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You cannot spoil a baby. They cry when they have a need. Babies who are put in the position of having their cries unmet will stop crying but at cost. Babies learn to trust from the time they are quite young.Psychology Today/.../dangers-crying-it-outLetting babies "cry it out" is an idea that has been around since at least the 1880s when the field of medicine was in a hullaballoo about germs and transmitting infection and so took to the notion that babies should rarely be touched (see Blum, 2002, for a great review of this time period and attitudes towards childrearing).In the 20th century, behaviorist John Watson (1928), interested in making psychology a hard science, took up the crusade against affection as president of the American Psychological Association. He applied the mechanistic paradigm of behaviorism to child rearing, warning about the dangers of too much mother love. The 20th century was the time when "men of science" were assumed to know better than mothers, grandmothers and families about how to raise a child. Too much kindness to a baby would result in a whiney, dependent, failed human being. Funny how "the experts" got away with this with no evidence to back it up! Instead, there is evidence all around (then and now) showing the opposite to be true!A government pamphlet from the time recommended that "mothering meant holding the baby quietly, in tranquility-inducing positions" and that "the mother should stop immediately if her arms feel tired" because "the baby is never to inconvenience the adult." A baby older than six months "should be taught to sit silently in the crib; otherwise, he might need to be constantly watched and entertained by the mother, a serious waste of time." (See Blum, 2002.)Don't these attitudes sound familiar? A parent reported to me recently that he was encouraged to let his baby cry herself to sleep so he "could get his life back."[Note: In other posts on infant sleep, my co-authors and I point out flaws in studies of sleep training. Here is another example. Check out this article and its table that lists the studies reviewed. The table shows that every study is flawed—either the intervention was not followed (fidelity) and/or only parent reports were used, not observation. Moreover, the age range of the children varied. Most importantly, note that most studies did not measure child wellbeing. So there is no responsible way to draw generalizable conclusions from this set of flawed studies. The standards for publishing such studies appear to be very low. In a forthcoming post, we note how many studies use an "Intent to Treat" criterion for distinguishing conditions, not bothering about what actually happened.]With neuroscience, we can confirm what our ancestors took for granted—that letting babies get distressed is a practice that can harm children and their relational capacities in the long term.The discredited behaviorist view sees the baby as an interloper in the life of the parents, an intrusion who must be controlled by various means so the adults can live their lives without too much bother. Perhaps we can excuse this attitude and ignorance because at the time, extended families were being broken up and new parents had to figure out how to deal with babies on their own, an unnatural condition for humanity—we have heretofore raised children in extended families. The parents always shared care with multiple adult relatives.According to a behaviorist view, the child 'has to be taught to be independent.' But forcing "independence" on a baby could lead to greater dependence. Instead, giving babies what they need leads to greater independence later. In anthropological reports of small-band hunter-gatherers, parents took care of every need of babies and young children. Toddlers felt confident enough (and so did their parents) to walk into the bush on their own (see Hunter-Gatherer Childhoods, edited by Hewlett & Lamb, 2005).Behaviorists then and now encourage parents to condition the baby to expect needs not to be met on demand, whether feeding or comforting. It's assumed that the adults should 'be in charge' of the relationship. Certainly this might foster a child that doesn't ask for as much help and attention, but it is more likely to foster a whiney, unhappy, aggressive and/or demanding child, one who has learned that one must scream to get needs met.Caregivers who habitually respond to the needs of the baby before the baby gets distressed, preventing crying, are more likely to have children who are independent than the opposite (e.g., Stein & Newcomb, 1994). Soothing care is best from the outset. Once patterns of distress get established, it's much harder to change them.Rats are often used to study how mammalian brains work and many effects are similar in human brains. In studies of rats with high or low nurturing mothers, there is a critical period for turning on genes that control anxiety for the rest of life. If in the first 10 days of life you have a low nurturing rat mother, the gene never gets turned on and the rat is anxious towards new situations for the rest of its life, unless drugs are administered to alleviate the anxiety. These researchers say that there are hundreds of genes affected by nurturance.Similar mechanisms are found in human brains—caregiver behavior matters for turning genes on and off. (See work of Michael Meaney and colleagues; e. g., Meaney, 2001).We should understand the mother and child as a mutually responsive dyad. They are a symbiotic unit that make each other healthier and happier in mutual responsiveness. This expands to other caregivers too.One strangely popular notion still around today is to let babies 'cry it out' (aka total extinction or unmodified extinction) when they are left alone, isolated in cribs or in other devices. This comes from a misunderstanding of child brain development.Babies grow from being held. Their bodies get dysregulated when they are physically separated from caregivers. (See here for more.)Babies indicate a need through gesture and eventually, if necessary, through crying. Just as adults reach for liquid when thirsty, children search for what they need in the moment. Just as adults become calm once the need is met, so do babies.There are many long-term effects of undercare or need-neglect in babies (e.g., Bremmer et al, 1998; Blunt Bugental et al., 2003; Dawson et al., 2000; Heim et al 2003).Secure attachment is related to responsive parenting, such as comforting babies when they wake up and cry at night.Why should we avoid 'crying it out'?The brain is developing quickly. When the baby is greatly distressed, it creates conditions for damage to synapses, the network construction which is ongoing in the infant brain. The hormone cortisol is released. In excess, it's a neuron killer but its consequences may not be apparent immediately (Thomas et al. 2007). A full-term baby (40-42 weeks), with only 25% of its brain developed, is undergoing rapid brain growth. The brain grows on average three times as large by the end of the first year (and head size growth in the first year is a sign of intelligence, e.g., Gale et al., 2006). Who knows what neurons are not being connected or being wiped out during times of extreme stress? What deficits might show up years later from such regular distressful experience? (See my addendum below.)Disordered stress reactivity may be established not only in the brain with the stress response system (Bremmer et al, 1998), but also in the body through the vagus nerve, a nerve that affects functioning in multiple systems (e.g., digestion). For example, prolonged distress in early life can result in a poorly functioning vagus nerve, which is related to various disorders as irritable bowel syndrome (Stam et al, 1997). See more about how early stress is toxic for lifelong health from the recent Harvard report, The Foundations of Lifelong Health are Built in Early Childhood).Self-regulation may be undermined. The baby is dependent on caregivers for learning how to self-regulate. Responsive care—meeting the baby's needs before he gets distressed—tunes the body and brain up for calmness. When a baby gets scared and a parent holds and comforts him, the baby builds expectations for soothing, which get integrated into the ability to self-comfort. Babies don't self-comfort in isolation. If they are left to cry alone, they learn to shut down in face of extensive distress—stop growing, stop feeling, stop trusting (Henry & Wang, 1998).Trust may be undermined. As Erik Erikson pointed out, the first year of life is a sensitive period for establishing a sense of trust in the world, the world of caregiver and the world of self. When a baby's needs are met without distress, the child learns that the world is a trustworthy place, that relationships are supportive, and that the self is a positive entity that can get its needs met. When a baby's needs are dismissed or ignored, the child develops a sense of mistrust of relationships and the world. And self-confidence is undermined. The child may spend a lifetime trying to fill the resulting inner emptiness.Caregiver sensitivity may be harmed. A caregiver who learns to ignore baby crying might learn to ignore the more subtle signaling of the child's needs. Second-guessing intuitions that guide one to want to stop child distress, the adult who learns to ignore baby needs learns to "harden the heart." The reciprocity between caregiver and baby is broken by the adult but cannot be repaired by the young child. The baby is helpless.Caregiver responsiveness to the needs of the baby is related to most many positive child outcomes. In our work, caregiver responsiveness is related to intelligence, empathy, lack of aggression or depression, self-regulation, social competence. Because responsiveness is so powerful, we have to control for it in our studies of other parenting practices and child outcomes. The importance of caregiver responsiveness is common knowledge in developmental psychology.The 'cry it out' approach seems to have arisen as a solution to the dissolution of extended family life in the 20th century. The vast knowledge of (now great great) grandmothers was lost in the distance between households with children and those with the experience and expertise about how to raise them well. The wisdom of keeping babies happy was lost between generations.But isn't it normal for babies to cry?A crying baby in our ancestral environment could have alerted predators to tasty morsels. So our evolved parenting practices likely served to alleviate baby distress and preclude crying except in emergencies. Babies are built to expect the equivalent of an "external womb" after birth (see Allan Schore, specific references below). What is the external womb? Being held constantly, breastfed on demand, having needs met quickly (I have numerous posts on these things). These practices are known to facilitate good brain and body development (discussed with references in other posts). When babies display discomfort, it signals that a need is not getting met, a need of their rapidly growing systems.Below is a good set of articles about all the things that a baby's cry can signal. We can all educate ourselves about what babies need and the practices that alleviate baby crying. We can help one another to keep crying from happening as much as possible.Check these out:How to soothe babies: http://www.babycenter.com/0_12-reasons-babies-cry-and-how-to-soothe-them_9790.bc?page=2Soothing babies crying "for no reason": http://www.babycenter.com/0_what-to-do-when-your-baby-cries-for-no-reason_10320516.bcSoothing babies who have "colic": http://www.babycenter.com/0_colic-how-to-cope_1369745.bcScience of Parenting, an inexpensive, photo-filled, easy-to-read book for parents by Margot Sunderland, has much more detail and references on these matters. I keep copies on hand to give to new parents.Here is a terrific post on co-sleeping (the abandoned practice that is behind notions of leaving babies to cry it out) by my esteemed colleague, Peter Gray. Much more about co-sleeping research is here at the website of my colleague, James McKenna.More on babies' and children's needs here, here, here.Giving babies what they need is really a basic right of babies. See here for more rights I think babies should expect. And see here for a new book by Eileen Johnson on the emotional rights of babies.ADDENDUM: I was raised in a middle-class family with a depressed mother, harsh father and overall emotionally unsupportive environment—not unlike others raised in the USA. I have only recently realized from extensive reading about the effects of early parenting on body and brain development that I show the signs of undercare—poor memory (cortisol released during distress harms hippocampus development), irritable bowel and other poor vagal tone issues, and high social anxiety. The USA has epidemics of poor physical and mental health (e.g., UNICEF, 2007; USDHSS, 1999; WHO/WONCA, 2008). The connection between the lack of ancestral parenting practices and poor health outcomes has been documented for touch, responsiveness, breastfeeding, and more (Narvaez et al., in press). If we want a strong country and people, we've got to pay attention to what children need for optimal development.NOTE on BASIC ASSUMPTIONS:When I write about human nature, I use the 99% of human genus history as a baseline. That is the context of small-band hunter-gatherers. These are “immediate-return” societies with few possessions who migrate and forage. They have no hierarchy or coercion and value generosity and sharing. They exhibit both high autonomy and high commitment to the group. They have high social wellbeing. See a comparison between dominant Western culture and this evolved heritage in my article (you can download from my website):Narvaez, D. (2013). The 99 Percent—Development and socialization within an evolutionary context: Growing up to become “A good and useful human being.” In D. Fry (Ed.), War, Peace and Human Nature: The convergence of Evolutionary and Cultural Views (pp. 643-672). New York: Oxford University Press.When I write about parenting, I assume the importance of the evolved developmental niche (EDN) for raising human infants (which initially arose over 30 million years ago with the emergence of the social mammals and has been slightly altered among human groups based on anthropological research).The EDN is the baseline I use for determining what fosters optimal human health, wellbeing and compassionate morality. The niche includes at least the following: infant-initiated breastfeeding for several years, nearly constant touch early, responsiveness to needs so the young child does not get distressed, playful companionship with multi-aged playmates, multiple adult caregivers, positive social support, and soothing perinatal experiences.All EDN characteristics are linked to health in mammalian and human studies (for reviews, see Narvaez, Panksepp, Schore & Gleason, 2013; Narvaez, Valentino, Fuentes, McKenna & Gray, 2014; Narvaez, 2014) Thus, shifts away from the EDN baseline are risky and must be supported with longitudinal data looking at wellbeing in children and adults. My comments and posts stem from these basic assumptions.My research laboratory has documented the importance of the EDN for child wellbeing and moral development with more papers in the works see (my Website to download papers):Narvaez, D., Gleason, T., Wang, L., Brooks, J., Lefever, J., Cheng, A., & Centers for the Prevention of Child Neglect (2013). The Evolved Development Niche: Longitudinal Effects of Caregiving Practices on Early Childhood Psychosocial Development. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 28 (4), 759–773. Doi: 10.1016/j.ecresq.2013.07.003Narvaez, D., Wang, L., Gleason, T., Cheng, A., Lefever, J., & Deng, L. (2013). The Evolved Developmental Niche and sociomoral outcomes in Chinese three-year-olds. European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 10(2), 106-127.Also see these books for selected reviews:Evolution, Early Experience and Human Development (Oxford University Press)Ancestral Landscapes in Human Evolution (Oxford University Press)Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality (W.W. Norton)ReferencesBlum, D. (2002). Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection. New York: Berkeley Publishing (Penguin).Blunt Bugental, D. et al. (2003). The hormonal costs of subtle forms of infant maltreatment. Hormones and Behaviour, January, 237-244.Bremmer, J.D. et al. (1998). The effects of stress on memory and the hippocampus throughout the life cycle: Implications for childhood development and aging. Developmental Psychology, 10, 871-885.Dawson, G., et al. (2000). The role of early experience in shaping behavioral and brain development and its implications for social policy. Development and Psychopathology, 12(4), 695-712.Catharine R. Gale, PhD, Finbar J. O'Callaghan, PhD, Maria Bredow, MBChB, Christopher N. Martyn, DPhil and the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children Study Team (October 4, 2006). "The Influence of Head Growth in Fetal Life, Infancy, and Childhood on Intelligence at the Ages of 4 and 8 Years". PEDIATRICS Vol. 118 No. 4 October 2006, pp. 1486-1492. The Influence of Head Growth in Fetal Life, Infancy, and Childhood on Intelligence at the Ages of 4 and 8 Years.Heim, C. et al. (1997). Persistent changes in corticotrophin-releasing factor systems due to early life stress: Relationship to the pathophysiology of major depression ad post-traumatic stress disorder. Psychopharmacology Bulletin, 185-192.Henry, J.P., & Wang, S. (1998). Effects of early stress on adult affiliative behavior, Psychoneuroendocrinology 23( 8), 863-875.Hewlett, B., & Lamb, M. (2005). Hunter-gatherer childhoods.New York: Aldine.Meaney, M.J. (2001). Maternal care, gene expression, and the transmission of individual differences in stress reactivity across generations. