Ooops! Much-touted 2006 Polar Bear survey used by ESA to list them as ‘threatened’ …now invalidated

I am neither astonished or shocked, and I doubt whether many of your readers will be either. Inaccurate science leading to alarmist conclusions seems to be and to have been the order of the day.

And yet once again we see so-called scientists violate elementary rules of logic and statistics to further their alarmist agenda. How many such examples do we need before we come to the conclusion that all of “climate science” is corrupted beyond redemption?
I am reading Dr. Ball’s book “The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science” on this issue. Well worth getting on your Kindle or other e-reader.

To misquote MarkTwain/Benjamin Disraeli
Lies, damned lies and Environmentalism!

Maybee the Icebear ate an environmentalist and is having huge problems digesting the crap, bullshit and hot gas?

Liars lie. Who’d a thunk it?

So bears, Himalayan glaciers, Kilimanjaro, frog in South America, hockey stick, no warming for 17years six months, our children won’t know what snow is, tornados/hurricane decline……..
Wow, the predictions and causes of agw seem to have taken a battering,

Thousands of peer pal-reviewed studies have shown that polar bears lie;

/sarc. ( Is it really necessary)

“Polar Bears”……..putting so many “Ice-Holes” into the “Science” of “Global Warming”….using the THICK Antarctica Ice….. much to the recent chagrin of “The Stuck-The-Ice Climate Change Scientists”…………………

John V. Wright says:
March 25, 2014 at 3:03 am
Re Wills comment on the polar bear face palm – could Josh or someone add a ‘doh!’ speech bubble?

That’s easy.
http://oi57.tinypic.com/2mlcex.jpg

just goes to prove that you can’t do science on a computer, you need to get out and LOOK.

There are times when I would just love to put the fluffy cuddly bunny tree hugger brigade in a pit with a fluffy cuddly Polar bear that hasn’t eaten for a few days, & watch the result! They might just gain some modicum of respect for these creatures in context to their environment, & perhaps they may even gain some common sense, perhaps! But then again, I am not a violent nor aggressive person, unlike some of the fluffy cuddly bunny tree huggers!

Just a reminder. Canada’s recently appointed Minister of the Environment Leona Aglukkaq is from Nunavut. [Aglukkaq was born in Inuvik, Northwest Territories and raised in Thom Bay, Taloyoak and Gjoa Haven (formerly in the NWT but all three are now in Nunavut). ]
I doubt that she ever believed the BS on polar bears published by the Alarmists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leona_Aglukkaq
Also, the polar bears lived in Vancouver’s Stanley Park zoo for years where the temperature rarely went below freezing and zero ice.

DaveF @ 4:28 am says;
Oh no – They told us there were bear-ly any bears left; that they were bear-ly surviving! That there were none in the Bear-ing Strait! Now it turns out they were bear-faced lies? This is unbearable.
It’s the old & wise poley bears you need to worry about.

We learned yesterday that Arctic Ice vanished completely 6k yrs ago in the Holocene Max so the Polar Bear story must go something like this:-
1) Polar Bears can’t survive Ice Free conditions (Source: Al Gore- Inconvenient Truth)
2) Polar Bears are alive in the arctic now (Source: Numerous ind.verified sightings/D.Attenborough)
3) Ergo Polar Bears must have evolved in last 5k years or so
4) Damn…just when I thought I had evolution sussed…

It seems the polar bears are doing just fine. They didn’t go extinct 6000 years ago when there was far, far less ice, and they’re not going extinct.
If anything’s going extinct it’s common sense and scientific integrity.
Chris
If you and your friend are being chased by an angry polar bear, you don’t need to outrun the bear. You just need to outrun your friend.

Once again, skeptics are proven right:
Right on the facts and right to be skeptical of AGW claims and predictions.

This is not a surprise. They were trying to present the cute white fluffy polar bears as endangered, but could not officially do so, as to be classed as endangered, the species MUST satisfy a very strict criteria. To be “threatened” they do not have to have as strict a criteria. In fact, an increasing population could still be listed as threatened, due to habitat loss, if such a habitat were small enough and unique in the world.
But only in CAGW world could a population which has increased five fold in 60 years, inhabit a massive and natural and untouched habitat of several million square Kilometers, and still qualify as threatened, due to a political prediction of what may or may not happen a century from now.

