New evidence that polar bears survived 1,600 years of ice-free Holocene summers

Thank you for bringing this up!

Let me use this occasion for a quick review of her Wikipedia entry. I don't know anything about Crockford but her entry is the typical smear job written by some activist editor who is only concerned with presenting the subject in the worst possible light. This stuff and writing style has no place on a decent encyclopedia, and the persistence of these entries through the years is one of the reasons I'm fed up with Wikipedia.

Warning: irony ahead.

In the first line of the lede, Susan Crockford is introduced as "a Canadian contract scientist who runs a small business identifying bones and other items in scat of wildlife". (italics mine)

It's clear that the lady is just a contract scientist with a small business. We can picture her rummaging the scat of wildlife for "items", presumably keys or other small objects lost perhaps by serious scientists while doing their work.

In the "Early life and education" section, we're first told that she "gained her interest in the Arctic in elementary school" and that her scientific interest was stoked at age 11 when she received a dog for her birthday. It's sad how sometimes you don't live up to your childhood dreams and you end up rummaging in wildlife scat.

The education part then briefly informs us that she received a doctorate (of which no title is given, but that is specified to be in "Interdisciplinary Studies" despite being about evolutionary biology), and concludes reporting extensively on criticism of her work.

Then the "Career" section, divided in four small chapters, in this order: "Business", "Books", "Dogs" and finally "Polar Bears".

Then the article ends with a rather large "Criticism" section, which focuses entirely around the climate change issues. Almost all the references throughout the article are coming from a climate change blog or are related to climate controversies.

Re: "unsupported by the scientific literature"

Einstein received the same treatment before relativity was widely accepted.

In medicine the man who started the practice of cleaning hands before surgeries and childbirth, was essentially murdered for his preposterous practices:

"You'd think everyone would be thrilled. Semmelweis had solved the problem! But they weren't thrilled.

For one thing, doctors were upset because Semmelweis' hypothesis made it look like they were the ones giving childbed fever to the women.

...

The sad end to the story is that Semmelweis was probably beaten in the asylum and eventually died of sepsis". - https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/01/12/3756639...

And paraphrasing Dr. Willie Soon, from the recent Tucker Carlson interview - found here - Soon says it only 1 takes scientist to be right - so the "unsupported by scientific literature" should hold little weight as you presented it at some kind of proof point; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7IdLzxzINw

All you're doing here is citing, to make it appear legitimate, what essentially is high level ad hominem - as you're not going into any specifics to argue a point, and where I doubt your sources even attempt to counter argue all of the relevant arguments that Soon put forward. You're just parroting propaganda talking points, literally copy/pasting them from a known corrupted-manipulated source:

"In a February 2021 interview with Fox News, Sanger stated that Wikipedia's 'ideological and religious bias is real and troubling, particularly in a resource that continues to be treated by many as an unbiased reference work'." - Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia.

TFA's author has a book about that exact topic: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1778038328

> The book includes a detailed account of brown bear and polar bear fossil evidence, recent hybridization events between brown bears and polar bears, and summaries of more than a dozen genetic studies that have been done on these bears.

(It's on my bookshelf but I haven't had a chance to read it yet)

I dunno, haven’t most populations sometimes gone through boom-bust cycles on the order of a few years/decades? It feels a little absurd to consider only a single ecological factor.

"the annually-banded Greenland ice-core that the annual-mean temperature increased by as much as 10°C in 10 years."

https://ocp.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/arch/examples.shtm...

..It's happened before. Didn't look like a pleasant experience but it's not something that's unheard of in recent history (rapid climate change). During these events ancient humans fought tooth and nail against each other. Doesn't bode well now that we're (Humans) armed with Nuclear Weapons.

Actual warming in the past 20 years has been at a trivial speed, bordering on undetectable unless you use very well sited stations and very accurately calibrated instruments: barely a fraction of a degree per decade. You can't even see a trend with the naked eye, you have to work it out by computer:

https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/national-tempera...

(select one month/all months for hi-res data).

Note that data before 2005 (and after it outside the USA) comes from heavily corrupted sites that were never meant for climatologists and which have experienced a lot of urban development and building-related warming. The post-2005 US CRN data comes from weather stations meant specifically for monitoring the climate. And after that new weather station comes online US warming turns out to be way slower than predicted, and not alarming.

> I also think focusing solely on polar bears is bit of misguided when we're talking about the effects of climate change. They are one species and deciding whether or not things are bad given the outcome of that one species is misguided.

There are very few species that have been seriously claimed to be endangered by climate change, polar bears are by far the most often presented to the public. It's right and proper that false predictions about one species informs people's expectations about predictions for others, especially as it's not the only failure. Corals have stopped being referred to as being killed off by climate change after the Great Barrier Reef made a sudden and unexpectedly huge recovery after its last bleaching, reaching record levels and completely confounding the "experts" who had data stretching back only a few decades.

I'm not a regular but I might become one. I hope topic based websites run by enthusiasts make a big comeback.

I came for the article, I stayed for the domain name.

It may be named like that purely for SEO reasons as the author seems to be a human caused climate change denier and promoting her book. A cute name though, I agree.

Could it be that they lived on fish? From inside the water, to a fish, a polar bear could be just a cloud. Waterfalls and currents are pretty bright as well.

Wild guess here, I know nothing about these things.