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 24, 1161-1192.Narvaez, D., Panksepp, J., Schore, A., & Gleason, T. (Eds.) (in press). Evolution, Early Experience and Human Development: From Research to Practice and Policy. New York: Oxford University Press.Panksepp, J. (1998). Affective neuroscience. New York: Oxford University Press.Schore, A.N. (1997). Early organization of the nonlinear right brain and development of a predisposition to psychiatric disorders. Development and Psychopathology, 9, 595-631.Schore, A.N. (2000). Attachment and the regulation of the right brain. Attachment & Human Development, 2, 23-47.Schore, A.N. (2001). The effects of early relational trauma on right brain development, affect regulation, and infant mental health. Infant Mental Health Journal, 22, 201-269.Stam, R., et al. (1997). Trauma and the gut: Interactions between stressful experience and intestinal function. Gut.Stein, J. A., & Newcomb, M. D. (1994). Children's internalizing and externalizing behaviors and maternal health problems. Journal of Pediatric Psychology, 19(5), 571-593.Thomas, R.M., Hotsenpiller,G. & Peterson, D.A. (2007).Acute Psychosocial Stress Reduces Cell Survival in Adult Hippocampal Neurogenesis without Altering Proliferation. The Journal of Neuroscience, 27(11): 2734-2743.UNICEF (2007). Child poverty in perspective: An overview of child well-being in rich countries, a comprehensive assessment of the lives and well-being of children and adolescents in the economically advanced nations, Report Card 7. Florence, Italy: United Nations Children's Fund Innocenti Research Centre.U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. (1999). Mental health: A report of the Surgeon General. Rockville, MD: Center for Mental Health Services, National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Mental Health.Watson, J. B. (1928). Psychological Care of Infant and Child. New York: W. W. Norton Company, Inc.WHO/WONCA (2008). Integrating mental health into primary care: A global perspective. Geneva and London: World Health Organization and World Organization of Family Doctors.Darcia Narvaez, Ph.D., is a professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame and the former executive editor of the Journal of Moral Education.In Print:Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture, and Wisdom (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology)Online: Research Website

No. No. No. There are no poor starving polar bears from global warming. There is evidence there are too many bears and this could explain the Russian story.When deer, wolves or bears grow too fast they often become a threat to nearby human populations. The result is culling of the herds to get a better balance. I remember when Canadian wolves were introduced into Wyoming to cull the over multiplied deer population. The result was positive. Canadian Inuit hunting of Polar bears which has been ongoing for centuries has the same effect.Take a good look at the Russian bears and the evidence is strong they are healthy and not starving but they will always prefer a free meal to the rigours of hunting their own prey.No, climate change hasn’t driven polar bears to take over a Russian townAnthony Watts / 2 days ago February 11, 2019Dr. Susan Crockford writes:The MSM have gone mad for this story today. I wrote up a post yesterday debunking the AGW claim.Polar bears have been terrorizing a Russian town on the Barents Sea since DecemberLarge group of polar bears at the Belushya Guba town dump on Novaya Zemlya, Russia. From the 11 Feb. 2019 story at The Daily MailSince early December, a group of 52 polar bears have terrorized the Russian village of Belushaya Guba on southern Novaya Zemlya. The aggressiveness of some of the bears, their boldness in entering local buildings and fearlessness in the face of the usual deterrents has caused the local government to call a state of emergency to help the town residents.Global warming is blamed for the problem but as is so often the case, that claim does not stand up to scrutiny.BARENTS SEA BEARS ARE THRIVINGAccording to recent research results, despite low ice cover since 2016, the population of polar bears around Svalbard and presumably in the Barents Sea as a whole are still increasing, as they recover from decades of over-hunting in the 19th and 20th centuries (Aars 2018; Aars et al. 2009, 2017; Crockford 2017).This incident of winter problems with polar bears and others like it reported from the Russian Arctic, almost certainly reflect the confluence of a growing human presence in the Arctic and thriving polar bear populations, not lack of sea ice due to global warming.Recall that explorer William Barents and his crew, who became stranded on the shore of northeast Novaya Zemlya over the winter of 1596-1597, had endless problems with polar bears (back when polar bears and sea ice were really abundant). That story provides an important perspective on this year’s troubles.Republished with permission of the author, originally published at https://polarbearscience.comhttps://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/02/11/no-climate-change-hasnt-driven-polar-bears-to-take-over-a-russian-town/Here are the facts -Polar bear populations healthy not dwindling.POLAR BEAR Numbers Not Declining Despite Media Headlines Suggesting OtherwiseNO other icon of ‘Global Warming’ epitomizes its very own false narrative like the polar bear does for ‘Climate Change’.WITH deadly irony, polar bear numbers have grown dramatically as carbon dioxide emissions have risen in lock-step. A CO2 correlation, at last!INDIGENOUS Inuit’s of Northern Canada are now facing the very real task of having to cull the population as “the polar bear may have exceeded the co-existence threshold.”*“Inuit believe there are now so many bears that public safety has become a major concern,”“Public safety concerns, combined with the effects of polar bears on other species, suggest that in many Nunavut communities, the polar bear may have exceeded the co-existence threshold.”Nunavut’s polar bear population is unsafe, government document says | The Globe and Mail*https://climatism.blog/2019/01/17/climatism-2019-state-of-the-climate-report/Posted: January 22, 2018 | Author: Jamie Spry | Filed under:polarbearscienceIn scanning comments generated by the recent flurry of internet interest in polar bears and blogs I noticed that a good many people, fed alarming media stories, are still convinced that polar bear numbers are declining rapidly when nothing could be further from the truth.In some cases, the media have made a possible future problem sound like a current problem. In others, people are remembering data from 2010 or so, not realizing that the picture has changed — or they assume that a conservation status of ‘threatened’ or ‘vulnerable’ (e.g. Amstrup et al. 2007) must mean numbers are declining (because that’s true for virtually all species classified that way, except polar bears).The sea ice situation hasn’t really improved or deteriorated since 2007 but the polar bear picture is much better: there is information on more subpopulations and studies show most are holding stable or increasing (Aars et…https://climatism.wordpress.com/2018/01/22/polar-bear-numbers-not-declining-despite-media-headlines-suggesting-otherwise/← Histrionics over Arctic temperatures & sea ice extent: implications for polar bearsDr. Susan J. Crockford Polar bear scientist U of VictoriaState of the Polar Bear Report 2017 shows polar bears are thrivingPosted on February 27, 2018 | Comments Offon State of the Polar Bear Report 2017 shows polar bears are thrivingMy new report reveals that polar bears are doing well despite recent reductions in sea-ice. It shows in details why this is so, with summaries of critical recent research.Press release and pdf below. And read my op-ed in the National Post here.polar bears can survive a complete or nearly complete fast from June to late November (and pregnant females from June to early April the following year). That’s the beauty of their Arctic adaptation: …Starvation is the leading natural cause of death for polar bears because if they cannot put on the fat they need in spring, they will not survive the low food months of summer and winter, whether they are on land or out on the sea ice (Amstrup 2003).Polar bear survival depends on the consumption of large numbers of fat, newborn seals that are only available in abundance from March to mid May (depending on the location and species of seal): after this time, fewer seals are available and are very hard to catch.FINANCIAL POSTPolar bears keep thriving even as global warming alarmists keep pretending they’re dyingSusan Crockford: Polar bears are flourishing, making them phony icons, and false idols, for global warming alarmistsA polar bear eats a piece of whale meat as it walks along the shore of Hudson Bay near Churchill, Man.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian PressSpecial to Financial PostSusan CrockfordFebruary 27, 20186:30 AM ESTOne powerful polar bear fact is slowly rising above the message of looming catastrophe repeated endlessly by the media: More than 15,000 polar bears have not disappeared since 2005. Although the extent of the summer sea ice after 2006 dropped abruptly to levels not expected until 2050, the predicted 67-per-cent decline in polar bear numbers simply didn’t happen. Rather, global polar bear numbers have been stable or slightly improved. The polar bear’s resilience should have meant the end of its use as a cherished icon of global warming doom, but it didn’t. The alarmism is not going away without a struggle.Part of this struggle involves a scientific clash about transparency in polar bear science. My close examination of recent research has revealed that serious inconsistencies exist within the polar bear literature and between that literature and public statements made by some researchers. For example, Canadian polar bear biologist Ian Stirling learned in the 1970s that spring sea ice in the southern Beaufort Sea periodically gets so thick that seals depart, depriving local polar bears of their prey and causing their numbers to plummet. But that fact, documented in more than a dozen scientific papers, is not discussed today as part of polar bear ecology. In these days of politicized science, neither Stirling nor his colleagues mention in public the devastating effects of thick spring ice in the Beaufort Sea; instead, they imply in recent papers that the starving bears they witnessed are victims of reduced summer sea ice, which they argued depleted the bears’ prey. There are also strong indications that thick spring-ice conditions happened again in 2014–16, with the impacts on polar bears being similarly portrayed as effects of global warming.The polar bear's resilience should have meant the end of its use as an icon of global warming doomOne reason that the 2007 predictions of future polar bear survival were so far off base is that the model developed by American biologist Steven Amstrup (now at Polar Bears International, an NGO) assumed any polar bear population decline would be caused by less summer ice, despite the Beaufort Sea experience. Moreover, Amstrup and fellow modelers were overly confident in their claim that summer ice was critical for the polar bear’s survival and they had little data on which to base their assumption that less summer ice would devastate the polar bears’ prey.Consequently, many scientists were surprised when other researchers subsequently found that ringed and bearded seals (the primary prey of polar bears) north of the Bering Strait especially thrived with a longer open-water season, which is particularly conducive to fishing: These seals do most of their feeding in summer. More food for seals in summer means more fat seal pups for polar bears to eat the following spring, a result that’s probably true throughout the Arctic.As long as polar bears have lots of baby seals to eat in spring, they get fat enough to survive even a longer-than-usual summer fast. And while it’s true that studies in some regions show polar bears are lighter in weight than they were in the 1980s, there is no evidence that more individuals are starving to death or becoming too thin to reproduce because of less summer ice.Not all bears get enough to eat in the spring, of course. Starvation has always been the leading natural cause of death for polar bears, due to a number of factors including competition, injury, tooth decay and illness. Some cancers induce a muscle-wasting syndrome that leads to faster-than-usual weight loss. This is likely what happened to the emaciated Baffin Island bear captured on video in July 2017 and promoted by National Geographic late last year. The videographers claimed it showed what starvation due to sea-ice loss looked like — an implausible conclusion given the time of year, the isolated nature of the incident, and the fact that sea ice that year was no more reduced than previously.That starving-bear video may have convinced a few more gullible people that only hundreds of polar bears are left in the world. But it also motivated others to locate the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List report for 2015 that estimated global polar bear numbers at somewhere between 22,000-31,000, or about 26,000, up slightly from 20,000-25,000, or about 22,500, in 2005. Newer counts not included in the 2015 assessment potentially add another 2,500 or so to the total. This increase may not be statistically significant, but it is decidedly not the 67-per-cent decline that was predicted given the ice conditions that prevailed.The failure of the 2007 polar bear survival model is a simple fact that explodes the myth that polar bears are on their way to extinction. Although starving-bear videos and scientifically insignificant research papers still make the news, they don’t alter the facts: Polar bears are thriving, making them phony icons, and false idols, for global warming alarmists.Susan Crockford, a zoologist and adjunct professor at the University of Victoria, is author of State of the Polar Bear Report 2017, released Tuesday. She will present her findings at Grounds for Thought in Toronto. www.susancrockford.comMy Published CommentJames Grant Matkin ·Arctic ice is stable and not melting away as predicted. Yes, polar bears are thriving, sea levels are not rising much if at all, Pacific islands are rising not sinking. The fear mongering of the alarmists is revealed as politics not science.