The Daily Caller tried to “debunk” the “myth” that a recent mass walrus beaching is connected to global warming, even though scientists say the walruses have crowded onshore because they cannot find a resting place on Arctic sea ice, which has declined significantly as the Earth warms. 

An October 1 Daily Caller article titled “Myth Debunked: Arctic Walrus Beachings Are Nothing New” promoted zoologist Susan Crockford's claims that a recent massive beaching of around 35,000 walruses on a single Alaskan shore has nothing to do with climate change. To support her claim, Crockford cherry-picked two instances of walrus beachings from the 1970s.

However, Biologist Anatoly Kochnev of Russia's Pacific Institute of Fisheries and Oceanography told NBC News that extended beachings of this size only began occurring in the late 1990s, adding: “The reason is global warming.”  Vox.com's Brad Plumer further reported that this “appears to be the largest ever observed in northern Alaska, though NOAA is still trying to verify the exact numbers.” The current beaching is so vast that the Federal Aviation Authority is re-routing flights in order to avoid setting off a stampede.

In six of the past eight years, all of the floating sea ice in the Chukchi Sea (the region of the Arctic near the current haul-out) that walruses need to rest in between swims has completely melted away by mid-September, according to Chadwick Jay, head of the U.S. Geological Survey's Pacific walrus program.

In the Daily Caller article, Crockford even noted that mass walrus beachings occurred in 2009, 2011 and 2014, but dismissed them simply because they “did not coincide with the lowest levels of Arctic summer sea ice” in 2007 and 2012.

However, every one of these years had much less Arctic sea ice than the historical average, contributing to the extended beachings.

And 2007 actually did experience a massive beaching, contrary to Crockford's claim.

Daily Caller's attempt to rebut what appears to be the consensus, that the massive walrus beaching is one example of climate change's impacts, relied entirely on Crockford. But Crockford may not be the most reliable source -- she has been working to attack the scientific consensus for years, once signing onto a document “rebuk[ing]” President Obama for accepting manmade global warming. A 2012 document from the climate “skeptic” Heartland Institute, which has received funding from oil interests, showed that Crockford was paid by the institute for the explicit purpose of combatting the United Nations' consensus reports on the state of climate science. She has co-authored several of Heartland's “Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change” (NIPCC) reports that attempt to mirror and debunk the U.N. reports. Climate scientist Kevin Trenberth has stated that the NIPCC reports have “no standing whatsoever.”