While AP’s resident alarmist Seth Borenstein reports
“The polar bear is us,” says Patricia Romero Lankao of the federally financed National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., referring to the first species to be listed as threatened by global warming due to melting sea ice.
WUWT reader “Windsong” writes:
Dr. Susan Crockford has a timely post on her site today about the International. Union for Conservation of Nature/Species Survival Commission (IUCN/SSC) Polar Bear Species Group walking back the basis for polar bears being listed as “threatened” in the U.S.
Excerpt:
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.
In other words, that 2006 study almost certainly did not indicate bears dying due to reduced summer sea ice in the SB, as biologists said at the time — and which they presented as evidence that polar bears should be listed by the ESA as ‘threatened’ — but reflected capture of bears that were never part of the SB subpopulation and so moved out of the region.
As the PBSG said about the 2006 estimate:
“…it is important to note that there is the potential for un-modeled spatial heterogeneity in mark-recapture sampling that could bias survival and abundance estimates.” [my emphasis]
“Spatial heterogeneity” means that the sampled bears could have come from more than one population, a possibility which violates a critical requirement of the statistics used to generate the population and survival estimates. “Un-modeled” means that the ‘movement of bears’ problem was not factored into the mathematical models that generated the 2006 population size and survival estimates as it should have been.
Ecologist Jim Steele pointed some of this out in his book and his guest post last year, so it’s not news that this was done.
What’s shocking is that the PBSG have now admitted that the ‘movement of bears’ issue essentially invalidates the 2006 population estimate and the much-touted ‘reduced survival of cubs.’ The reduced survival of cubs data from that SB study was a critical component of the argument that US bears were already being negatively impacted by global warming and thus, should be listed as ‘threatened’ under the ESA (US Fish & Wildlife Service 2008).
More at http://polarbearscience.com
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Love the photo of the polar bear doing the face palm …
w.
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.
Will Al Gore retweet this article? Michael Mann?
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.
Policy based Climate and environment claims are mostly the wagon or tool to scare people toward leftist policy/solutions nationally and internationally. It’s about international socialism ans saving socialism. Not about saving nature or climate. Bjorn Lomborgs book the Sceptical environmentalist showed that they have lied since day one. And the Icebear should stop drinking?
“Oops! Our bad. We can’t give back your money. We spent it. Give us more money so we can try again. Well do better next time; pinkie swear.”
>:-(((O)))
if this
“in Anthony Everett’s fine biography of the Roman emperor Hadrian that polar bears and seals were among the animals that Nero displayed in the arena (this is on page 66 )”
and the roman temps compared to now were a lot higher
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/lappi/gisp-last-10000-new.png
then what is the problem? No need to ‘worry’ until temps get higher than the roman period? And maybe not even then?
To misquote MarkTwain/Benjamin Disraeli
Lies, damned lies and Environmentalism!
Bear and the face palm, would we not love to see a Mann do the face palm? At least the bear had the humility.
Maybee the Icebear ate an environmentalist and is having huge problems digesting the crap, bullshit and hot gas?
Polar bear ancestry traced back to one brown bear from Ireland
“All living polar bears can trace their genetic lineage back to a single, female ancestor — a brown bear from Ireland, who lived around 20,000 to 50,000 years ago.
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-07/07/polar-bear-ancestry
Liars lie. Who’d a thunk it?
Common sense should be listed as threatened by the warmosphere.
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,
This is just plain unbearable. This is the sort of garbage that makes me sick and makes me despise most environmentalists. Half cocked, emotive, hair brained non science. Will the sanctimonious environmentalists ever do anything, or ever think, properly? or honestly? They just don’t cut it when it comes to hard numbers and hard thinking and the pursuit of the truth. They like to claim noble but they can’t claim “No bull”. I feel I have just passed the point of being tolerant and amiable with environmentalists.
Re Wills comment on the polar bear face palm – could Josh or someone add a ‘doh!’ speech bubble?
More much touted BS..
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-26655779
Thousands of peer pal-reviewed studies have shown that polar bears lie;
/sarc. ( Is it really necessary)
This admission has a purpose. It is no different than the well-worn tactic of adjusting even recent temperatures (1998) down and present temperatures up to create a trend that fits their narrative. “2010 was the hottest year on record!”
Raising bear populations in 2006 is important if you want to raise the meme “Your SUV killed Knut’s babies!” in 2014.
I predict that by mid-summer we start to see studies that polar bear populations have fallen by the fastest rate on record… tipping point… Hiroshima bombs.
Ironically, the extremely cold winter this year probably will have more to do with the bear’s suffering than anthropogenic global warming.
Yes – that’s a great shot of the Polar Bear…
As time goes by it is becoming clear that just about everything that has been said by the warm-mongering classes for the last 25 years has been total and utter bollocks.
asybot says:
March 25, 2014 at 2:15 am
Bear and the face palm, would we not love to see a Mann do the face palm? At least the bear had the humility.
Or, even better, see the bear do a face palm on Mann.
Now the countdown till this shows up on the msm. Ten trillion and ten, ten trillion and nine….
So the supposed/claimed decline of polar bears was because of some fact (or two) they did not model as opposed to what was actually observed. And to think, polar bears, in spite of the models, continue to live and breed as they damn well please. They appear to be surprise by this. Wow. Just wow.
97% of polar bears do not believe int AGW.
Shocking they must been misled by a small number of evil fossil fuel funded skeptic bears.
I ran a model that predicts the probability that the Polar Bear will be removed from the ‘threatened’ list given that the basis for the listing has been shown to be bogus. It shows a probability of near 0%.
Two explanations for the reversal come to mind. 1. A few have suddenly regained their desire to be careful scientists. 2. The numbers of polar bears are exploding and they need to back track on this past result to not look like fools.