“No matter if the science is all phony; there are collateral environmental benefits…. Climate change [provides] the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world.”Christine Stewart, former Minister of the Environment of CanadaThat Paris conference agenda got a useful boost from U.S. government agency scientists at NASA and NOAA who conveniently provided “warmest years ever” claims. Both have histories of stirring overheated global warming stew pots with alarming and statistically indefensible claims of recent “record high” temperatures.Global cooling from unstoppable solar cycles of dimimuished sunspots is rearing its ugly head as it did in the seventies. BEWARE cooling is a real threat.http://business.financialpost.com/opinion/polar-bears-keep-thriving-even-as-global-warming-alarmists-keep-pretending-theyre-dyingThis just in about increasing ice from falling temperatures annually.W. Hudson Bay Freeze-Up Earlier Than 1980’s Average For Third Year In RowNov 11, 2019This is the third year in a row that freeze-up of Western Hudson Bay (WH) ice has come earlier than the average of November 16 as documented in the 1980s.Reports by folks on the ground near Churchill confirm polar bears are starting to move onto the sea ice that’s developing along the shore after almost five months on land.After five good sea ice seasons in a row for WH polar bears, this repeat of an early freeze-up means a sixth good ice season is now possible for 2019-2020.Sadly for the tourists, however, it means the polar bear viewing season in Churchill will be ending early this year, just like it did last year and the year before.When mothers with cubs are out on the ice (see photo above), it’s pretty certain the mass movement from land to sea ice is well underway because these family units are usually the last to leave.CURRENT ICE CONDITIONSWeather in Churchill was very cold today, -36C with the wind chill. The slight moderation in temperature in the forecast for the rest of this week is still very conducive to ice formation:The Canadian Ice Service charts for 10 November 2018 below (the overall picture and the details for ice development in northern Hudson Bay) show the ice conditions last year at the time that bears left for the ice:Just to round out the comparison, below is the detailed ice development chart for 11 November 2017:W. Hudson Bay Freeze-Up Earlier Than 1980's Average For Third Year In RowPolar Bears & The Sleazy New York TimesPublished on April 16, 2018Written by Donna LaframboiseSPOTLIGHT: Journalistic professionalism evaporates in front of our eyes.BIG PICTURE: When historians document the demise of the mainstream media, an article published this week by the New York Times will make an excellent case study.Titled “Climate Change Denialists Say Polar Bears Are Fine. Scientists Are Pushing Back,” it’s written by Erica Goode who isn’t just any journalist. She’s a former Environment Editor of the Times. In 2009, she “founded and led a cluster of reporters dedicated to environmental reporting.” Currently, she’s a visiting professor at Syracuse University.Out here in the real world, a debate exists about polar bears. Will they be adversely affected by climate change or will they continue to adapt as they have historically?Since the future hasn’t yet arrived, it’s impossible to know whose opinions will turn out to be correct. But rather than presenting a range of perspectives to her readers, Goode takes sides. Apparently clairvoyant, she knows that experts concerned about the long term prospects of polar bears are correct. She knows that dissenting voices are wrong. No other possibility is conceivable within the confines of her exceedingly narrow mind.She doesn’t tell us that researchers with significant academic records and decades of experience can be found on both sides of this question. Instead, in the first sentence of her article, Goode negates all possibility that a legitimate debate might be in progress. Climate “denialists,” she declares, are “capitalizing” on the iconic status of polar bears “to spread doubts about the threat of global warming.”Goode knows the dissenters are playing politics. She knows their motives are profane. With a wave of her hand, she thus relieves herself of the obligation to take seriously these alternative viewpoints.People who think polar bears are currently doing well – a separate question from how they might fare in the future – are similarly labeled “climate denialists” by Goode in paragraph four. Individuals on the other side of the fence, meanwhile, are portrayed as “real experts” and “mainstream scientists.”Last November, a shocking paper was published online. It has now appeared in the print edition of the journal BioScience. Titled “Internet Blogs, Polar Bears, and Climate Change Denial by Proxy,” the PDF version fills five pages of text, followed by two pages of references. This is an assault by a gang of 14 authors on an individual scholar.The target is Susan Crockford, a Canadian zoologist and adjunct professor with more than 35 years experience in her field. As the author of PolarBearScience.com, Crockford performs a public service. She encourages us to look past activist spin and media hype. Not everything we’re told about polar bears, she says, rests on a solid foundation.While it’s appropriate for these 14 people to challenge Crockford’s assertions, their tone is anything but scholarly. This is five pages of name-calling. PolarBearScience.com is labeled a “denier blog” at the outset. So are online venues that cite Crockford’s work. The term ‘denial’ is used 9 times. ‘Denier’ 18 times. ‘Deniers’ 12 times.The entire exercise is brazenly political. This paper sends a message to everyone else: think twice before departing from the polar bear party line. Our ugly gang of bullies will come looking for you next.How does Goode present these events? Is 14 against one viewed as a tad unsporting? Does anyone in her article express astonishment that a naked political screed somehow got published in a peer-reviewed academic journal? Is free inquiry lauded? The importance of vigorous scientific debate championed?I’m afraid not. She’s an extension of the gang, you see. Smugly certain that Crockford is a ‘climate denier,’ Goode considers this female scholar in a male-dominated field unworthy not only of a hearing, but of empathy, as well.According to Goode, the 14 are merely “scientists banding together against climate change denial.” She quotes Michael Oppenheimer: “Some climate scientists basically have had enough of being punching bags.” Voilà, the victim is transformed into an aggressor who deserves what she got.Goode tells us Oppenheimer is “a professor of geoscience and international affairs” at Princeton. She fails to mention that he spent two decades cashing paycheques at the overtly activist Environmental Defense Fund. This man isn’t impartial. He has a flashing neon sign of an agenda.In the world inhabited by Goode, polar bear dissenters are dismissed out-of-hand because she knows they’re politically motivated. But orchestrated political behaviour by a gang of 14 is OK. And scientists affiliated with organizations that lobby for political change are reliable commentators.Rather than inform its readers in a fair and even-handed manner, the Times this week became a mouthpiece for one side in a scientific debate. Erica Goode chose to be prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner in the case of Susan Crockford.She sided not with the brave dissident, but with the numerous and the powerful. Crockford wasn’t merely assaulted in BioScience, her assault was justified and amplified in the pages of the Times. By another woman.TOP TAKEAWAY: Environmental reporting at the New York Times is a disgrace.Polar Bears & the Sleazy New York Times | PSI IntlPolar bears not starving, says Nunatsiavut wildlife managerThis monster polar bear was photographed in Labrador in 2016.Jim Goudie says there are lots of bears the in northern Labrador/Quebec regionGeoff Bartlett · CBC News · Posted: Apr 21, 2018 11:00 AM NT | LThis monster polar bear was photographed in Labrador in 2016. Research suggests numbers of the animals have been increasing since before 2007. (Submitted by Edwin Clark)One of the people who oversees an Indigenous hunt of polar bears says the population is doing well, despite heart-wrenching photos online suggesting some bears are starving.Every year, the Nunatsiavut government awards polar bear licences to Inuit hunters living in the northern Labrador settlement area.The Inuit set a quota of 12 polar bears this winter. Nunatsiavut wildlife manager Jim Goudie said all 12 were taken within the first seven days of the season.Sea ice is critical habitat for polar bears from late fall through late spring onlyPosted on July 14, 2018 | Sea ice is critical habitat for polar bears from late fall through late spring onlySea ice is said to be “an essential habitat for polar bears” but that’s an overly simplistic advocacy meme as ridiculous as the “no sea ice, no polar bears” message with which the public is constantly bombarded. Polar bears require sea ice from late fall to late spring only: from early summer to mid-fall, sea ice is optional. Historical evidence of polar bears that spent 5 months on land during the summer of 1874 proves an extended stay ashore is a natural response of polar bears to natural summer ice retreat, not a consequence of recent human-caused global warming. Sea ice is a seasonal requirement for polar bears: it’s not necessary year round.[This PBI newsletter from 2011 repeats this meme and Andrew Derocher’s recent tweet conveys a similar message (“Sea ice loss = habitat loss for polar bears”)]As long as sea ice is available from late fall through late spring (December to early June) and accompanied by abundant seal prey (sometimes it isn’t, see Derocher and Stirling 1995; Stirling 2002; Stirling et al. 1981, 1982, 1984), polar bears can survive a complete or nearly complete fast from June to late November (and pregnant females from June to early April the following year). That’s the beauty of their Arctic adaptation: fat deposited in early spring allows polar bears to survive an extraordinary fast whether they spend the time on land or sea ice.Young and very old bears, as well as sick and injured ones, are the exception: these bears often come ashore in poor condition and end up dying of starvation — as a much-publicized bear on Baffin Island who likely had a form of cancer did last summer (Crockford 2018). Competition with bigger, stronger bears means these bears can’t keep what they are able to kill and they are most often the bears who cause problems. Starvation is the leading natural cause of death for polar bears because if they cannot put on the fat they need in spring, they will not survive the low food months of summer and winter, whether they are on land or out on the sea ice (Amstrup 2003).Polar bear survival depends on the consumption of large numbers of fat, newborn seals that are only available in abundance from March to mid May (depending on the location and species of seal): after this time, fewer seals are available and are very hard to catch.As I’ve stated previously (Crockford 2018:15):“Sea ice extent in June has declined, on average, from just over 12 mkm2 in the 1980s to just over 11 mkm2 from 2004-2017. 140By late May to early June, the young seals that form the bulk of polar bear diets in spring take to the water to feed and are no longer available on the ice, leaving only predatory-savvy adults and subadults hauled out as potential prey. 141This means few seals are actually caught and consumed by polar bears after about mid-June in Seasonal and Divergent sea ice ecoregions, or by mid-July in Convergent and Archipelago regions (see Section 6, Prey Base).”The most pessimistic predictions of March sea-ice extent at the end of the 21st century is about 12.0 million km2 (Stroeve et al. 2007), equal to the average extent of ice for May 2016 (shown below, from NSIDC), which is a perfectly adequate amount of ice to meet polar bear needs in all subpopulations during late winter/early spring:Not a single sea ice prediction suggests the disappearance of sea ice in winter or early spring due to human-caused global warming (Amstrup et al. 2007; Regehr et al. 2016) and predictions of catastrophic polar bear losses due to sea ice declines have failed to materialize (Crockford 2017).From early summer to mid-fall, many bears lounge around on land with no ill-effects. As far as we know, they have always done so (see Historical Evidence below). There is also no biological reason to suggest that well-fed bears that historically did not have to spend much time ashore in summer (such as those in the Southern Beaufort) are incapable of doing so for 5 months if necessary.HISTORICAL EVIDENCEBack in 1874 — well before human-caused global warming reared its ugly head — hundreds of fat, healthy Chukchi Sea polar bears (see drawing below) spent four to five months on St. Matthew Island in the Bering Sea during the summer (at about 60°N latitude, not quite as far south as Churchill, Manitoba); some females stayed on to have their cubs in maternity dens dug into the hills (Eliott and Coues 1875; Elliott 1875; Klein and Sowls 2011).Figure 2. A drawing of polar bears on St. Matthew Island that accompanied the May 1, 1875 Harper’s Weekly Journal of Civilization article written by Henry Elliot. See here.From my 2013 post on this topic:“Elliott’s government report (Elliott and Coues 1875: Appendix) notes that the bears they saw were “in most excellent condition, fat and sleek.” They encountered both males and females with twin cubs. Maynard’s report apparently mentions twins and triplets – “about one third grown” (cited in Klein and Sowls 2011:430), i.e. one year old cubs. Elliott and Maynard found empty maternity dens that had been dug into the hillsides and “bear roads” winding around the island. Fresh water was abundant on the island and while there were walrus and a few seals offshore, there was only scant evidence (the carcass of one young walrus) that the bears were feeding on them. The bears appear to have been fasting – except for the odd bit of scavenging and grass-chewing, which all land-bound polar bears appear to do.”The fact that well-fed Chukchi Sea polar bears spent 5 months onshore in the late 1800s suggests that well-fed polar bears throughout the Arctic have always had the ability to fast for this length of time: it is not a new phenomenon associated with recent sea ice changes blamed on human-caused global warming (Overland and Wang 2013; Wang and Overland 2012, 2015).Note that polar bears no longer den or spend the summer on St. Matthew Island because they were exterminated by commercial hunters. Wrangel Island to the north is now the primary denning/summering location.MODERN EVIDENCEWrangel IslandOne of the largest terrestrial denning area in the Arctic is on Wrangel Island, off the Russian coast of the Chukchi Sea, where in 2017 almost 600 bears were estimated onshore for the 3-4 month summer ice-free season. Bears in the Chukchi Sea are doing very well, better than they were in the 1980s (Rode and Regehr 2010; Rode et al. 2013, 2014, 2018), despite a dramatic reduction in summer sea ice (Serrez et al. 2016).Last year, polar bear biologist Eric Regehr (US Fish & Wildlife Service) told the Daily Mail (23 November 2017) that the Chukchi Sea subpopulation “appears to be productive and healthy.”Photo below of a fat Wrangel Island bear. Shutterstock.SvalbardDespite concerns over the effect of spring sea ice loss around the Svalbard archipelago in recent years (circled in yellow in the maps below, from Walsh et al. 2017), polar bear data collected by researchers up to the spring of 2018 show little to no negative impact from these low ice springs (see previous post here, with references).It must be remembered that the polar bear subpopulation region that encompasses Svalbard is called “Barents Sea” (see map below from the PBSG) and includes the archipelago of Franz Josef Land to the east that has a much colder climate (Barr 1995). Franz Josef Land is where most Barents Sea polar bears live (Aars et al. 2009) and provides abundant denning habitat for pregnant females as well as a refugium for bears that prefer to stay on land during the summer when sea ice retreats. It is likely that most females that formerly made terrestrial dens on Svalbard have now shifted to Franz Josef Land (Aars 2015; Aars et al. 2017; Descamps et al. 2017), except for years (like 2014) with abundant fall ice.Western and Southern Hudson BayHere are critical words to remember (more details here) from biologist Martin Obbard and colleagues (2016:29) on the relationship between body condition and sea ice for Southern Hudson Bay (SH) polar bears, which apply equally well to bears in other regions:“Date of freeze-up had a stronger influence on subsequent body condition than date of break-up in our study. Though models with date of freeze-up were supported over models with other ice covariates, we acknowledge that lower variability in freeze-up dates than in ice duration or break-up dates could have influenced the model selection process. Nevertheless, we suggest that a stronger effect of date of freeze-up may be because even though break-up has advanced by up to 3-4 weeks in portions of Hudson Bay it still occurs no earlier than late June or early July so does not yet interfere with opportunities to feed on neonate ringed seal pups that are born in March-April in eastern Hudson Bay (Chambellant 2010). Therefore, losing days or weeks of hunting opportunities during June and July deprives polar bears of the opportunity to feed on adult seals, but does not deprive them of the critical spring period (Watts and Hansen 1987) when they are truly hyperphagic. No doubt, the loss of hunting opportunities to kill adult seals has a negative effect on body condition, but it appears that for bears in SH a forced extension of the fast in late fall has a greater negative effect on subsequent body condition.” [my bold]In other words, by mid-June at least, polar bears have largely finished their intensive feeding that’s so critical to their survival over the rest of the year. They may catch a few seals over the coming months but for most bears, this makes little difference to their overall condition or potential survival.Most bears are at their fattest in early summer (when they come off the ice to spend the summer ashore) after having gorged on newborn seals in early spring.Breakup dates for Western Hudson Bay have not become progressively earlier each year since 1979: rather, a step-change occurred about 1997/1998 that meant breakup dates since then have been about 3 weeks earlier than before (with much year to year variation). There has been no trend in breakup or freeze-up dates since 1995 or 2001 depending on how you calculate the data (Castro de la Guardia et al. 2017; Lunn et al. 2016).For both Western and Southern Hudson Bay, very late freeze up has had the most negative impact on polar bear survival. When bears come ashore in less than good condition (as they did in 1983), many bears can struggle to survive. However, poor feeding conditions on the bay during early spring (about which virtually nothing is known), can also impact the body condition and survival of bears.REFERENCESAars, J. 2015. Research on polar bears at Norwegian Polar Institute. Online seminar (‘webinar”), January 14. pdf here.Aars, J., Marques,T.A, Lone, K., Anderson, M., Wiig, Ø., Fløystad, I.M.B., Hagen, S.B. and Buckland, S.T. 2017. The number and distribution of polar bears in the western Barents Sea. Polar Research36:1. 