From the apparently out of touch with reality University of Alberta , comes this poorly timed headline that made me laugh out loud when I read it, because of this other polar bear story today in which it demonstrates polar bear numbers on the rise:
NPR finally gets it – does this signal an end to the polar bear as poster bear for global warming?
Polar bear researchers urge governments to act now and save the species
(Edmonton) A University of Alberta polar bear researcher along with eleven international co-authors are urging governments to start planning for rapid Arctic ecosystem change to deal with a climate change catastrophe for the animals.
U of A professor Andrew Derocher co-authored a policy perspective in the journal Conservation Letters urging governments with polar bear populations to accept that just one unexpected jump in Arctic warming trends could send some polar bear populations into a precipitous decline.
“It’s a fact that early sea ice break-up and late ice freeze-up and the overall reduction in ice pack are taking their toll,” said Derocher. “We want governments to be ready with conservation and management plans for polar bears when a worst case climate change scenario happens.”
The effects of climate change on polar bears are clear from both observational and modeling studies in many parts of the distribution. Earlier studies by Derocher and his colleagues show that one very bad ice year could leave hundreds of Hudson Bay polar bears stranded on land for an extended period. Derocher noted “Such an event could erase half of a population in a single year”.
“The management options for northern communities like Churchill would range from doing nothing, to feeding the bears, moving them somewhere else or euthanizing them,” said Derocher.
The concerned researchers say they’re not telling governments what to do. The authors, however, want policy makers and wildlife managers to start planning polar bear for both the predicted escalation of Arctic warming and for an off the charts worst case scenario.
“You’re going to make better decisions if you have time to think about it in advance: it’s a no brainer,” said Derocher. Further, “consultation with northern residents takes time and the worst time to ask for input is during a crisis”.
The researchers say the options for polar bear management include feeding and releasing the bears when freeze ups allow the animals to get to their hunting grounds. Derocher calls this a wild bear park model, but the paper reports the cost could run into the millions and could have ramifications for the long term behaviour of the animals.
The authors of the paper say government should be aware of the fall-out from climate change and human safety in the north is going to be an increasing challenge..
“Around the world polar bears are an iconic symbol so any tragedy would produce massive attention,” said Derocher. “If the warming trend around Hudson’s Bay took an upward spike, the population of 900 to 1000 bears in western Hudson Bay would be on the line, so there has to be a plan.”
The paper is titled; Rapid ecosystem change and polar bear conservation. It was published online as an accepted article January 25, 2013 in Conservation Letters.
Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/conl.12009/abstract
================================================================
Models don’t cut it, data does.
Some numbers via Andrew Bolt:
Polar bear numbers as estimated in 2009 by the Polar Bear Specialist Group of the IUCN Species Survival Commission: 20,000 – 25,000.
Polar bear numbers as estimated in 2012 by the Polar Bear Specialist Group of the IUCN Species Survival Commission: 22,600 – 32,100.
From: http://www.polarbearsinternational.org/about-polar-bears/what-scientists-say/are-polar-bear-populations-booming
Ask the Experts: Are Polar Bear Populations Increasing?
Answered by Dr. Andrew Derocher
Some recent media reports have cited inaccurate data concerning polar bears. For clarification on polar bear numbers, we turned to Dr. Andrew Derocher, Chair of the IUCN/SSC Polar Bear Specialist Group.
Dr. Derocher is a polar bear scientist with the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. He also serves on PBI’s Scientific Advisory Council.
Question: The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has proposed that the polar bear be listed as a threatened species. Yet some news reports state that polar bear numbers are actually increasing. For example, the following paragraph appeared on the Fox News Web site:
“In the 1950s the polar bear population up north was estimated at 5,000. Today it’s 20- to 25,000, a number that has either held steady over the last 20 years or has risen slightly. In Canada, the manager of wildlife resources for the Nunavut territory of Canada has found that the population there has increased by 25 percent.”
If this is true, then why are scientists worried about population declines?
Answer from Dr. Derocher: The various presentations of biased reporting ignore, or are ignorant of, the different reasons for changes in populations. If I thought that there were more bears now than 50 years ago and a reasonable basis to assume this would not change, then no worries. This is not the case.
