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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Ric Werme says:
March 25, 2014 at 5:01 am
You are not alone; there are support groups for this affliction. And you will be relieved to know that under the Affordable Care Act you cannot be denied coverage because of this pre-existing condition.
There is even a movement you can join: Americans for Sustainable Solutions in Efficiency Spelling (ASSES). Many people are unaware of just how much extra greenhouse gas is emitted by all the extra unnecessary letters standard (ha!) english spelling requires. Extra letters require extra paper and ink to print, the manufacture of which emits CO2.
Not to mention all the extra web searches required by people just like you who are terrified of misspelling words like “medieval” in a public forum. The extra CO2 from trips to therapy after committing the ultimate fox paws in an otherwise insightful and socially important tweet like:
well it’s probably incalculable, or at least a very, very large number. Enough to give James Hansen nightmares, and we all know the effect his nightmares have on his grandchildren.
It’s not too late, but we have to act NOW!
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
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.
…
There needs to be some accountability for the propagation of this junk science.
Agreed.
However, there is no accounting for the junk science at that site. Their half-truths, distortions, and deliberately misleading statements are the norm.
Their motto should be “We put the “junk” in junk science.”
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.
MarkW says:
March 25, 2014 at 5:58 am
“What are the odds that the EPA will reverse the endangered finding?”
Oh, Mark… the date to reverse is already set, didn’t you hear? It’s on the 12th of Never at 3:00 pm. Be there. (Wear warm clothes. Hell will be frozen over.)
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.
Placing bets on what the mass media is going to pick up on this issue …. any takers?
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.
Here’s an amusing book that documents the dissimulation by leading polar bear researchers. The author was interviewed on NPR!
http://www.amazon.com/Never-Look-Polar-Bear-Mini-Marshmallows-ebook/dp/B00AXS6B4S/ref=sr_1_21?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1395755803&sr=1-21&keywords=polar+bears
RE Ken Hall at March 25, 2014 at 5:25 am
“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?”
Ken,
Let’s have some informed outrage. If you read the post, you’ll discover their problem was exactly the opposite of what you describe.
They took their samples from the entire range of the Southern Beaufort subpopulation (there is a map provided to show you) knowing that there was a 50% or more chance of bears at the ends coming from adjacent subpopulations (Northern Beaufort on the east, Chukchi Sea on the west).
Which means that when many of the bears they captured a bear at the ends of the SB range went home (to the CS or NB), the model assumed they were dead. This would be true for adults and for the cubs of mothers captured in these areas.
The ‘overlap’ problem had been known for years – there was simply no excuse for ignoring it, as Jim Steele explained in his post, “How science counts bears” (which was carried here at WUWT and reblogged at my site).
And thanks Anthony, for the link. Love your added pic!
Susan
I don’t know how the “threatened” finding for polar bears can be reviewed, in the light of this information or the other data showing increasing numbers, but I can bet how it will be spun in the press if/when they are taken off the threatened list:
“Major win for conservation efforts. The US EPA has today removed polar bears from the endangered species list after a massive effort by governments to restore their habitat.”
Isn’t that just what has happened in other recent cases?
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
This other post of mine examines why biologists working in the eastern portion of the Southern Beaufort (otherwise known in the research literature as the “eastern Beaufort”) sometimes find skinny bears:
http://polarbearscience.com/2013/06/28/why-is-it-that-every-decade-eastern-beaufort-sea-ice-gets-really-thick/
Susan
Who holds these so called scientists accountable? Mistakes like these people made should be grounds for stripping them of their credentials.
dccowboy says:
March 25, 2014 at 3:33 am
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%.
=========================================================================
Your estimate is too high. I came up with i%
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.
Their “research” has already fulfilled its purpose. It may be wrong but the declining polar bear population meme is already ingrained into the AGW movement and it won’t die easy with the MSM ignoring this like they do all other inconvenient truths.
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?
Wiith withdrawal of Lew’s paper, the IPCC’s steps back, the pause, papers giving lower ECS, failures of short term to medium term predictions of temps, recovery in arctic and new records in antarctica…etc. etc. I think we should have a “Status of Climate update and summary” for distribution. A Monckton essay would do it.
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?
Just like the newspapers who print their retractions/corrections on page 8, they will continue to use and quote the original study and ignore any subsequent corrections. Bury the truth and continue with the party line..
If you waded through the series of USGS papers, it is clear they were well aware that there were high rates of migratory bears but they simply dismissed that evidence as not affecting their model.
But even worse, revealing their political bias, was they way they tried to support the model’s results arguing the bears body condition was deteriorating. To push the idea that recent ice loss had caused nutritional stress, Amstrup and his co-authors highlighted cherry-picked statistics to suggest bears were starving. In the abstract they wrote, “Declines in mass and BCI [body condition index] of sub-adult males, declines in growth of males and females, and declines in cub recruitment suggest that polar bears of the Southern Beaufort Sea have experienced a declining trend in nutritional status.”
However sub-adult males comprised a mere 5% of all measured bears. The abstract failed to mention that the body condition for 95% of all the other bears, both adult males and females, sub-adult females as well as all cubs, showed no signs of nutritional stress. In contrast, adult females represented about 34% of all captures, and despite being under the most stress due to an eight-month fast while giving birth and nursing their cubs, their body condition had improved.
To read that good news you had to search the results section: “There was no trend in mass of adult females during the study, but the mean BCI of females increased over time”. They also wrote there was “no trend in mass or BCI of adult males over time.” Likewise, “There was no trend in mean BCI of sub-adult females over time,” and “there was no trend in the mass of the cubs.”602 So why did these experts focus on just 5% of the population?
The final deception was arguing lower cub survival. Their abstract also implied “a decline in cub recruitment” to support their model’s uncharacteristic dive in survival rates. But that too was an illusion. Recruitment compares the number of cubs in the spring with the number of cubs in the fall. Their observed results found that the number of cubs per female had increased between 1982 and 2006 during the spring. This would be expected. When the female BCI increases, they usually produce more cubs. However Amstrup and his coauthors argued there was a decline in cubs during the fall, and thus a decline in recruitment. However they had not surveyed in the fall since 2001 and they used zombie data to make their bogus claims.
As I read the summation, I believe it allows for considerable wiggle room here…
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?
[RUBBER STAMP IN RED] More LewPaper