1374125. doi:10.1080/17518369.2017.1374125Aars, J., Marques, T.A., Buckland, S.T., Andersen, M., Belikov, S., Boltunov, A., et al. 2009. Estimating the Barents Sea polar bear subpopulation. Marine Mammal Science 25: 35-52.Amstrup, S.C. 2003. Polar bear (Ursus maritimus). In Wild Mammals of North America, G.A. Feldhamer, B.C. Thompson and J.A. Chapman (eds), pg. 587-610. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.Amstrup, S.C., Marcot, B.G. & Douglas, D.C. 2007. Forecasting the rangewide status of polar bears at selected times in the 21st century.US Geological Survey. Reston, VA. Pdf hereBarr, S. 1995. Franz Josef Land. Oslo: Norwegian Polar Institute. ISBN82-7666-095-9.Castro de la Guardia, L., Myers, P.G., Derocher, A.E., Lunn, N.J., Terwisscha van Scheltinga, A.D. 2017. Sea ice cycle in western Hudson Bay, Canada, from a polar bear perspective. Marine Ecology Progress Series 564: 225–233. Sea ice cycle in western Hudson Bay, Canada, from a polar bear perspectiveCrockford, S.J. 2017. Testing the hypothesis that routine sea ice coverage of 3-5 mkm2 results in a greater than 30% decline in population size of polar bears (Ursus maritimus). PeerJ Preprints 2 March 2017. Doi: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.2737v3 Open access. Testing the hypothesis that routine sea ice coverage of 3-5 mkm2 results in a greater than 30% decline in population size of polar bears (Ursus maritimus)Crockford, S.J. 2018. State of the Polar Bear Report 2017. Global Warming Policy Foundation Report #29. London. pdf here.Derocher, A.E. and Stirling, I. 1995. Temporal variation in reproduction and body mass of polar bears in western Hudson Bay. Canadian Journal of Zoology 73:1657-1665. Canadian Science PublishingDescamps, S., Aars, J., Fuglei, E., Kovacs, K.M., Lydersen, C., Pavlova, O., Pedersen, Å.Ø., Ravolainen, V. and Strøm, H. 2017.Climate change impacts on wildlife in a High Arctic archipelago — Svalbard, Norway. Global Change Biology 23: 490-502. doi: 10.1111/gcb.13381Elliott, H.W. 1875 . Polar bears on St. Matthew Island. Harper’s Weekly Journal of Civilization. May 1 issue. Harper and Brothers, New York.Elliott, H.W. and Coues, E. 1875. A report upon the condition of affairs in the territory of Alaska. US Government Printing Office, Washington. A Report Upon the Condition of Affairs in the Territory of AlaskaKlein, D.R. and Sowls, A. 2011. History of polar bears as summer residents on the St. Matthew Islands, Bering Sea. Arctic 64:429-436. http://arctic.synergiesprairies.ca/arctic/index.php/arctic/article/view/4142Lunn, N.J., Servanty, S., Regehr, E.V., Converse, S.J., Richardson, E. and Stirling, I. 2016. Demography of an apex predator at the edge of its range – impacts of changing sea ice on polar bears in Hudson Bay. Ecological Applications, in press. DOI: 10.1890/15-1256Obbard, M.E., Cattet, M.R.I., Howe, E.J., Middel, K.R., Newton, E.J., Kolenosky, G.B., Abraham, K.F. and Greenwood, C.J. 2016. Trends in body condition in polar bears (Ursus maritimus) from the Southern Hudson Bay subpopulation in relation to changes in sea ice. Arctic Science, in press. 10.1139/AS-2015-0027Overland, J.E. and Wang, M. 2013. When will the summer Arctic be nearly sea ice free? Geophysical Research Letters 40: 2097-2101.Regehr, E.V., Laidre, K.L, Akçakaya, H.R., Amstrup, S.C., Atwood, T.C., Lunn, N.J., Obbard, M., Stern, H., Thiemann, G.W., & Wiig, Ø. 2016. Conservation status of polar bears (Ursus maritimus) in relation to projected sea-ice declines. Biology Letters 12: 20160556. http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/12/12/20160556Supplementary data here.Rode, K. and Regehr, E.V. 2010. Polar bear research in the Chukchi and Bering Seas: A synopsis of 2010 field work. Unpublished report to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Department of the Interior, Anchorage. pdf here.Rode, K.D., Douglas, D., Durner, G., Derocher, A.E., Thiemann, G.W., and Budge, S. 2013. Variation in the response of an Arctic top predator experiencing habitat loss: feeding and reproductive ecology of two polar bear populations. Oral presentation by Karyn Rode, 28thLowell Wakefield Fisheries Symposium, March 26-29. Anchorage, AK.Rode, K.D., Regehr, E.V., Douglas, D., Durner, G., Derocher, A.E., Thiemann, G.W., and Budge, S. 2014. Variation in the response of an Arctic top predator experiencing habitat loss: feeding and reproductive ecology of two polar bear populations. Global Change Biology 20(1):76-88. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.12339/abstractRode, K. D., R. R. Wilson, D. C. Douglas, V. Muhlenbruch, T.C. Atwood, E. V. Regehr, E.S. Richardson, N.W. Pilfold, A.E. Derocher, G.M Durner, I. Stirling, S.C. Amstrup, M. S. Martin, A.M. Pagano, and K. Simac. 2018. Spring fasting behavior in a marine apex predator provides an index of ecosystem productivity. Global Change Biologyhttp://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.13933/fullSerreze, M.C., Crawford, A., Stroeve, J.C., Barrett, A.P. and Woodgate, R.A. 2016. Variability, trends and predictability of seasonal sea ice retreat and advance in the Chukchi Sea. Journal of Geophysical Research 121 (10):7308–7325. Variability, trends, and predictability of seasonal sea ice retreat and advance in the Chukchi SeaStirling, I. 2002. Polar bears and seals in the eastern Beaufort Sea and Amundsen Gulf: a synthesis of population trends and ecological relationships over three decades. Arctic 55 (Suppl. 1):59-76. http://arctic.synergiesprairies.ca/arctic/index.php/arctic/issue/view/42Stirling, I., Andriashek, D., and Calvert, W. 1993. Habitat preferences of polar bears in the western Canadian Arctic in late winter and spring. Polar Record 29:13-24. Habitat preferences of polar bears in the western Canadian Arctic in late winter and spring | Polar Record | Cambridge CoreStirling, I., Calvert, W., and Andriashek, D. 1984. Polar bear ecology and environmental considerations in the Canadian High Arctic. Pg. 201-222. In Olson, R., Geddes, F. and Hastings, R. (eds.). Northern Ecology and Resource Management. University of Alberta Press, Edmonton.Stirling, I, Cleator, H. and Smith, T.G. 1981. Marine mammals. In: Polynyas in the Canadian Arctic, Stirling, I. and Cleator, H. (eds), pg. 45-58. Canadian Wildlife Service Occasional Paper No. 45. Ottawa.Stirling, I, Kingsley, M. and Calvert, W. 1982. The distribution and abundance of seals in the eastern Beaufort Sea, 1974–79. Canadian Wildlife Service Occasional Paper 47. Edmonton.Stroeve, J., Holland, M.M., Meier, W., Scambos, T. and Serreze, M. 2007. Arctic sea ice decline: Faster than forecast. Geophysical Research Letters 34:L09501.Walsh, J.E., Fetterer, F., Stewart, J.S. and Chapman, W.L. 2017. A database for depicting Arctic sea ice variations back to 1850. Geographical Review 107(1):89-107. A database for depicting Arctic sea ice variations back to 1850Wang, M. and Overland, J.E. 2012. A sea ice free summer Arctic within 30 years: An update from CMIP5 models. Geophysical Research Letters 39:L18501.Wang, M. and Overland, J.E. 2015. Projected future duration of the sea-ice-free season in the Alaskan Arctic. Progress in Oceanography136:50-59.https://polarbearscience.com/2018/07/14/sea-ice-is-critical-habitat-for-polar-bears-from-late-fall-through-late-spring-only/POLAR BEAR Numbers Not Declining Despite Media Headlines Suggesting Otherwise“NOAA mysteriously forgot to mention that Arctic ice is expanding in their Arctic Report Card.”POLAR BEAR Numbers Not Declining Despite Media Headlines Suggesting OtherwisePosted: January 22, 2018 | Author: Jamie Spry | Filed under:polarbearscienceIn scanning comments generated by the recent flurry of internet interest in polar bears and blogs I noticed that a good many people, fed alarming media stories, are still convinced that polar bear numbers are declining rapidly when nothing could be further from the truth.In some cases, the media have made a possible future problem sound like a current problem. In others, people are remembering data from 2010 or so, not realizing that the picture has changed — or they assume that a conservation status of ‘threatened’ or ‘vulnerable’ (e.g. Amstrup et al. 2007) must mean numbers are declining (because that’s true for virtually all species classified that way, except polar bears).The sea ice situation hasn’t really improved or deteriorated since 2007 but the polar bear picture is much better: there is information on more subpopulations and studies show most are holding stable or increasing (Aars et…https://climatism.wordpress.com/2018/01/22/polar-bear-numbers-not-declining-despite-media-headlines-suggesting-otherwise/← Histrionics over Arctic temperatures & sea ice extent: implications for polar bearsState of the Polar Bear Report 2017 shows polar bears are thrivingPosted on February 27, 2018 | Comments Offon State of the Polar Bear Report 2017 shows polar bears are thrivingMy new report reveals that polar bears are doing well despite recent reductions in sea-ice. It shows in details why this is so, with summaries of critical recent research.Press release and pdf below. And read my op-ed in the National Post here.ARCTIC ICE EXTENT EXPANDING“NOAA mysteriously forgot to mention that Arctic ice is expanding in their Arctic Report Card.” Gee, could it be because it doesn’t fit the climate alarmists’ narrative?i love ‪#DeplorableClimateScienceBlog for documenting the fraudArctic Sea Ice Increasing For Eleven YearsJames Matkin •"THE GLOBAL ICE AREA IS VIRTUALLY THE SAME TODAY AS IT WAS IN 1979.' Yes, fears of unusual warming by Al Gore and the UN are based on misleading data and pseudo-science not reality. The scientists error exposed by new satellite data have been duped by the oldest trick in the books, CHANCE - when deducing a theory from a false trend over a too short timeline. See https://www.academia.edu/33...Polar bears are thriving because polar ice melt is moderate and not unusual. Recent research with real data shows no unusual warming from fossil fuels. From TIBET recent peer review of climate history derived from 2000 years of tree-rings showed " that "no obvious warming trend since the industrial revolution was observed," WHICH MEANS THE AGW THEORY FAILS.A 2000-Year Temperature History of China's Animaqin Mountains http://www.co2science.org/a......Sadly, the terrible waste and distortion of public resources is massive and will never be recovered to be used to address real issues. This is the greatest scientific hoax ever. Note even if the AGW theory had any merit the reality is the earth's climate is "anti-fragile" and climate change cannot be stopped.See - Nobel laureate Ivar Giaever's speech at the Nobel Laureates meeting 1st July 2015.-https://www.youtube.com/wat...http://netrightdaily.com/2015/08/polar-ice-caps-stable-since-1979/WRITTEN BY THOMAS RICHARD, EXAMINER.COM ON JULY 21, 2015. POSTED IN LATEST NEWSPlentiful Arctic spring ice helping polar bears thrive (despite misleading news)Polar bear expert and zoologist Susan Crockford is firing back today at recently published articles that say polar bears are somehow starving and “food deprived” because of global warming. The problem is that since 1979, polar bears are thriving and far from starving. This is due to plentiful Arctic sea ice they need (except when it’s too thick) to hunt for food before the summer arrives. Unlike most carnivores, polar bears are unique mammals that do all their primary feeding in the spring, and very little during the summer. Other mammals hunt and gather food in the late spring, summer, and fall, but because of the Arctic’s unique climate, late winter/spring is the time that polar bears hunt and fatten up.According to Crockford, “polar bears are at their lowest weight in March and at their highest in June/July.” She notes that other large mammals don’t have this unique eating pattern because no other carnivore lives on the surface of the sea ice. “Summer is warm across the Arctic,” she writes. “It’s the perfect time for polar bears to fast, as little energy is needed for keeping warm, especially if they don’t swim around.”She also notes the “polar-bears-are-doomed crowd can’t hide the fact that this year, spring sea ice habitat for polar bears worldwide has been excellent.” For example, Hudson Bay sea ice extent on July 19 this year was 150,000 square kilometers higher than in recorded on that date in 2009 (526.2 vs. 368.5 mkm2).Norwegian polar bear researchers also reported a good crop of cubs this spring because conditions have been excellent for pregnant females around Svalbard. Worldwide, the amount of Arctic sea ice on July 18, 2015, was the same on that date in 2006, and by July 19, there was actually more sea ice than the same date in 2006 (8.4 vs. 8.3 mkm2).Put simply, the recent summer ice melt has not interfered with the spring feeding period “that is so critically important for polar bears.” Leftover sea ice in early summer meant there was plenty of sea ice in the spring (April-June), even in the Southern Beaufort Sea. The only polar bear region with below-average sea ice extent over the last five years was the Chukchi Sea, but researchers have already shown that polar bears in that region are “doing very well even with no summer sea ice.”Even though the Chukchi Sea currently has below-average summer sea ice, it doesn’t affect a polar bear’s eating habits, as fasting during the summer is normal for them. These Arctic carnivores put on hundreds of pounds of fat during the spring feeding period, chowing down on plump, plentiful young seals that are easy to catch, in preparation for the summer months. This time period, known as the “walking hibernation,” is likely an adaptation to their environment and not a physiological mechanism.What all this means, Crockford writes, is that summer sea ice declines predicted in the Arctic “cannot possibly have any significant impact for otherwise healthy bears.” In 2012, this was evidenced by the record-breaking low September ice extent in the Southern Beaufort Sea that showed no noticeable effect on polar bear health or survival. Why? Summer ice extent has “nothing to do with polar bear health or survival.” Spring ice conditions are what matter most to all polar bear populations. It’s the time of year they spend fattening up for the upcoming summer.http://climatechangedispatch.com/plentiful-arctic-spring-ice-helping-polar-bears-thrive-despite-misleading-news/Posted on 14 Oct 2017 by Iowa Climate Science EducationDay 285 Arctic sea ice extent has been increasing since the start of MASIE records in 2006. This year is fifth highest since 2006.fmasie_4km_allyears_extent_sqkm.csvMeanwhile, criminals in the press and scientific community continue to report the exact opposite of what the data shows.https://iowaclimate.org/2017/10/14/arctic-sea-ice-increasing-for-eleven-years/@ccdeditorArctic Sea Ice Volume Up 15% Over The Past Decade | The Deplorable Climate Science Blog ‪Arctic Sea Ice Volume Up 15% Over The Past Decade“In a new report published by London-based think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, zoologist Susan Crockford says that predictions that climate change is bringing about the demise of these iconic creatures have proven to be far from the mark.Dr Crockford’s report, published to mark International Polar Bear day, makes clear that although Arctic sea-ice has declined to levels not expected until 2050 and widely predicted to cause catastrophe for polar bears, their numbers have remained stable, or have even increased slightly. As she explains“Ice levels during the key feeding period in Spring have been good, and prey species have been abundant. It’s not really a surprise that polar bears are doing so well.”And in the Southern Beaufort Sea, the one area where polar bear numbers have fallen, the reason appears to be too much sea ice rather than too little.