So, an I to understand that when they conducted their population surveys, (over a tiny area, and then extrapolated the rest based on models stuffed with other flawed assumptions), that when they could not find any previously seen polar bears, that they simply assumed that they were dead? (killed by climate change) Did they really, not account for polar bears being migratory? Seriously?
That reminds me of the millions of animals (deer IIRC) north of the artic circle that scientists had thought disappeared, killed by climate change, a few years ago and were astonished when they appeared again. When they asked a local, he told them, “they move”.

Thanks, A. Good to know it was just part of the scam and that polar bears are doing OK; they are sooo cute!

What are the odds that the EPA will reverse the endangered finding?

Ooops…
Mod, please change the broken link to this…
https://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php?p=2&t=68&&a=87
…and delete this post.
Thanks

Now go to a warmist site and tell them the polar bear studies were screwed up and there is no decline in polar bear numbers.
They will call you a conspiracy nut and then go on and on about how the bears are nearly extinct, all the studies say so. And then there will be 150 posts about renewable energy.

Drought and flood. Heat and cold. Thick and thin snow pack. Now AGW causes polar bear populations to fall AND rise in yet another dazzling display of its mythical powers.

Truly astounding how much science is just models. Models and more models. These people never get off their fat arses and go get some data.

I always agree with them in the end that the Polar bear situation is terrible but what I’m really thinking is terrible, is just how successful propaganda can be.
http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2011/09/15/polar-bears-going-extinct-yawn/
Pointman

Who holds these so called scientists accountable? Mistakes like these people made should be grounds for stripping them of their credentials.

This kind of either sloppy science or agenda driven science seems in a higher gear with biologists. Thank goodness there are scientists like Jim Steele that save the science from oblivion.

Doesn’t matter. The alarmists will now say that man-made global warming is causing an INCREASE in polar bear populations, and that increase is BAD, because now seal populations are threatened. You see, it doesn’t matter which numbers you look at, or which way or how fast the numbers are changing, whatever is happening is happening because of global warming, and whatever is happening is most certainly VERY BAD. Heat waves? Man-made global warming. Blizzards? Man-made global warming. Decreasing ice in the Arctic? Man-made global warming. Increasing ice in the Antarctic? Man-made global warming. Drought? Man-made global warming. Floods? Man-made global warming. More huricanes? Man-made global warming. Fewer hurricanes? Man-made global warming (and also, fewer hurricanes is bad, for some reason which we will learn when they finally admit hurricane numbers are decreasing). Crop yields decreasing? Man-made global warming. Crop yields increasing? Man-made global warming (and increasing crop yields is bad). Temperatures increasing? Man-made global warming. Temperatures decreasing? Man-made global warming. Temperatures remaining unchanged for 17.5 years? Man-made global warming. There is absolutely nothing that could possibly happen with the climate that cannot be attirbuted to man-made global warming. Man-made global warming is the first ever scientific theory that is completely unfalsifiable, which means you can’t prove it wrong, no matter what the climate does. So shut up, skeptics. Don’t you know the science is settled?

Oh no, the polar bear population explosion will cause some of them to starve to death. There just won’t be enough baby seals for all of them to eat. Teehee.
Hopefully soon, the seals will be able to live without the fear of being eaten by bears. Aren’t we supposed to be saving the baby seals?

As I read the summation, I believe it allows for considerable wiggle room here…

The SB subpopulation is currently considered to be declining due to a negative trend in sea ice conditions, particularly over the continental shelf, resulting from the continuing effects of climate warming. If the region continues to lose high quality polar bear hunting habitat as forecasted by global climate models (Durner et al. 2009), it is likely that the SB subpopulation could face extirpation by mid-century (Amstrup et al. 2010).

From my uneducated perspective, the recent report suggesting ice free “high quality polar bear hunting habitat” 6-10,000 years ago flies in the face of this “could face extirpation” conclusion.
Are they reading the same “science” I am?

Ooops!