The bottom line here is that it is an apples and oranges issue. The early estimates of polar bear abundance are a guess. There is no data at all for the 1950-60s. Nothing but guesses. We are sure the populations were being negatively affected by excess harvest (e.g., aircraft hunting, ship hunting,self-killing guns, traps, and no harvest limits). The harvest levels were huge and growing. The resulting low numbers of bears were due only to excess harvest but, again, it was simply a guess as to the number of bears.
============================================================
I can’t say this answer by Dr. Derocher inspires any confidence in his ability to give a straight answer. If it were guessing, show how that you determined it was “guessing”.
Maybe it is because nobody really has a handle on the numbers, from an article in the Society of Environmental Journalists:
These and other scientists agree that polar bear populations have, in all likelihood, increased in the past several decades, but not five-fold, and for reasons that have nothing to do with global warming. The Soviets, despite their horrendous environmental legacy on many issues, banned most polar bear hunting in 1956. Canada and the U.S. followed suit in the early 1970s — with limited exceptions for some native hunting, and permitted, highpriced trophy hunts. And a curtailment of some commercial seal hunting has sparked a seal population explosion – angering fishermen, but providing populations in eastern Canada and Greenland with plenty of polar bear chow, leading in turn to localized polar bear population growth in spite of the ice decline.
The scientists also caution that we still don’t have a firm count on these mobile, remote, supremely camouflaged beasts. All this uncertainty over the numbers — past and present —even gave some conservative bloggers pause.
http://www.sej.org/publications/alaska-and-hawaii/magic-number-a-sketchy-fact-about-polar-bears-keeps-goingand-going-an
This is an article I like to send around to family and friends regarding the unfortunate future of polar bears. The writer has had a journey similar to many of us here on WUWT. We were true believers until that “huh” moment. I think this might be his moment.
.http://www.psmag.com/magazines/pacific-standard-cover-story/endangered-polar-bear-global-warming-climate-change-arctic-sea-ice-50450/
“Polar Bears”, “Industrial Revolution”, and other CAGW terms have literally been hard wired into people’s heads over the last 25 years. It will take some serious transneural degeneration to rectify. Obviously, as in this case, some need more time than others.
I guess you really can make this stuff up sometimes. Maybe we should stop using that phrase so much when discussing climate science alarmism.
Yup, it’s the old “generate a grant” sausage machine, and if this particular meme wasn’t currently being deconstructed, they’d have had time to polish the turd.
Hudson Bay, the hunting ground of the bears studied by the author, already melts completely in the summer. Does this kill off the local population of polar bears? No, they’ve adapted, evolutionarily, to the seasonal changes. What does logic teach us from that example?
If I had to guess, I’d assume with total loss of summer sea ice (extremely unlikely), bears would do well because their favored prey would also come ashore more often, with no ability to enter hiding places from the water. This is just a logical presumption, and not an established fact, therefore is not an endorsement to anyone to panic on behalf of the seals.
Give the guy a break. If he came out and said that the polar bear was not endangered, then he would lose all funding, and be out of a job. That is how the global warming people work. Everyone has to agree with them, OR ELSE!
To become a savior, you first must convince others that something needs to be saved.
That’s step one on the path to environmental hero. Like the above poster said, “Gee, now how did those polar bears survive the last ice-free Arctic sea?”
Pity the WWF does not seem to care about current killing of bears now only forecasts of destruction http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20798136
So real death now is nothing compared to computer model based future forecast deaths.
The no ice = no seals……so no bears relies on evolution being false. Need another forehead this thinking requires a double face palm.
Dr. Derocher says:
Sounds like a cognitive recognition problem–I think he’s mistaking “bears” for “beers”:
http://www.badideatshirts.com/BEAR-DEER-BEER-FUNNY-T-SHIRTWHITE-INK-P1811.aspx
If Dr. Derocher had a new set of eye glasses, he’d see there isn’t a problem at all.
Just another example of reporting to further a cause. Another one is banning assault rifles when they are the least used weapon of choice used by sick-os and criminals.
