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
“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”…………………
O/T.. sorry. .. What percentage of environmentalists believe that solar power is good for the environment?
— ‘Analysis Shows Solar Modules Cause More Greenhouse Gas Emissions Than Modern Coal Power Plants!’ —
“Ferrucio Ferroni writes … how China is the number 1 manufacturer of solar panels globally and that the production of solar panels there requires immense amounts of electricity, which in China is mainly produced by coal power plants. Moreover the manufacture of solar panels also involves substantial amounts of potent greenhouse gases that leak out into the atmosphere.”
~~ More here :-
http://notrickszone.com/2014/03/25/analysis-shows-solar-modules-cause-more-greenhouse-gas-emissions-than-modern-coal-power-plants/
That’s easy.
http://oi57.tinypic.com/2mlcex.jpg
As penance, all the clowns responsible for the study should be made to go apologize personally to the polar bears. Any survivors will be given a full pardon.
just goes to prove that you can’t do science on a computer, you need to get out and LOOK.
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.
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!
“did not take known movements of bears into account as it should have done.”
They cannot be that stupid. Even the biggest idiot scientist knows that a Polar Bear is not a vegetable. So this is activist pseudoscience. These people knew exactly what they were doing.
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.
I know….. they were fed by man.
DaveF @ur momisugly 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.
Ooops our bad!!! You can “un-scare’ your grandkids now!!
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…
So number of polar bears in the Southern Beaufort region is increasing after all, not decreasing as previously surmised. However, the root cause of this grave finding can’t be anything else, but Climate Change, therefore it is certainly worse than we thought.
Just imagine thousands of cute baby seals being ruthlessly butchered by ferocious predators, an utterly obnoxious scene. And this repulsive mass murder of babies is brought about by our actions, so our own responsibility for this horror can no longer be denied.
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.
Also over there is http://polarbearscience.com/2014/03/17/new-genetic-study-confirms-polar-bears-survived-several-warm-interglacials/ . That sure puts the kibosh on my hypothesis that PBs went extinct during the Holocene Optimum, again during the Roman Warm Period, and most recently during the Medeival Warm Period.
It also proves I still can’t spell Medieval without assistance.
Once again, skeptics are proven right:
Right on the facts and right to be skeptical of AGW claims and predictions.
this is very funny!!!!
RMR: Seven Day Forecast – comedy.
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.
That is the study I debunked in the essay
How “Science” Counts Bears or Why it Takes a Village
http://landscapesandcycles.net/how-science-counts-bears.html
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”.
Politically the damage was done for the alarmist cause, this is a usual pattern. Consider the veracity of the “97%” mythology? It serves the media purpose, reinvents itself in new and more dishonest forms.
Polar bear lying will continue in another new form about…….ten minutes after this story is ever reported if at all. It never gets old in Greenshirt communities. Bill Nye is talking smack about Manhattan sinking just the other day and so on……
Thanks, A. Good to know it was just part of the scam and that polar bears are doing OK; they are sooo cute!
And from the comments (emphasis mine)…
There needs to be some accountability for the propagation of this junk science. Names & quotes, easily accessible to media.
Poptech?
What are the odds that the EPA will reverse the endangered finding?