Abstract – February 2014
Revisiting Western Hudson Bay: Using aerial surveys to update polar bear abundance in a sentinel population
Capture-based studies of the Western Hudson Bay (WH) polar bear population in Canada have reported declines in abundance, survival, and body condition, but these findings are inconsistent with the perceptions of local people. To address this uncertainty about current status, we conducted a comprehensive aerial survey of this population during August, 2011, when the region was ice-free and bears were on shore. We flew a combination of overland transects oriented perpendicular to the coastline, coastal transects parallel to shore, and transects across small islands. We used distance sampling and sight–resight protocols to estimate abundance. Bears were concentrated along the coast in central and southern Manitoba and Ontario portions of the population, although sightings >10 km inland were not uncommon in central Manitoba. We analyzed 2 combinations of data and derived an abundance estimate of 1030 bears (95% CI: ∼754–1406). This figure is similar to a 2004 mark–recapture estimate but higher than projections indicating declining abundance since then. Our results suggest that mark–recapture estimates may have been negatively biased due to limited spatial sampling. We observed large numbers of bears summering in southeastern WH, an area not regularly sampled by mark–recapture. Consequently, previous mark–recapture estimates are not directly comparable to our aerial survey of the entire population. Whereas our results do not necessarily contradict the reported declines in this population, we believe that improvements are needed in monitoring, and methodological limitations and inconsistencies must be resolved to accurately assess status and the impacts of climate change.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2013.12.040

Maybe the researchers have contributed to the bears ‘bad’ situation.
CLAIM

There are suggestions the bears, however, may suffer long-term consequences from their encounters with researchers. According to Polar Bears Alive, a non-profit, international organization dedicated to the worldwide protection of the polar bear, studies have shown that darted and tagged female bears consistently produce smaller litters and lighter cubs. If tagged in the den area, pregnant females may abandon the siteb>.
http://home.earthlink.net/~douglaspage/id89.html

But now, in an astonishing admission, the PBSG have acknowledged that the last population survey for the SB (Regehr, Amstrup and Stirling, 2006), which appeared to register a decline in population size and reduced cub survival over time, did not take known movements of bears into account as it should have done.

You betcha!

Abstract – 1999
S.H. Ferguson et al
Determinants of Home Range Size for Polar Bears (Ursus maritimus)
The mean home range size of female polar bears (Ursus maritimus; 125 100 km2 ± 11 800; n = 93) is substantially larger than the predicted value (514 km2) for a terrestrial carnivore of similar weight. To understand this difference, we correlated home range size and sea ice characteristics. Home range size was related to (i) the ratio of land vs. sea within a given home range (42% of explained variance), and (ii) seasonal variation in ice cover (24%). Thus, bears using land during the ice-free season had larger home ranges and bears living in areas of great seasonal variation in ice cover also had larger home ranges. In another analysis we investigated how variation in a bear’s environment in space and time affects its choice of home range. We found that polar bears adjusted the size of their home range according to the amount of annual and seasonal variation within the centre of their home range. For example, polar bears experiencing unpredictable seasonal and annual ice tended to increase their home range size if increasing home range size resulted in reducing variation in seasonal and annual ice. Polar bears make trade-offs between alternate space-use strategies. Large home ranges occur when variable ice cover is associated with more seals but also a more unpredictable distribution of those seals.
Ecology Letters – Volume 2, Issue 5, pages 311–318, September 1999
DOI: 10.1046/j.1461-0248.1999.00090.x
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/j.1461-0248.1999.00090.x/abstract

Polar bears are in great danger indeed. They will soon be extinct.

Abstract – April 2013
Until recently, the sea ice habitat of polar bears was understood to be variable, but environmental variability was considered to be cyclic or random, rather than progressive. Harvested populations were believed to be at levels where density effects were considered not significant. However, because we now understand that polar bear demography can also be influenced by progressive change in the environment, and some populations have increased to greater densities than historically lower numbers, a broader suite of factors should be considered in demographic studies and management. We analyzed 35 years of capture and harvest data from the polar bear (Ursus maritimus) subpopulation in Davis Strait, including data from a new study (2005–2007), to quantify its current demography. We estimated the population size in 2007 to be 2,158 ± 180 (SE), a likely increase from the 1970s. We detected variation in survival, reproductive rates, and age-structure of polar bears from geographic sub-regions. Survival and reproduction of bears in southern Davis Strait was greater than in the north and tied to a concurrent dramatic increase in breeding harp seals (Pagophilus groenlandicus) in Labrador. The most supported survival models contained geographic and temporal variables. Harp seal abundance was significantly related to polar bear survival. Our estimates of declining harvest recovery rate, and increasing total survival, suggest that the rate of harvest declined over time. Low recruitment rates, average adult survival rates, and high population density, in an environment of high prey density, but deteriorating and variable ice conditions, currently characterize the Davis Strait polar bears. Low reproductive rates may reflect negative effects of greater densities or worsening ice conditions. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jwmg.489/abstract

I think polar bears will be around even IF we get an ice free Arctic ocean in the summers.