According to
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/03/early-polar-bear-discovered-in-a.html
Polar Bears appear to have survived multiple climate events over the last 120000 years. Why would they not continue to survive if, as the AGW protagonists would have us believe, the Arctic ice cap experiences another event?
Mickey Reno says:
February 5, 2013 at 5:08 am
…This is just a logical presumption, and not an established fact, therefore is not an endorsement to anyone to panic on behalf of the seals.
——————
PANIC ON BEHALF OF THE SEALS! OMG I’m going to propose a study and apply for a grant immediately! PAAAAANIC!!!
Time for the University of Alberta to fully investigate this “professor” to see if he has committed research fraud.
And parents everywhere should think seriously about sending their kids to a University with research standards that support this type of activity.
Unless of course the parents want their children to get a degree in Glowball Warming Fear Mongering and Hysteria from a second rate university.
Derocher is apoplectic that Canadians in charge of listing threatened and endangered species have not embraced without question the recommendations of himself and the international Polar Bear Specialist Group, which he was chairman of between 2005 and 2009 (when the US uplisted their polar bears to “threatened” status).
As Anthony says – timing is everything.
Next month CITES meets to decide a US-led proposal (for the 2nd time) to get all trade in polar bears and polar bear parts banned and the US Fish and Wildlife Dept has been actively campaigning in Europe to get votes .
I have a post that went up just yesterday on this issue at PolarBearScience: http://polarbearscience.com/2013/02/04/why-is-the-us-pushing-to-ban-polar-bear-trade-polar-bears-have-been-saved/ The Canadian gov’t has indicated it intends to vote against this proposal, which has no doubt made Derocher even angrier.
Canada is also under pressure on another front because it has so far refused to go along with the US and raise its polar bears to a “threatened” status, leaving it as a species of “special concern. The Center for Biological Diversity has filed a petition with the international Commission for Environmental Cooperation demanding sanctions against Canada – a petition that uses all the arguments Derocher has used in the past. The deadline for Canada to respond was Jan. 23, 2013. I am watching to see if anything come of it.
See details in this post: http://polarbearscience.com/2013/01/26/canada-under-international-pressure-to-list-polar-bears-as-threatened-so-far-holds-out/
Susan
“The management options .. euthanizing them,” said Derocher.
==========\
Quite a proposal. He is worried about global warming killing the bears – so we proposes we kill them to save them the agony of being killed.
Curious Canuck says:
February 4, 2013 at 8:04 pm
A quick google on “Andrew Derocher” and “Tides Canada”
=========
Tides Canada = US millionaires trying to dictate Canadian policy to the benefit of US interests.
Derocher has tied his fame and fortune to arguing global warming is killing bears. To counter the Inuits claims that it is the time of the most bears, he and others have reported the Inuits were fooled because more bears were coming into towns because they were starving due to less ice. The Inuits argued the human interaction data was skewed by the city dump. Indeed the number of bears coming into town had risen with the greatest numbers in 2003. However after the dump was closed by 2005, the number of bears dropped precipitously to one half the average. However the advocates stop using any data after 2005. Derocher wrote a paper in 2012 and still used the data only up to 2004 before the dump closed. He also talks about the reduced condition of the bears, but again references old “zombie” data on body condition that stops at a 1999 paper. Unpublished data by Stirling and Lunn show that the bears body condition in the Hudson Bay had improved since then and by 2004 body condition was as good or better than the early 1980’s. These sins of omission border on scientific fraud. Derocher his trying to save his theory not the bears!
Yes the real deal about Polar Bears is at
http://polarbearscience.com/
Really informative.
Fred from Canuckistan says: Time for the University of Alberta to fully investigate this “professor” to see if he has committed research fraud.