“The fearmongering from the media and the polar bear specialists is now backfiring”, says Crockford. “They convinced the world that polar bears were doomed but the facts got out. Now would be a good time to set the story straight”.The State of the Polar Bear Report 2017 summarizes clear, reliable and concise information on the current state of polar bears in the Arctic since 2014, relative to historical records.It highlights up-to-date data and research findings in a balanced and factual format that avoids hype and exaggeration. It is intended for a wide audience, including scientists, teachers, students, decision-makers and the general public interested in polar bears and Arctic ecology.”Here it is, in pdf form: State of the Polar Bear Report 2017Cite as: Crockford, S.J. 2018. State of the Polar Bear Report 2017. Global Warming Policy Foundation Report #29. London.Less Svalbard polar bear habitat during the early Holocene than nowPosted on April 21, 2018 | Comments Offon Less Svalbard polar bear habitat during the early Holocene than nowSvalbard in the western Barents Sea has recently had less sea ice extent than it had in the 1980s, especially in the west and north, but this is not unprecedented.New evidence from clams and mussels with temperature-sensitive habitat requirements confirm that warmer temperatures and less sea ice than today existed during the early Holocene period about 10.2–9.2 thousand years ago and between 8.2 and 6.0 thousand years ago (based on radio carbon dates) around Svalbard. Barents Sea polar bears almost certainly survived those previous low-ice periods, as they are doing today, by staying close to the Franz Josef Land Archipelago in the eastern half of the region where sea ice is more persistent.As this sea ice chart for 18 April 2018 shows, ice this month has been virtually absent from the west and north coasts of the Svalbard Archipelago, while Franz Josef Land to the east is surrounded by highly concentrated pack and land-fast ice.From a new paper by Jan Mangerud and John Svendsen (2018) [my bold]:Svalbard, located between 74° and 81°N, is the warmest place on Earth at this latitude (Drange et al., 2013). This is because of the North Atlantic Current and large-scale atmospheric circulation which transport warm water and air masses from lower latitudes northwards across the Atlantic and along the coast of Norway to Svalbard (Figure 1). Yet, during the Holocene Thermal Maximum, the climate of Svalbard was considerably warmer than at present.The transition from Younger Dryas cold to Holocene Thermal Maximum warm conditions took place very rapidly, according to records from nearby Greenland (Taylor et al. 1997), warming in “steps” of about five years each over a period of about 40 years. This was at last as fast, if not faster than, recent Arctic warming between the 1980s and 2015. And since polar bears of the Barents Sea and adjacent Arctic areas appear to have survived this change to Holocence Thermal Maximum conditions, it challenges the notion that recent warming has been (or will be) too fast to allow polar bears to survive without huge changes in their present distribution (Amstrup et al. 2007).The summer water temperature map from Mangerud and Svendsen (below) not only illustrates why western Svalbard is subject to periods of no or low sea ice in winter but why Franz Josef Land to the east (surrounded by near-zero temps (in blue), even in summer) is the perfect refugium for polar bears during low-ice years (Aars 2015; Aars et al. 2017; Andersen and Aars 2016; Barr 1985; Chernova et al. 2014; Descamps et al. 2017; Fauchald et al. 2014), see previous post here.Franz Josef Land provides the most stable sea ice habitat for Barents Sea polar bears because it is largely beyond the influence of warm water influxes from the North Atlantic.The schematic below from Mangerud and Svendsen shows the warm water incursions from the Atlantic flowing past the west coast of Svalbard at about 11 thousand years ago, when the Laurentide Ice Sheet still covered the eastern half of Canada and the northern US, excluding fish, seals and polar bears from most of Canadian Arctic and Hudson Bay.Here is the abstract from Mangerud, J. and Svendsen (2018) [my bold, link added]:“Shallow marine molluscs that are today extinct close to Svalbard, because of the cold climate, are found in deposits there dating to the early Holocene. The most warmth-demanding species found, Zirfaea crispata, currently has a northern limit 1000 km farther south, indicating that August temperatures on Svalbard were 6°C warmer at around 10.2–9.2 cal. ka BP, when this species lived there. The blue mussel, Mytilus edulis, returned to Svalbard in 2004 following recent warming, and after almost 4000 years of absence, excluding a short re-appearance during the Medieval Warm Period 900 years ago. Mytilus first arrived in Svalbard at 11 cal. ka BP, indicating that the climate was then as least as warm as present. This first warm period lasted from 11 to 9 cal. ka BP and was followed by a period of lower temperatures 9–8.2 cal. ka BP. After 8.2 cal. ka, the climate around Svalbard warmed again, and although it did not reach the same peak in temperatures as prior to 9 ka, it was nevertheless some 4°C warmer than present between 8.2 and 6 cal. ka BP. Thereafter, a gradual cooling brought temperatures to the present level at about 4.5 cal. ka BP. The warm early-Holocene climate around Svalbard was driven primarily by higher insolation and greater influx of warm Atlantic Water, but feedback processes further influenced the regional climate.”Survival of Barents Sea polar bears during low-ice years does not require emigration to another sea ice ecoregion or even another subpopulation area. The eastern Barents Sea (located in Russian territory), as defined by the Polar Bear Specialist Group (see map below), provides ample habitat for polar bears to thrive despite extended fluctuations in seasonal sea ice cover in the western portion. Although it must be frustrating for Norwegian researchers and their colleagues to see “their” bears abandoning Svalbard for Franz Josef Land because of recent low ice levels, they are not witnessing a biological catastrophe.Bottom line: Barents Sea polar bears are loyal to this region because the eastern portion has the habitat they require to thrive even when sea ice cover in the western portion essentially disappears for thousands of years at a time.aTaylor, K.C., Mayewski, P.A., Alley, R.B., Brook, E.J., Gow, A.J., Grootes, P.M., Meese, D.A., Saltzman, E.S., Severinghaus, J.P., Twickler, M.S., White, J.W.C., Whitlow, S., and Zielinski, G.A. 1997. The Holocene-Younger Dryas Transition Recorded at Summit, Greenland. Science 278:825-827. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/278/5339/825https://polarbearscience.com/2018/04/21/less-svalbard-polar-bear-habitat-during-the-early-holocene-than-now/See: Morano’s new book shoots to #1 at Amazon in 4 Categories! Climatology, Earth Sciences, Env. Science & Nature & EcologyThe book has also been getting extremely positive reviews with a nearly 5 star average at Amazon:Book Excerpt: – Chapter 5: The Ice Caps Are Melting!The Polar BearsThe photogenic polar bear has been the icon for the modern global warming movement. “They are looking for poster children,” explains geologist Bob Carter. “It suits that advertising purpose. It has nothing to do with science.” The fact is that polar bear populations are at or near historic highs. Scientists point out that the computer models predicting polar bear population collapse simply do not reflect reality or account for the adaptability of these animals. “Polar bears have survived several episodes of much warmer climate over the last 10,000 years than exists today,” evolutionary biologist and paleozoologist Susan Crockford of the University of Victoria explains. “There is no evidence to suggest that the polar bear or its food supply is in danger of disappearing entirely with increased Arctic warming, regardless of the dire fairy-tale scenarios predicted by computer models.” As her research shows, “Polar bears have not been harmed by sea ice declines in summer.” And so she rejects predictions of doom: “While the decline in ice extent is greatest in September, all evidence suggests this is the least important month of the year for polar bears—the yearly ice minimum in September occurs after the critical spring/summer feeding period, after the spring/summer mating period and well before the winter birth of cubs,” she added.The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has estimated that the polar bear population was as low as 5,000 to 10,000 bears in the 1950s and 1960s. A 2002 U.S. Geological Survey of wildlife in the Arctic Refuge Coastal Plain noted that the polar bear populations “may now be near historic highs.” And in 2016, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature estimated the current polar bear which according to Crockford is “the highest estimate in 50 years.”As Crockford wrote in 2016, “So far there is no convincing evidence that any unnatural harm has come to them. Indeed, global population size appears to have grown slightly since 1993, as the maximum estimated number was 28,370 in 1993 but rose to 31,000.”Climatologist Judith Curry has said, “It seems like the polar bears are doing well and have managed to evolve and adapt over a very long time. It’s not clear what we’re doing up in the Arctic that’s particularly jeopardizing them.”According to geologist Don Easterbrook, “There are five times as many polar bears now as they were in the 1970s so doesn’t look like they are hurting too much. And I can also tell you on a factual basis that the past 10,000 years we’ve had temperatures that were…a half to 5° warmer and Greenland and the polar bears survive[d] that so there’s not any problem now.”In 2008, scientists spoke out publicly against the polar bear climate fears and I wrote a report for the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. What follows is based up on that report.Award-winning quaternary geologist Ólafur Ingólfsson, a professor at the University of Iceland, has also rejected bear fears. “We have this specimen that confirms the polar bear was a morphologically distinct species at least 100,000 years ago, and this basically means that the polar bear has already survived one interglacial period,” said Ingólfsson, who has conducted extensive expeditions and field research in both the Arctic and Antarctic. “This is telling us that despite the on-going warming in the Arctic today, maybe we don’t have to be quite so worried about the polar bear,” he added.Biologist Matthew Cronin, a research professor at the School of Natural Resources and Agricultural Sciences at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, rejected climate fears as well. “Polar bear populations are generally healthy and have increased worldwide over the last few decades,” Cronin said.Biologist Josef Reichholf, who heads the Vertebrates Department at the National Zoological Collection in Munich is also skeptical of bear fears. “In warmer regions it takes far less effort to ensure survival,” Reichholf said. “How did the polar bear survive the last warm period? Look at the polar bear’s close relative, the brown bear. It is found across a broad geographic region, ranging from Europe across the Near East and North Asia, to Canada and the United States. Whether bears survive will depend on human beings, not the climate.”The Nunavut government in Canada is not concerned about the fate of polar bear populations. Territorial Environment Minister Daniel Shewchuk said, “Through direct consultation, [Inuit communities] are unanimous in their belief that polar bears have not declined…. Based on hunter observations, polar bears are presently still healthy and abundant across Nunavut—and for that reason, not a species of special concern.”The Los Angeles Times reported in 2012, “Doomsday predictions of the polar bear’s demise tend to draw an Inuit guffaw here in Nunavut, the remote Arctic territory where polar bears in some places outnumber people….Heart-rending pictures of polar bears clinging to tiny islands of ice elicit nothing but derision.”Internationally known forecasting pioneer J. Scott Armstrong of the Wharton School at the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania and his colleague, forecasting expert Kesten Green of Monash University in Australia, coauthored a January 27, 2008, paper with Harvard astrophysicist Dr. Willie Soon, which found that polar bear extinction predictions violate “scientific forecasting procedures.” As they explained, their “study analyzed the methodology behind key polar bear population prediction and found that one of the two key reports in support of listing the bears had ‘extrapolated nearly 100 years into the future on the basis of only five years data—and data for these years were of doubtful validity.”Polar bear expert Dennis Compayre, formerly of the conservation group Polar Bears International, who has studied the bears in their natural habitat for almost thirty years, weighs in. “I tell you there are as many bears here now as there were when I was a kid,” Compayre, author of the 2015 book on polar bears Waiting for Dancer, said. “Churchill [in Northern Canada] is full of these scientists going on about vanishing bears and thinner bears. They come here preaching doom, but I question whether some of them really have the bears’ best interests at heart.”Executive summary1. Polar bears are still a conservation success story: there are more polar bears now than there were 40 years ago.2. Fewer populations are in decline than in 2010(onlyone,of cially)andonlysix are data de cient (down from nine).3. Abrupt summer sea ice decline has not affected polar bear numbers as pre- dicted: even though sea ice levels dropped to mid-century levels in 2007, the expected decimation of polar bears failed to occur.4. The Chukchi Sea population is thriving, despite a pronounced lengthening of the ice-free season since 2007.5. Less sea ice in the summer in the Chukchi Sea has meant a healthy prey base for polar bears because ringed seals feed primarily in the ice-free season.6. Polarbearshaveshownthemselvestobeadaptabletochangingiceconditions in several regions.7. SouthernBeaufortnumbershavereboundedsincethelastsurveycount.8. Barents Sea numbers have probably increased since 2005 and have de nitely not declined, despite much less sea ice cover.9. There is no evidence that record-low summer sea ice in 2012 had a harmful effect on Southern Beaufort bear numbers.10. Other species are being negatively impacted by high polar bear numbers, es- pecially nesting sea birds and ducks.11.WesternHudsonBaypopulationnumbershavebeenstablesince2004,despite what scientists are telling the media.12. Hudson Bay sea ice has not changed since about 1999: the breakup dates and freeze-up dates are highly variable but the ice-free period was not any longer in 2015 than it was in 2004. However, this fall freeze-up is shaping up to be the earliest in decades.13. ProblembearsinChurchillarenotleanorstarving.14. ChurchillManitobahadthemostproblembearsin1983and2016,whichwere late freeze-up years, but many of the incidents in 2016 can be attributed to in- creased vigilance on the part of patrol of cers after an attack in 2013.15. There have been only marginal sea-ice declines during the feeding period in spring, when polar bears need sea ice the most.16. Theisnoevidencethatsubsistencehuntingisaffectingbearpopulations.17. StressfulresearchmethodshavebeencurtailedinmuchofCanada.ix18. Therehavebeennoreportsofpolarbearcannibalismsince2011.19. Polar bears appear unaffected by pollution: studies suggest only that harm is theoretically possible, not that it has happened.20. Polar bears have survived past warm periods, which is evidence they have the ability to survive future warm periods.Conclusion· Polar bears are thriving: they are not currently threatened with extinction.· Tens of thousands of polar bears did not die as a result of more than a decade of low summer sea ice, as was predicted.· Polar bears don’t need sea ice n late summer/early fall as long as they ar ewell- fed in the spring.·1 A conservation success story· Polar bears are still a conservation success story. With a global estimate almost certainly greater than 28,000, we can say for sure that there are more polar bears now than there were 40 years ago (Fig. 1). Sadly, although completing a global survey was one of the primary objectives of the Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG) at its inception 49 years ago, it has so far been unable to do so because at least four subpopulations have never been counted.https://polarbearscience.com