ScienceDaily – January 22, 2014
Polar bear diet changes as sea ice melts
At least some polar bears in the western Hudson Bay population are using flexible foraging strategies while on land, such as prey-switching and eating a mixed diet of plants and animals, as they survive in their rapidly changing environment, new research suggests.
………..
In the final paper in the series, published in December 2013 in the journal BMC Ecology, the researchers show that polar bears are, with a few exceptions, consuming a mixed diet of plants and animals. The predominance of local vegetation in collected scat suggests little movement among habitat types between feeding sessions, indicating that the polar bears are keeping energy expenditure down…….
“……Our results suggest that some polar bears may possess this flexibility and thus may be able to cope with rapidly changing access to their historic food supply.”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140122104025.htm

It’s just not as simple as they told me. I vaguely recall that what matters most to polar bears is SPRING sea ice. Summer and Fall no so much.

Jim Bo says:
March 25, 2014 at 5:57 am
How will global warming affect polar bears?
What the science says…
Polar bears are in danger of extinction as well as many other species.
Climate Myth…
Polar bear numbers are increasing

They produce such utter garbage it’s beyond me. Right there are 2 flagrant lies that have been debunked time and again.
Ice free Arctic ocean during the Holocene [Peer reviewed papers]

Does it occur to these “students” wishing they were scientists, that it is common for prey species, to modulate their breeding habits, according to their recent food experience, so that any ups and downs in apparent polar bear breeding success, could be nothing more than a reflection of that adaptive behavior.
In California for example, we have a parallel situation; although the State symbol grizzly bear is now extinct. Well NO, they aren’t extinct; there just aren’t many or any in California these days. In Yellowstone National park, I recently heard on a Nat Geo Wild program, that there are maybe 7,000 grizzly bears. Seems a lot to me, but maybe they were talking of a larger total habitat, than just the park. So if any of them want to come to California, I’m sure they can do so.
But back to the cubbing success of PBs.
In California, The mountain lion / puma / catamount / panther / whatever , is a protected predator species. In the past, they were legally hunted; great white hunter no need to go to Africa to bag a lion; could get on in California. They make really awful fur coats.
But now they are protected, but humans keep invading their habitat, to build more goof courses, bike trails, jogging paths, yoga meditation spots, and other green enterprises, and of course hunters want to shoot the deer, instead of letting the lions eat them.
So there is continuous pressure to open hunting of mountain lions again. Now I’m not against deer hunting. I don’t do it, but more power to those who do, and whatever their reasons are. In NZ they do deer hunting 365 days a year; well except for leap years, when it is 366 days a year. Problem is, no mountain lions in NZ but plenty of deer; every kind known to Noah, except moose. All nuisances, and eat grass that sheep need.
So California mountain lion encounters, with humans, have increased, and there have been some unfortunate meetings, so the subject of culling the lions a bit for human safety crops up from time to time.
Problem is, that MLs evidently regulate their breeding to the food supply. A biological expert, whose knowledge, I pay attention to, said that the problem is, that if you really need, or want to reduce lion populations, enough to reduce human encounters, you would have to kill between one quarter, and one third of the total State lion population, all in a single hunting season, because otherwise, their natural adaptation (to resources) would simply compensate, for any small reductions.
I don’t think anyone is going to slaughter one quarter of California’s mountain lions.
Personally, I’m for the lions (coyotes too), and don’t expect to get any hysterical calls from m3e, if I encounter one in my travels, I will just let it go on its way, and the squeamish, will never know it was there.
so I doubt, that it is much different for polar bears. When there is no ice, they will reduce their cubbing, for lack of seals, and when the ice returns, so will the cubs.

Their getting bigger too.
USGS (@USGS) tweeted at 0:05 PM on Tue, Mar 25, 2014:
Karyn Rode discovers Chukchi Sea #polarbears larger now than in the past http://t.co/tEkEFjxD2Q #WomeninScience http://t.co/VFN0qIWdSD
(https://twitter.com/USGS/status/448536155693133824)

It’s like the population of Phoenix during the summer after all the “snowbirds” head back north.
“Scientists”!!! HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa!!