar bear jail, which is just a great big decommissioned military building. And they will give them no food, and they're given only snow to drink and then they wait until the bay freezes up. And when the bay freezes up, these bears can be released to go back out on the ice.

"[The bears] don't want to be in town, they're just waiting for the ice to freeze. But if they're a hassle in town, put them in jail, give them a short sentence, and the problem is solved."

On trick-or-treating when polar bears might be lurking around the corner

"Halloween is when you're supposed to go up with lots of food and run around with your kids. So we were up there for Halloween ... and so what they do is when you go out trick-or-treating you go out with somebody who has a gun — whether it's a police officer, or a volunteer or someone from the military. They all come out and they help you go trick-or-treating. Now, they have one rule, which is that kids can't dress in anything white — no princesses, no ghosts — because you don't want to be dressed as something white in the darkness when there's a bunch of guys with guns looking for polar bears."