MILLIONS of people have been severely disabled (mentally and or physically) by mercury from dental amalgams, and this continues now. A huge pack of LIES has been used to cover this up. The subject gets censored (removed) from various websites. You can see the full research into this in free Chapter 3 at Experts Catastrophe - the catastrophe of official medical charlatanism where you can also see the list of all the references cited below here.However, as Quora prefers long answers to short ones, I'll see how much I can copy in here for you. But I'll first mention that mercury has numerous different effects on brain and body, depending on (a) timing, (b) dose, (c) form of mercury, (d) genetic disposition, (e) interacting factors. My own "peer-reviewed" published evidence also indicates that (in moderation) it causes higher IQ. Furthermore, mercury poisoning expert AH Cutler independently came to the same conclusion as myself, that the current epidemic of "snowflakes" trying to shut down anyone who disagrees with them has also been caused by mercury poisoning. Incandescent anger at divergent viewpoints is one of the most characteristic symptoms of mercury poisoning. I should know because I was there myself in a former life. There is quite a lot more evidence than this answer here will fit in.Oh, and it is all very carefully formatted in the actual book chapters pdfs, whereas here it is a bit of hit and hope.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Before reading this chapter I recommend that you read the first two chapters of this book. Otherwise you may come to it with considerable misconceptions which could make for difficult and unproductive reading here.The main content of this chapter is a scientific paper. I wrote it with the intention of it being accepted in a scientific journal, and so you might find it rather turgid reading and with too many of those citations such as (Authorname, 2012) intruding into my florid prose. On the other hand one journal editor condemned it for (supposedly) appearing to be written like a newspaper article, so maybe there’s hope for non-academic readers nevertheless.You may be wondering whether you can have the competence to make any useful judgement of the soundness or credibility of this article. Wouldn’t the experts perhaps point out all manner of hidden things wrong with it? But I am providing you with a special resource here. In the next two chapters, you can see the world’s top experts telling me (off the record) the reasons why this article is such rubbish that you shouldn’t even be informed of its existence anyway. I suggest that you study those critiques and my rejoinders to them, and (as is always necessary eventually) then decide for yourself who if anyone has the more credibility. I can’t print the re-rejoinders from these experts because none have replied back. Perhaps you could write to these journals yourself to ask them why you shouldn’t be persuaded by what I said in my own replies.Scientific papers normally end with a list of the references cited. In this book I will transfer this paper’s reference list into the list at the end of the book. But this article is unusual in that it contains an appendix which itself contains three further lists of references. I will leave those in place just as they were present in the original documents contained in that appendix. Other than that, what follows after this paragraph is the most updated version of the manuscript I have sent to now eighteen journals. It is usual for scientific papers to begin with a summary called an “abstract”. This gives an overview for those who don’t already have the full text, but may be hard as a non-specialist to follow until you have read that full text, and you shouldn’t let yourself get bogged down by this one here. Also this chapter contains some graphs of disability epidemiology. If you are not already a wizard with such graphs, you may find it useful to jump forward to the section of Chapter 6 which discusses some misuses and abuses of similar sorts of graphs. Lastly, the “p<“ values stated herein indicate the probability of obtaining that result due to random chance.(NOTE: AT NO POINT HAVE I EVER SAID THAT ALL AUTISM IS CAUSED BY MERCURY OR AMALGAMS – See Chapter 7!)Autism, adult disability, and ‘workshy’: Major epidemics being caused by non-gamma-2 dental amalgamsRobin P ClarkeAbstract: It is unknown to most people that the dental amalgams which have been used as standard in recent decades, namely non-gamma-2 dental amalgams, have been substantially unlike those used before the 1970s, in that they constantly emit 20 to 50 times more mercury vapor than the older types. This is the first-ever study of health consequences of non-gamma-2. Following the changeover to non-gamma-2 amalgams, there promptly began a tenfoldish increase of autism, a tenfoldish change of ratio between late onset and early onset, a change from mainly genetic to mainly environmental, and a change from lifelong incurable to sometimes clearly recoverable. Exactly simultaneously there occurred a fourfoldish increase of claims for adult disability in the UK, with disabilities all or mostly of the nature that would be expected from chronic mercury poisoning (including mental disabilities and neurological disabilities). And similarly in the US. These timings cannot be dismissed as coincidence because there are no credible alternative explanations for the increases. Data strongly suggests that non-gamma-2 amalgams are currently by far the main cause of chronic disability in the UK, US, and other such countries, with about 10% of the UK working-age population disabled thereby.An experiment on millions of dis-informed subjectsDental amalgams in patients’ teeth constantly emit mercury vapor, and that vapor is easily measureable. This has been known for decades as indicated in at least 18 published studies (Berglund, 1993; Berglund et al., 1988, Boyer, 1988; Brune et al., 1983; Clarkson et al., 1988; Ferracane et al., 1995; Mackert, 1987; Mahler et al., 1994; Moberg, 1985a, 1985b; Olsson et al., 1989; Olsson and Bergman, 1987; Patterson et al., 1985; Psarras et al., 1994; Svare et al., 1981; Vimy and Lorscheider, 1985a, 1985b, 1990).And yet in stark contradiction of all this clearly established basic science, the UK’s Chief Dental Officer (2009) has publicly asserted, as some supposed fact, that dental amalgams do not constantly emit any mercury vapor (or in his second thoughts on being challenged, at least “not measureably”).Such mercury vapor has been recognised for centuries as one of the most toxic of substances, causing various mental, neurological and physical disabilities. For more than a hundred years prior to the 1970s, strong condemnations were regularly issued against the use of amalgam in dentistry. These warnings were consistently ignored by health authorities, and dismissed with claims that there was no real evidence of harmfulness.Much further evidence of harmfulness of dental amalgam has come to light in recent decades (Mutter, 2011; Hanson, 2004; Homme et al., 2014), not least in thousands of cases of improvement following amalgam removal which cannot be dismissed as merely anecdotal or placebo. Some relatively large-scale trials have been asserted to show amalgam safety, but they have been substantially flawed and in at least one case in reality showed harmfulness rather than safety (as explained by Mutter, 2011 and Homme et al., 2014).In the 1970s a new type of dental amalgam was introduced as the new standard, partly on the basis that it was very much more durable, with far less tendency to corroding and crumbling. This new type was called non-gamma-2.These non-gamma-2 dental amalgams constantly emit 20 to 50 times more of the toxic mercury vapor than the older types (Berglund, 1993; Boyer, 1988; Brune et al., 1983; Ferracane et al., 1995; Mahler et al., 1994; Moberg, 1985a, 1985b; Psarras et al., 1994). The amalgam constantly emitting this neurotoxic mercury vapor is located in a person’s mouth, less than two inches from their brain, and in the pathway to the lungs (where 80% is absorbed at each inhalation). Any notion that the levels of mercury vapor caused by amalgams are very low has to be put in the context of the general outdoor levels being many times lower still at around 0.002 mcg/m3.No safety testing was undertaken before or after it was introduced. Patients and the public in general have still not been informed of the change, let alone of the increased levels of mercury involved. No informed consent has been sought, and no warnings have been given of any possible harmfulness. Indeed, throughout the US it was actually made illegal for dentists to issue such warnings, and Hal Huggins and other dentists were struck off the register of practitioners for doing so.In the UK, a number of untruths were adopted by the NHS and DH such as to prevent people being diagnosed with mercury toxicity and to thereby further reduce any concern about risk. The following untruths have been identified by the author, but it is unlikely that they have been the only ones.1. Untrue assertion that “Chronic mercury poisoning is highly unlikely to present in a psychiatric setting”.2. Use of proven useless urine tests for supposed (dis-) diagnosis of chronic mercury poisoning.3. Use of proven useless blood tests for supposed (dis-) diagnosis of chronic mercury poisoning.4. Chief Dental Officer’s untrue assertion that “no mercury vapor” emits from amalgams, or alternatively “not measureably”.5. Chief Dental Officer’s untrue denial that amalgams are the main source of mercury in the body.6. NHS Chief Executive’s re-insistence on the untruth that dentists have capability for mercury diagnosis whereas doctors do not.The existence of these untruths is authenticated via my Freedom of Information requests as documented partly in an Appendix hereto and more fully via dental mercury falsehoodsDates of introduction and usageNon-gamma-2 amalgams are very much more durable than the previous types. Consequently, declining rates of amalgam install-ation would conceal an increase of prevalence of the amalgams in patients’ mouths. And it is here expected that the key variable would be that rising prevalence rather than the declining rate of installations and replacements.A number of US patents for non-gamma-2 were granted in the mid-1970s. The famous US dentist Hal Huggins states that the changeover to “high copper”, i.e. non-gamma-2, occurred in 1976. In 1986 the ISO standard was changed retrospectively to incorporate them. The non-gamma-2 amalgams took over in the period 1975-79 in Denmark (Hansen et al., 1993). In Germany the use of the earlier types was banned in 1992, making the non-gamma-2 the only option. And according to the manufacturer’s product sheet, Dispersalloy is the most widely used amalgam with over 25 years of proven performance, i.e., since before 1979, but perhaps after their 1974 patent no. 3841860.I have been unable to obtain any numerical data on usage or total prevalence of non-gamma-2 in people’s mouths. The DH have told me they have no such records. And NHS dental records have not recorded the types of amalgam used. It is unlikely that any better information is available in other countries. But we can very reasonably assume that the overall prevalence of non-gamma-2 will have gradually, progressively increased in the decades following its introduction.My epidemiological investigationsHaving become aware of the changeover to non-gamma-2 amalgams, I decided to look to see if there might be epidemiological evidence of any consequences. It appears that no-one has ever done this before.In respect of the following accounts it is important to understand that I have not cherry-picked selected data to prove any point, but instead have used all the best data readily available to me.To avoid undue length here, the reader is referred to consult prior reviews of substantial important other data pointing to similar conclusions as those here, including Hanson (2004), Mutter (2011), Geier et al. (2010), Homme et al. (2014), and others not specifically cited..Is mercury involved in causation of autism?Before presenting the epidemiological findings it will be useful to first show the context of existing evidence from clinical studies on this question.A number of reviews have suggested there is persuasive evidence that mercury is importantly involved in causing of autism (Geier et al., 2010; Bernard et al., 2001; DeSoto and Hitlan, 2010; Kern et al., 2012). And yet the evidence can be shown to be far more decisive than any of these suggest, and indeed beyond all reasonable doubt.In any combinatory review of studies it is necessary firstly to rule out those which lack a sound rationale. A number of studies have used blood mercury or urine mercury as criterion measures, and yet it has been known for decades that these lack merit as indicators of chronic mercury toxicity. Indeed, the most prominent such study, Hertz-Picciotto et al. (2010), stated in its second-last sentence that: “This report did not address the role of prenatal or early-life Hg exposure in the etiology of autism” [i.e., the study could not provide any evidence against causation by mercury].Another danger in meta-reviewing of studies is the merging together of data which should be kept separate. In respect of mercury in autistics’ hair, the most enlightening study is that of Majewska et al. (2010). They found that in younger children autism was associated with markedly decreased hair mercury (p<0.01), whereas in older children autism was associated with markedly increased hair mercury (p<0.01). If they had just lumped all their results together they would have got an entirely unwarranted “no difference” non-result instead. Viewed in the light of Majewska et al, all or most of the other hair mercury studies fall into a coherent pattern. There are several which have smudged together the different ages and therefrom invalidly declared non-results. Meanwhile others strongly reinforce the notion that there are real effects.Holmes et al. (2003) obtained an eightfold difference of mercury in hair, with significance level of 1 in 250,000 (p<0.000004). Some commenters dismiss that study on a basis that it was done by opponents of mercury, and “therefore” their results may have been biased or fraudulent. But one would have expected any bias or fraud to result in a finding that hair mercury was increased in autistics, as that would have been in accordance with the standard rationale for diagnosing toxin exposure from increased hair measurements. They found instead 8﷓fold reduced levels, which strongly suggests that they were instead acting competently and honestly. Their rational-ising notion of paradoxical reductions of measurements in mercury toxic subjects has since been supported by much other evidence that mercury sometimes impairs its own excretion.A study in India (Lakhshmi Priya and Geetha, 2010) found 8-fold increased hair mercury (p<0.001). Another in Kuwait (Fido and Al-Saad, 2005) found 15-fold increased hair mercury (p<0.001).Bradstreet et al. (2003) found that a challenge test with the chelating agent DMSA caused a release of mercury 3.15 times greater in autistic cases than in controls (p<0.0002). That is a 1 in 5000 probability that that excess mercury was just a fluke.The probability of just these results listed above being all due to mere chance is 1/5000 x 1/250000 x 1/100 x 1/100 x 1/1000 x 1/1000, that is one in 12,500,000,000,000,000,000, vastly beyond the standard of proof ever required in any criminal prosecution.And far more than one negative result is required to call into question one significantly positive result. There are far more ways of making a “negative” car that does not move than of making a “positive” one that does. I and thousands of others have lived in the UK for many years and never seen the Queen in all that time, and yet that does not constitute significant grounds for dismissing the testimony of those who claim she has existed. If there were in reality no mercury-autism connection there should be a huge pile of “no-difference-found” results among which these high-significance results would be a small minority. But there is no such pile of null results to speak against the mercury-autism connection.One could seek to interpret all those results with a notion that there could be an unknown factor which both causes autism and also harmlessly causes mercury to vary in hair and other tissues. But that notion is brought into question by the extensive commonalities between autism and mercury toxification (Kern et al., 2012). And it is completely demolished by the observations of the Autism Research Institute which has for decades been surveying the effectiveness of many potential treatments for autism. Of more than 80 treatments tested, the ARI has found that one of the most effective has been removal of mercury by careful chelation. And Blaucok-Busch et al. (2012) obtained highly-significant behavioral improvements even with the rather poor Hg chelator DMSA (p<0.001; p<0.001; p<0.001).Meanwhile, three studies have been promoted as supposedly disproving any mercury-autism thesis. The study by Ip et al. (2004) was shown to be riddled with arithmetical errors, and in reality indicated that there was indeed a mercury connection (DeSoto and Hitlan, 2010). Likewise Soden et al. (2007) actually proved the opposite (DeSoto and Hitlan, 2010). And Hertz-Picciotto et al. (2010) stated in their own second-last sentence that their study did not address causation of autism by prenatal or early-life mercury exposure. Such falsely proclaimed studies are all that stands in supposed defiance of that astronomically large number calculated above. There is even more evidence that merits mention here but it would be superfluous. We can resolutely conclude that mercury is now a major cause of autism. [Updates: Autism association with prenatal SSRI use (Harrington et al., 2014) = amalgam causes both depression of mother and autism of baby. Widespread reports of seizures in 1/3 of autistics = perinatal mercury causes both autism and seizures (Szasz et al., 2002; Klinghardt, 1998).]Increased autism?In academic papers and elsewhere, certain myths about autism are constantly portrayed as self-evident truths, so they must be addressed here. Firstly, the human race does not divide into those “with” autism and those “without” it, or those “on the spectrum” and those “not on the spectrum”. Rather, there is a continuum of variation in the extent to which individuals are more or less autistic (in varying ways). Secondly, there is no scientific basis for a distinction between autism and Asperger’s. It was merely a historical accident that Kanner and Asperger made simultaneous rediscoveries of the syndrome described by JL Down in 1887. Thirdly, there is no scientific basis for the routine references to autism as a “disorder”. Autism can be severely disabling, is often terribly distressing, and may often be a consequence of a disorder (such as maternal infection), but rather than a disorder it is properly considered to be just atypicality (as is genius). [This is now more fully discussed in Chapter 2.]Some researchers with decades of direct experience, such as Bernard Rimland and Lisa Blakemore-Brown, have been of the view that there has been a substantial increase of autistic behaviors, and not just increase of diagnoses.