Action4Canada - July 15, 2022


Tom Harris： Polar Bears are Not Going Extinct

Hosted by
Tanya Gaw
Mentioned
Susan Crockford Bob Carter
Climate Change Fraud： Money, Corruption, and Control & Live Q&A Rocco Galati Defending Ontario Doctors Against CPSO Heavy-Handedness

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

158.28

Word count

416

Sentence count

26


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Polar bear expert Susan Crockford explains why polar bears are not dying out, and why we should not be worried about it. In this episode of the podcast, we talk to polar bear expert and author Susan Crickford about the science behind her new book, "The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened."

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 A lot of people, you know, a lot of the hysteria has been around, you know, that the ice is melting and the polar bears have nowhere to go.
00:00:09.160 What's your comment on that?
00:00:10.840 Well, first of all, if, you know, it's funny, Bob Carter, who used to be our chief scientist, he's just passed away a little while ago,
00:00:17.480 he used to show a slide of polar bears on the ice.
00:00:20.820 And he said, you know, this must be virtual reality.
00:00:23.500 It can't be real polar bears.
00:00:25.200 Because if polar bears were as fragile as people think, then they would have gone extinct.
00:00:30.220 And he then shows the temperature graph in times in the past when the Arctic truly was ice free many times in the past.
00:00:36.860 I mean, polar bears have been around for something like 70,000 years.
00:00:39.980 And in that time frame, there were periods where the ice in the Arctic was pretty well gone.
00:00:45.080 And he says, well, they must have gone extinct.
00:00:47.200 You know, so there are no polar bears alive today.
00:00:49.580 And, of course, Susan Crockford, who's somebody you might want to interview from the University of Victoria,
00:00:53.720 she's a polar bear expert.
00:00:55.820 She wrote a book called The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened.
00:01:00.400 And right now we have something like 25,000 to 30,000 polar bears in contrast to the 1960s when we had about 5,000.
00:01:08.240 So the reduction in sea ice is certainly not hurting them at all.
00:01:12.440 In fact, what hurts polar bears are two things.
00:01:14.880 One, we conquered, and that was excess hunting.
00:01:18.040 That's the main reason why the polar bear populations have recovered,
00:01:21.180 because we've cut down on the excess hunting.
00:01:24.000 But the other thing that hurts polar bears is when it's too cold,
00:01:26.920 because the ice is too thick and the seals don't break through.
00:01:29.760 They go somewhere else.
00:01:31.180 And so their food source disappears.
00:01:33.400 But, you know, polar bears are a very, very robust animal.
00:01:37.200 You know, when they were considering declaring them an endangered species in Washington, D.C.,
00:01:42.220 quite a number of the Inuit went down,
00:01:44.280 and they actually said, there's too many polar bears.
00:01:47.380 You know, don't declare them the only endangered species is Inuit children,
00:01:52.200 because polar bears are so many of them.
00:01:54.440 They wander into the town,
00:01:55.660 and they've actually been issuing a lot more hunting licenses,
00:01:58.600 or sorry, rifles, actually, to people just to protect them from all the polar bears.
00:02:17.380 So let's find ways to speak.