"Crock"ford is a blogger. What do the actual polar bear scientist think ? Trend forming perhaps ?
Crockford blogs about polar bears.She has not published peer-reviewed papers on polar bears and as noted in Harvey et al. (2018) "Notably, as of this writing, Crockford has neither conducted any original research nor published any articles in the peer-reviewed literature on the effects of sea ice on the population dynamics of polar bears. However, she has published notes and “briefings through a conservative think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation."[10] Crockford is a source of disagreement with the published literature by polar bear scientists, notably Steven Amstrup and Ian Stirling, regarding polar bears' current status and level of endangerment. Crockford suggests that the decline in the polar bear population was in fact caused by unusually thick spring ice that year, a recurring trend every decade for the past century, which led to a shortage of their preferred prey, ringed seals.[11][clarification needed] Either the subsequent seal shortage or declining ice levels was the cause of an approximately 40% decrease in polar bear numbers in the Beaufort Sea area.[12] She charges that this study, which only used data up to 2010, despite being available until 2013, used cherry picked results due to an undisclosed conflict of interest to cause the species to be categorized as "Threatened" in the International Union for Conservation of Nature's2015 Red List. A response to her op-ed was written by Amstrup and Andrew Derocher, to which she replied on her blog.[13][14]