[Update for this book: Significant further discussion of the increase “controversy” is contained in Chapter 2 in the section “The autism increase controversy” (page 68), just before the appendix to that chapter, and also majorly in Chapter 12 and pages 188-189.]The NHS has published a report claiming to show that there has not been any increase, by supposedly showing the prevalence of autism among older adults to be the same as in children (Brugha, 2011). The report detailed the elaborate measures taken to ensure reliability of the autism assessments. And yet it gave no details at all of any measures taken to ensure the validity, that is the (infinitely more important) comparability of the diagnostic procedures as applied to adults relative to applied to children. The reason there were no such details is because there was no way of establishing such validity. And in absence thereof, such a study proves nothing about changing prevalence of autism. I myself have direct knowledge of two older persons given baseless diagnoses of autism by this same NHS that proclaims as expertise the untruths listed on a preceding page here.The Autism Research Institute has a uniquely extensive historical database of cases. Figure 1 [here 3.1] is my re-plot of a graph published by the Autism Research Institute of its own records. Figure 2 shows my extraction from Figure 1 of the time-series of case ratios between late and early onset. Before 1980, onset at birth was twice as frequent as onset in the second year (i.e. regressive autism), whereas after 1990 the later onset rose to become five times more frequent than the onset at birth. The switch-over began at the end of the 1970s and was well under way by 1990. It closely related with the apparent increase of autism illustrated in Figure 3 and elsewhere. Figure 3 shows the data from the California DDS 2003 report (2003), with the earlier 1999 report (1999) (1998 data) re-calculated to the same basis.[Note added to book chapter version: Figure 3 also shows what mathematicians call an exponential increase curve; basically it gets increasingly steeper exactly in proportion to the higher it gets.](Please see free Chapter 3 at Experts Catastrophe - the catastrophe of official medical charlatanism for the graphs, until such time as I can sort out converting them to a form that will load to here. These four graphs are at pages 86 and 87. Also note the free tutorial about use and misuse of such graphs in free Chapter 6.)Fig. 3.1. “U.S. Cases: Autistic children who behaved normally before 18 months vs. those with no normal period.” From Rimland (2000) (replotted)Fig. 3.2. Data from Figure 1 here used to show the changing ratio of cases in respect of age-of-onset. A further datum is from Mrozek-Budzyn et al. (2009) p.109.Fig. 3.3. Autism enrolment in California.Fig. 3.4. Concurrence of California data of Figure 3.3 with total autism implied in Figure 3.2 if onset at birth is assumed to have constant incidence of one unit.In Figure 4 I have added together the two series of Figure 2 such as to give a nominal “total autism” curve based on an assumption that onset at birth has had constant prevalence during those years, and that early onset cases plus late onset cases equals total autism. Figure 4 shows that the increase curves of Figure 3 peculiarly coincided in time with the ratio-change curve of Figure 2. This enables substantial confidence that the conceptually independent Figures 2 and 3 are tracking exactly the same causal phenomenon.The late-onset, regressive autism is much more difficult to overlook than the at-birth autism, as parents are baffled by the regression of their children. Any under-awareness would not have been concentrated on those late-onset cases. And yet it is those which have increased about tenfold, not the more overlookable early-onset. So this data argues against interpretation in terms of mere changing of awareness or diagnostic thresholds. And it cannot be dismissed as due to demise of the diagnosis of “childhood schizophrenia”, because ARI’s survey questionnaire asked about age of onset rather than presumed about it, and indeed the ARI was neutrally called the “Institute for Child Behavior Research” until 1991.These curves strongly suggest that the autism increase was caused by something that started having an effect on children around the end of the 1970s and also caused a tenfold change of ratio of late-onset cases relative to early onset.An overview of autism trends in the US and UK found essent-ially the same trends of increase in both areas and in respect of both autism and “autism spectrum disorders” (Blaxill, 2004). Information about other capitalist countries has been less systematic, but generally similar trends appear to prevail. In respect of Sweden, Gillberg’s three prevalence studies in Gothenburg (Stehr-Green et al., 2003) could have been plotted into Figure 3, but they would have collided impressively with the California data. The data of Denmark is rich in potential for confusion but the careful analysis by Goldman and Yazbak (2004) shows an increase from at least about 1987 onwards. Likewise, the general observation in the other countries is that there has been an increase in recent decades. And the age-of-onset data in Figure 2 follows the same pattern too. (The notion of Bernard (2003) that autism decreased in Denmark after removal of mercury from vaccines is misfounded for various reasons partly explained by Hviid (2004).)So there is here a simple thing to be explained, seemingly beginning around the end of the 1970s.In 1993 there was published “A theory of general impairment of gene-expression manifesting as autism” (Clarke, 1993) (the antiinnatia theory). It remains unchallenged in reasoning and evidence, and unrivalled as the only comprehensive fully satisfact-ory explanation of the supposed mystery of autism. Martha Herbert has recently been arguing that autism is not a brain/behavior condition but rather “whole body”, and also not essentially genetic or developmental and fixed. But the antiinnatia theory already embodied all those notions decades ago.The theory also specified circumstances in which autism would change from a mainly genetic condition to a mainly environmental one. Autism has now indeed markedly changed to a mainly environmental causation (Hallmayer et al., 2011).The 1993 paper made no mention of mercury or an increase of autism (which was only vaguely becoming apparent at the time of writing it). But it did explicitly explain why molecules which randomly, dose-dependently bind to DNA and thereby reduce gene-expression would thereby cause autism. Mercury is now known to do exactly that binding and reducing at levels far below those producing other toxic effects (Ariza et al., 1994; Goyer, 1991; Rodgers et al., 2001; Walter and Luck, 1977).A preceding section here has shown the decisive recent evid-ence of major involvement of mercury in many autistic cases. And thimerosal in vaccines cannot have been a main source of that mercury, for reasons explained in [Chapter 6]. So the question arises of:where else is the source of the mercury that is now so strongly associated with most autism.An update review of the antiinnatia theory was written in 2004-2006, and showed confirmation of various peculiar predictions [Update: including Clarke (2015)], and explained the amalgam-autism causation more fully. But almost all medical researchers have a false presumption about theories, whereby “skepticism” (in reality a prejudice against new ideas) is supposedly a characteristic of intellectual superiority (Eysenck, 1995). And “peer review” systems block from effective publication any ideas that are more than routinely original (Eysenck and Eysenck, 1992).Because readers are deprived of that update review I will outline here just a few of its important points. (1) Many mothers keep their infants close by at all times, and many people keep their homes very unventilated, even installing draught-proofing. The new prediction that autism would be associated with lack of ventilation (of the mercury vapor breathed out by parents or carers then inhaled by infants) has already found significant accidental confirmation (Waldman et al., 2008). (2) The antiinnatia theory points to causation not so much like an overdose “hammer-blow” but rather more like a sustained suppression of genetic data, and thus the every-day inhalation of mercury would be much more impactful than occasional large injections. (3) The tenfold change to predominantly later onset is explained by gradual accumulation when infants regularly inhale the vapor. (4) Any persons who dismiss the antiinnatia theory must logically be supporting one of a handful of utterly absurd alternatives, and this author requests that such “skeptics” kindly state which ones they find so credible: (i) “anti-innatia factors don’t tend to produce biological advantageousness”; (ii) “they don’t exist anyway despite their experimental demon-stration” (genuine flat-earthers will prefer that one); (iii) “they would not tend to become excessive”; (iv) “excess would not manifest as autism”.Some studies have found positive associations between maternal dental amalgams and autism (Holmes et al., 2003; Geier et al., 2009). There have also been some seemingly conflicting findings, such as Adams et al. (2008) compared to Holmes et al. (2003). But rather than concluding from these that the whole mercury or amalgam theories are unsound, or that there has been falsification or error, we may better understand them as reflecting a fact that autism is far from being simply “a novel form of mercury poisoning”, and instead other factors impact in ways not yet known. Even the causation of autism by amalgam vapor alone would be complicated by variables of ventilation, parental habits, galvanic contacts in the mouth, genetics and epigenetics, intake of protective selenium, and other intakes and exposures. That complexity could explain why small cross-sectional studies have given inconsistent results. And meanwhile the time-series data shown in the charts here reflects varying levels of non-gamma-2 applied to whole populations, such that all those confounding variables are evened out, which explains why they show a clear association with the growing prevalence of the non-gamma-2 in adults’ mouths.Increased adult disability?In 2010 I heard on BBC Radio a claim by a government minister that “There certainly hasn’t been a threefold increase of disability”. This suggested to me that perhaps there had indeed been an increase of adult disabilities, threefold or even greater.On investigating this possibility, the most extensive data I could obtain was a chart on page 9 of pathways-presentation.pdf, (DWP, no date a) and online data timeseries (DWP, no date b) from the DWP’s website.(Please see these graphs at page 91 of free Chapter 3 at www.pseudoexpertise.com)Figure 3.5. Autism enrolments (DDS) in California compared with UK adult invalidity benefits claims granted (excluding short-term lower-rate cases and excluding claims denied for policy reasons of “caseload growth now controlled”)Figure 3.6. Autism enrolments under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)I then took the Figure 4 chart from my (long-obstructed) autism theory update review draft, and removed my data-series derived from age-of-onset ratio-change, leaving only the two data-series of autism enrolment in California. I then added in the data of granted invalidity benefits from the DWP’s chart. I used only zero-baselines, so as to not to misuse the statistics to create artificial alignments. All I did was set the righthand scale such that the first datum of the invalidity benefits data was level with the autism data at that same year, 1979.This showed a close relationship of timing between the two, as shown in Figure 5 here.At this point it will be useful to show you a second chart of the autism increase, this time a different administrative database (IDEA rather than DDS) and covering the whole US, namely Figure 6. This is a more complex graph, with each data-series representing a different age at recording of the cases.With the increasing of age, fewer children from any particular birth-year cohort remain undiagnosed. So in respect of each year on Figure 6, the highest datum is the most accurate estimate to date of the real underlying level. And the falling off at the top of the latest years is due to diagnoses not yet being made.The first important thing that this chart of IDEA data shows is that the increase has been a remarkably uniform exponential sort of curve, with just a moderate decrease of slope after 1992. The other curves, from the California DDS data, can be understood as showing what would be a similarly uniform exponential, but distorted by noticeable “noise” due to smaller samples or mislaid records.Another important thing to understand about all these curves is that we are not here counting clear distinct things like apples or oranges. The number of people granted invalidity benefits in a particular year is a precisely-known integer, but the underlying number of people who were more or less “disabled” is necessarily a debatable, fuzzy one. Likewise with the autism numbers, and this goes some way to explaining why these two autism databases (DDS and IDEA) show significant discrepancies, most obviously in the starting levels before the increase. So we must understand that none of these curves document validly exact measurements of the underlying pathologies in their vertical scales. And therefore we should not be looking for particularly close alignments in the vertical scales; and if we do find such precision it should be considered largely a fluke. Also there is a lack of numerical data on usage or total prevalence of non-gamma-2 in people’s mouths.But these charts nevertheless do give an accurate document-ation on the horizontal scale, of the timing of the increases and of the form of the increases (i.e. not one big jump over a couple of years). And the four series (DDS, IDEA, onset ratio, and invalidity claims) show closely similar timing, of an increase that was gently starting off just before 1980, and then accelerating rapidly through the 1980s and well into the 1990s.Meanwhile, there is also a weight of other facts attesting to the reality of an increase of invalidity.The symptoms of chronic mercury vapor poisoning have been known for centuries, and include most especially all manner of mental and neurological disturbances, but also a variety of other symptoms. The wide variability of the presentation is easily under-stood in terms of the effects of mercury as a general anti-anti-oxidant, and as an antagonist to zinc thereby disrupting hundreds of enzymes, and also binding to the body’s own proteins thereby causing the immune system to identify them as alien and thereby producing auto-immune reactions.Page 14 of pathways-presentation.pdf gives an analysis of diagnoses of the claimants. It shows that 83% of cases are accounted for by those categories especially readily attributable to amalgam illness:Mental disorder 35%Nervous system 10%Musculo-skeletal* 22%Others** 16%(* Which could be mostly fibromyalgia, a modern “mystery” illness commonly sharing features of typical amalgam illness and often cured by amalgam removal.)(** An all-too-likely official label for cases of the amalgam illness which officially does not exist.)[Book update: In David Brownstein’s book Overcoming thyroid disorders, he quotes Dr Derry saying: “Chronic fatigue and fibro-myalgia were non-existent before 1980. So where did these two new diseases come from?” Errm.... no idea, please tell me, folks.]Further evidence supports the reality of the increase. I web-searched for the minister’s words “been a three-fold increase in disability” and found instead that in Finland 1987-1994 there was a threefold increase of disability pensions granted in respect of affective disorders (mainly depression) (Salminen et al., 1997), which is one of the most common effects of amalgam illness.And the disability claimants are now being regularly character-ised by ministers and propagandists as “workshy”, “bogus”, or merely making a “lifestyle choice” of fraudulent leisure.In 2010, the government minister Mark Harper declared on BBC Any Questions that “There are definitely some people in this country—and everyone in every community knows who they are—who are perfectly able to work, and don’t.” and then reiterated with “Everybody knows them, able-bodied people with no barriers to work who choose not to.”Another government minister, George Osborne, asserted that there were a sizeable number for whom claiming disability was a “lifestyle choice”.Meanwhile we are also being told that immigrants are subst-antially more hardworking than the natives of the UK, who appear by contrast to be “workshy”. And indeed employers confirm such a difference.In the real world of disability, the effects of adult mercury vapor poisoning can be far from obvious to “everyone in every community”. As stated in the book Amalgam Illness by Andrew Hall Cutler, at page 78, “Extremely poisoned patients do not look as sick as they are …. they make adequate adrenaline during the stressful time and perform. Then they collapse for a long time while nobody is around.” And at page 13, “One very important note: the patient looks a lot healthier than he is…..It is important to keep in mind that the patient may look well during appointments and yet be unable to conduct day-to-day activities, as well as be experiencing great discomfort on an ongoing basis.”And note also the following 1926 account by the famous chemist Alfred Stock of his own mercury vapor poisoning. Note how easily it could be “known” to be “workshy” were it not that the author was a notable professor.