The trigger for this article was a news report that I read over breakfast. It was a hit of déjà vu alarmism regarding polar bears, who have been the poster bears for climate alarmists ever since Al Gore’s 2006 film, An Inconvenient Truth. (Inconveniently, High Court Judge Michael Burton in the UK ruled that the film contained nine scientific errors and thus must be accompanied by an explanation before being shown to school children.)

That latest news report inspired the notion of a PEA Club – the dreaded coalition of left-leaning Politicians, misguided Experts, and Activists – who have learnt nothing after years of being wrong and a clear danger to The People. The People are those of us sometimes mischaracterised as the silent majority. We who have raised objections to misguided and/or harmful policies, bad ideas, unsustainable beliefs, and comical predictions.

I couldn’t have imagined reading this in the middle of 2024 if I hadn’t actually done so:

‘Using models, researchers considered how future rises in global temperatures could hit ice thickness in Hudson Bay and in turn, the fate of its endangered polar bears.’

That’s a quote from a news report from the AFP on June 14, 2024. The words ‘using models’ and ‘future rises … could’ jumped out, triggering a stifled guffaw. Fool us once, shame on you… etc.

A ‘fact check’ by the same AFP claims a graph that shows polar bear populations rising over five decades used by statistical analyst Bjorn Lomborg (author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and False Alarm) ‘uses unreliable data’.

The critique insists that the message conveyed by the graph is ‘misleading’, and that experts say ‘human-driven climate change poses a threat to polar bears’.

However, Dr Susan Crockford begs to differ. It’s important to put her scholarship into context here. Dr Crockford is an evolutionary biologist and has been working for more than 40 years in archaeozoology, paleozoology, and forensic zoology. She is a former adjunct professor at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, and works full-time for a private consulting company she co-owns. She is the author of Rhythms of Life: Thyroid Hormone and the Origin of Species, Eaten: A Novel (a polar bear attack thriller), Polar Bear Facts and Myths (for ages seven and up, also available in French, German, Dutch, Portuguese, and Norwegian), Polar Bears Have Big Feet (for preschoolers), and the fully referenced How the Polar Bear Came to Be, Sir David Attenborough and the Walrus Deception, The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened, and Polar Bears: Outstanding Survivors of Climate Change, as well as a scientific paper on polar bear conservation status and a peer-reviewed paper on the distribution of ancient polar bear remains. She has authored several earlier briefing papers, reports, and videos for GWPF (Global Warming Policy Foundation), as well as opinion pieces for major news outlets, on polar bear and walrus ecology and conservation.

Dr Crockford counters those criticisms above, claiming that ‘some polar bear specialists are attempting to cast a smoke-screen over the relevant facts of the matter’. Polar bears are thriving, she reports.

Writing last year (2023), Crockford noted that summer sea ice has declined dramatically since 1979 and especially so in the Svalbard region of the Barents Sea over the last 20 years.

‘However, Svalbard polar bear health and abundance have not been negatively affected, which data from fieldwork and peer-reviewed scientific studies done by polar bear specialists show to be true.

‘Empirical evidence like this explains why computer models predicting a dire future for polar bears are worthless: … summer sea ice does not inevitably lead to a decline in polar bear numbers as these models assume.’ (emphasis added)

In June 1989 the UN Environment Program was saying: ‘Entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000.’

Articles ran that predicted in 2002 that there would be famine in 10 years.

Anti-science, anti-factual reporting, and phony forecasting continued the tradition of ignoring genuine evidence by not only activists but also by politicians. We have just survived (just being the operative word) the Covid years, where we saw that sort of thing in fervent action, as I first summarised in October 2021.

Predictive models about the rate of global warming have been repeatedly proven wrong – or fake – over the years.

Despite this observable fact, policy makers persist in relying on them, activists quote them.

Observed growth of Pacific Islands (by up to 8 per cent as reported in January 2021) continue to be contradicted by climate activists.

This mischaracterisation of information is like selective morality (which has reached epidemic proportions), picking out what suits and rejecting what is contrary to the ruling orthodoxy.

We The People are sick and tired of big-mouth, little-brain Pollies, Experts, and Activists of all stripes. Not to mention those useless climate models and fatuous government edicts that defy common sense and observable reality. You PEA brains!

Andrew L. Urban is the author of Climate Alarm Reality Check (Wilkinson Publishing).