Not just Derocher, but Stirling, and the USGS’ Regehr. Regehr’s study of bears in the Beaufort Sea area, horribly abused the mark and recapture statistics. If they do not recapture a bear, then they must estimate survivorship by deducing the probability of the bear dying versus moving out of the study area and thus still alive but simply avoided capture. Because of the Arctic’s great variability, polar bears do not have territories like other bear species. Defending a territory only makes sense if food is reliable every year. Instead they are highly mobile. They have been shown to travel a distance that would be equal to traveling from the polar bear capital in Churchill to Dallas,Texas and back in a single year. So to constrain their estimates of survival, bears are equipped with radio collars. If just the data from collared bears were used the natural survival rate is around 98% and higher. Even though though most of the collared bears revealed they were outside the study area between 2004 and 2006 and thus less likely to be captured, Regehr simply treated them as dead and generated a dramatic drop in survivorship. Instead of using the collared data for their model, they used a drop in sea ice to “prove” less ice was “killing” the bears. That model predicted hundreds of bears had died, but no one ever saw any dead bears, until the story of the “drowning” bears emerged to support the model. The reason for the drowning was never known, but the only observation of bears actually drowning were caused when researchers drugged 2 bears that fell in the water and drowned.
“Polar bears, Derocher says, survived the last period of Arctic warming, … The past period of warming was also not as intense or prolonged as this one is turning out to be.
==========
Nonsense. During the Holocene optimum 10 thousand years ago the Arctic was ice free for 1000 years and the polar bears survived. The polar bear is simply an ice adapted version of the grizzly (brown) bear. When there is no ice, polar bears eat the same food as grizzly bears. When the ice comes there is no food on land, so they hunt on the sea ice. Much easier to wait by an air hole in the ice for a seal than try and make a living catching mice.
In 1950 the populations were a guess but Derocher and advocates ignore more recent studies:
-In the Davis Strait area population, bears have recently, more than doubled based on 1980 estimates of 900 bears. By 1993 that estimate rose to 1400 and by 2007 the estimate stands at 2142 bears.[Stirling 1980]
-The Baffin Bay area may have tripled from 1980’s estimates of 300 to 600 bears. However the Inuit challenged that low estimate. The new estimate in 2004 was increased to 2,074. However models based on estimated survival rates and reports of excessive harvesting of bears by Greenland hunters, the estimate has been lowered. Those models suggested the population may have now declined to 1600 bears, which is still 2 to 3 times greater than 1980’s estimates.
– The Fox Basin is the region encompassing the northern end of the Hudson Bay. In 1996 the bear population had been estimated to be 2,119 and then raised to 2,300 bears in 2004. The results from recent aerial survey published in 2012 now estimates that the Fox Basin embraces ~2,580 bears (95% CI: about 2,100 – 3,200)
-Only 333 bears were believed to inhabit the Gulf of Boothia in 1984 but they too quadrupled. Estimates of 900 were established in the 1990s and “following the completion of a mark-recapture inventory in spring 2000, the subpopulation was estimated to number 1,523 ± 285 bears [Taylor et al. 2009].
-In Lancaster Sound a subpopulation estimate of 2,541 ± 391 was based on an analysis of both historical and current mark-recapture data in 1997 and is considerably larger than the previous estimate of 1,675 that had also included the Norwegian Bay region [Taylor 2008]
And the “WESTERN HUDSON BAY POLAR BEAR AERIAL SURVEY, 201” released in May 2012 show the Hudson Bay bears population is as high as it has ever been. The complete opposite of Stirling, Regehr and Derocher’s predictions.
Digging in the frozen tundra of Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, scientists have uncovered the remains of the most ancient polar bear ever found. DNA analyses reveal that the bear—a mature male—lived about 120,000 years ago
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/03/early-polar-bear-discovered-in-a.html
================
Polar bears evidently had no problem surviving the last interglacial, which also had an ice free arctic.
jim Steele says:
February 5, 2013 at 8:25 am
And the “WESTERN HUDSON BAY POLAR BEAR AERIAL SURVEY, 201″ released in May 2012 show the Hudson Bay bears population is as high as it has ever been. The complete opposite of Stirling, Regehr and Derocher’s predictions.
==========
Climate Science. The art of predicting the opposite of what will actually happen.
Wayne Delbeke: “He is an expert who has spent 20 years studying polar bears but even experts have biases.”
Paraphrasing from the author, Trevanian, I suspect that Dr Derocher’s studying is for one year–twenty times.
One of my students did their weekly science article on this story yesterday, and when he was done with his presentation, I told him that actually, the bears are doing great up there, and directed him here. He shrugged, and I know that his take home message is going to be that the polar bears are still doomed. Teacher, thy name is Sisyphus.