“Mental weariness and exhaustion, lack of inclination and ability to perform any, particularly mental, work, and increased need for sleep. …. My memory, which had previously been excellent, left more and more to be desired and became worse and worse until, two years ago, I suffered from nearly complete memory loss….. I forgot the content of the book or theater play I had just read or seen as well as my own work, which had been published. ….. Obstacles, which formerly I would have overlooked smilingly (and am overlooking again today), seemed insurmountable. Scientific work caused great effort. I forced myself to go to the laboratory without being able to get anything useful accomplished in spite of all efforts. Thought came laboriously and pedantically. I had to deny myself working on solutions to questions beyond the nearest tasks at hand. The lecture that used to be a pleasure became a torture. The preparations for a lecture, the writing of a dissertation, or merely a simple letter caused unending effort in styling the material and wrestling with the language.” (translated by Birgit Calhoun)(Stock, 1926)You can see from all the above that the characteristics ascribed to the allegedly bogus claimants are characteristics of mercury poisoning. With this understanding we can even account for the peculiar observations that workers from Eastern Europe and from more distant countries are found to be more “hardworking” than the native British, who by contrast are accused of being “workshy”. In fact a whole peculiar myth about normal human nature has been deployed here. Any normal healthy person, yourself for instance, would positively want to go out and do things rather than just lie in bed or slump in front of the tv all day every day. The normal healthy person would experience the latter prospect as more like a form of imprisonment than as an agreeable “lifestyle choice”.[[ Update for this book: Here are the words of Frank Field MP speaking on BBC Any Questions (Field, 2012):“London’s got the second highest youth unemployment, and yet it is the mecca for immigrants to come in and work. Now why is it that our schools produce people who cannot work or don’t work, as opposed to other people who at the very same time have work as part of their dna and the best thing in the world they want to do is to actually work? (loud applause).” [He then answers in terms of lazy racist white people, presumably with inferior dna, before continuing....]“It doesn’t take much money to get the kids to school on time, washed, clothed, breakfasted, and to school on time, and it is worrying that something is happening here...” [Indeed, and my own inability to get to the grammar school on time had nothing to do with my family’s shortage of money either.]And here are words about chronic fatigue syndrome from the book Plague (Heckenlively & Mikovits, 2014):“If this had been going on in the fifties and sixties, even if we had discarded it as psychiatric, it would have been written about, and [yet] it’s not in the literature.” ..... “How could we have possibly missed this disease for all these years?”. ....“....by the mid-1980s, distressed doctors and desperate patients had turned the disease into the top category of inquiry at both the CDC and public health departments ....”“Aided by a passive lay press, government scientists have sought to dismiss the disease by labeling sufferers with all manner of deficiencies and malevolent motives. That list has included malingering and cheating welfare systems, .... or people who [had] read about the disease and “wanted to have it”.“By 2009.... patients were denied not merely medical care, payouts on disability claims, and the emotional support that might have been forthcoming from family and friends had they suffered from a “real” disease,..... If they were children, they were denied educations ....” [like don’t I know myself, and see Chapter 8 here] ]]And furthermore, in reality almost all people are desperate to avoid becoming categorised as disabled, going to near-psychotic lengths of denial in the opposite direction. Few people would be pleased to be in any social context, with no better answer to a common question than: “I’ve been chronically disabled for the past five years (mentally rather than physically of course).” Virtually no-one in any society treats mentally disabled people as even near to being social or intellectual equals of themselves (in terms of marriage or educational opportunities for instance) (notwithstanding their pretentions to otherwise).An even greater catastrophe?Notably in line with the UK data, recipients of disability benefits in the US (SSI/SSDI) also increased more than twofold between 1987 and 2007.Here are some further facts. Figure 5 indicates a levelling off at 2.5 million claimants from 1995 onwards. But this must be put in the context of the words of the DWP document those figures came from. It was an internal discussion document about the “Personal Capability Assessment”, and its page 11 was headed “Caseload growth now controlled”. Translating those words from Officialese, they mean that there has been political resistance to the growth of disability claims, and that many thousands of persons genuinely disabled by DH recklessness have been denied the disability benefits they needed for survival, and that if the graph had reflected the real increase of disability it would not have levelled off, but instead would probably have surpassed more like 4 million by 2000 (which is about 10% of the UK’s working-age population). [Update August 2015: “Statistics [reluctantly] released by the DWP on Thursday revealed that 2,380 people died between December 2011 and February 2014 within 14 days of being taken off Employment and Support Allowance because a Work Capability Assessment had con-cluded they were able to work.” (Butler, 2015).][Update November 2015: 590 additional suicides linked to WCA reassessments (Barr et al., 2015; Benefits and Work, 2015).]And yet more. Four of the most characteristic symptoms of chronic mercury vapor poisoning are fatigue, depression, sleep disturbances, and poor memory. And surveys in recent years have found that now a gigantic proportion of the NON-claimant pop-ulation have these very symptoms, as follows.Depression:A survey of 2000 women and girls in England and Wales found 63% had been affected by mental health problems, having “a devastating impact on their lives”, and “48% experiencing mental health problems had stayed in bed or not left the house for a long period as a result” (Platform 51, 2011). Meanwhile, Colin Walker of Mind said his organisation’s research showed men and women experienced mental health problems such as depression and anxiety in roughly equal numbers (Hill, 2011).Insomnia:A report from the Mental Health Foundation (2011) states: “Only 38% of survey respondents (2522 people) were classified as ‘good sleepers’, whilst 36% were classified as possibly having chronic insomnia (2414 people). …. Other estimates of insomnia have put the total figure at around 30% of adults, …. although rates depend upon the criteria used to define it. Of the people reporting insomnia in the survey, over 30% have had insomnia for 2–5 years, and over 25% for over 11 years (figure 4).”The figure 4 in question then shows a distinctly bimodal distribution, in which the larger, longer-term, mode can be reasonably attributed to the effects of the dental amalgam toxicity.Fatigue:In a survey by Pharmaton (2010) in the UK, 24% said they are mentally or physically exhausted every day, 45% say they miss socialising due to tiredness, and 60% of the young are too tired to socialise, compared to 40% in 2002. And that is in line with the widespread experience that immigrants from less-developed countr-ies are substantially more “hardworking” than those who have grown up in the UK, who are conversely “workshy” as discussed on a preceding page here.Memory:Almost everyone nowadays wishes they had “better” memory, by which they mean more remembering rather than less. And yet contrary to the common assumption, memory is not something which natural selection would always be pressuring for more of (such as health or beauty). On the contrary, some persons (e.g. Solomon Shereschevsky) have had more memory than was actually useful for them. And history attests to the powerful memorising abilities of our ancestors.(This chapter continues on the next page.)Update 1All the preceding evidence here was suggesting to me an obvious further question, namely whether the original introduction of amalgams in the 19th century had caused an earlier increase of mental disabilities to the baselines shown here. Subsequent to my writing all the preceding, I learnt of the detailed historical review by Torrey & Miller (2002) of what was then called “insanity”, and the time-series graphs therein (at pages 94, 152, 188, 271, and frontispiece). In Figure 7 here I have re-plotted their data along with dates relating to the introduction of amalgam. Their book makes no mention of amalgam, or dentistry, nor of mercury as a possible cause of that increased morbidity. And yet their graphs show that rates of mental disability steadily increased from the original introduction of amalgams till a century later, by fourteenfold in Ireland and Canada, elevenfold in the US, and fivefold in the UK. These increases occurred in the context of vociferous contemporary condemnations of the use of amalgam due to its causing of mercury toxicity disabilities. The ASDS disbanded and the ADA replaced it because too many dentists preferred making quick profits from poisoning their patients with fillings deceitfully referred to as “silver”.Two curious observations on Figure 7. Firstly, the starting level being much higher in England/Wales, which could be because England was the first industrialised country, and with the main fuel both in houses and factories being mercury-emitting coal, besides which mercury was used for other purposes (such as hat-making). And indeed there is much reference in Torrey & Miller to insanity having been considered “the English disease”.Secondly, the ending level being much higher in Ireland, which could be because Ireland gets high rainfall from the Gulf Stream and consequently people are much more indoors and hence breathing in the amalgam mercury (as per my citation of Waldman et al earlier here). These two reality-harmonious observations suggest that these statistics reflect real increases rather than what some might construe as just some speculated mysterious spontaneous increase of awareness of what was then called insanity.And the Preface of their book states: “It has now been almost thirty years since one of us—E. Fuller Torrey—submitted a paper for publication suggesting that epidemic insanity was a recent phenomenon. .... The paper was summarily rejected by all journals .... and it was never published.... “.And then even my own copy of their extraordinary book had come from being dismissed from a library in Illinois.(Please see page 99 of free Chapter 3 at Experts Catastrophe - the catastrophe of official medical charlatanism for this next graph:)Figure 3.7. Insane persons in relation to the history of amalgams[Update 2 (added to this book chapter, August 2015)[missed out here, see book chapter for full].Conclusions and PredictionsIt is important to bear in mind here the further supporting data reviewed by Mutter (2011), Hanson (2004), Geier et al (2010), Homme et al (2014), and others.There are roughly two alternative viewpoints which may be reached from the data presented here. On the one hand there is a notion which entails that:(1) The heavy involvement of mercury in modern autism has nothing to do with the largest source of mercury input but instead is due to some other mysterious source or process.(2) And these graphs and other observations are mere coincid-ences in time.(3a) And either some mysterious unknown substance caused all these disabilities just so as to resemble the mercury symptoms that Mutter, Hanson, Geier, etc., have long been predicting anyway on entirely different evidence, and just happened to coincide at the right time to neatly confuse the author.(3b) Or there has been either a huge moral degeneration into “workshy” or else millions of people have enthusiastically embraced a “lifestyle choice” of living like a prisoner combined with the social leper dis-status of being mentally disabled, and furthermore these shirkers by some fluke just happened to be getting diagnosed with mercury symptoms even though they knew nothing about mercury toxicity, and by further impressive fluke so closely coincided with the increases of autism diagnoses and non-gamma-2 prevalence. And these “workshy” millions are somehow descendants of the people who hand-built the huge medieval cathedrals in a cold wet small island and then went on to create the largest empire (of hardworking foreigners) in history.(4) And a many-fold increase of mercury burden has not had any harmful effects on the millions thus burdened.(5) And the change of autism from life-long genetic to environmental and recoverable is just another of these mysteries.(6) And those gross untruths from the NHS just happened by fluke to all relate to preventing people getting diagnosed with mercury poisoning (two evidence-defying pseudo-tests, the “birds are highly unlikely to have wings” nonsense, the “see a dentist instead” - “see a doctor instead” nonsense, the review of my non-dental problems complaint exclusively by a dental panel with no toxicological or neurological expertise, the NHS’s own pseudo-study to pretend away the autism increase, and the Chief Dental Officer’s evidence-defying insistence that no mercury vapor comes off anyway).(7) And merely by yet another fluke Torrey’s graphs confirmed my suspicion that there would have been a previous increase of mental disabilities following the original introduction of amalgam 150 years earlier.(8) And merely by yet another fluke there is that observation that most mental disorders start in the 12-25 age-range.Alternatively there is a notion that non-gamma-2 amalgam has been the main cause of a tenfoldish increase of autism and a fourfoldish increase of adult disability including so-called “workshy”. It is the view of this author that this latter interpretation of the data strains credibility very much less than the former. It is hardly a surprising discovery given what Mutter, Hanson, and others have previously predicted on entirely different evidence already.And likewise the data of an increase in the 19th century cannot be lightly dismissed as “merely” coincidence. Some such increase was to be suspected by inference from the later non-gamma-2 data; it is scientifically explainable in terms of known mercury toxicity; and indeed it was very much pre-warned of already by ASDS members 170 years ago. And the ADA then adopted the propaganda language of “silver amalgams” by way of the ongoing cover-up. And I obtained that data from a very detailed review book which did not even mention dental or amalgam, so can hardly be dismissed as some sort of cherry-picking.Editors of putatively scientific medical journals have a duty to ensure that the public is not being kept unaware of evidence of possible serious harm from standard medical practices. It is a serious breach of ethics for such evidence as contained here to be refused publication other than for rigorously justified reasons. If there really are any serious faults in the case presented here, they should be openly published in the scientific literature rather than used as mere excuses to prevent the evidence being raised in the first place.It is here predicted that these increases will tend to correlate together in comparisons between different nations, due to the common causality. It is predicted that these epidemics will only be reversed by reduction of prevalence of non-gamma-2 in victims’ mouths. And meanwhile the risk of autistic disability can be reduced by ensuring adequate ventilation (in practice with a through draught at breathing-level).Appendix: Four Freedom of Information requestsPlease see the actual free book Chapter 3 for continuation - at Experts Catastrophe - the catastrophe of official medical charlatanismAND this is NOT the end of all the evidence by any means. Dental mercury poisoning is the greatest medical catastrophe in history and is the reason why I and you have been and still are constantly LIED to about it. It is almost impossible to get anything published about the subject. Nothing has EVER been published about the catastrophic health effects of non-gamma-2 unless you count this chapter here as being published.Cheers for reading so far and I would be interested to read your thoughts about it.