A story broadcast and posted by WPLN, Louisville Public Media, claims Tennessee’s black bear population is being threatened by climate change. Data show this is false. Bear populations are growing along with improved conditions for black bears to flourish. The biggest threat to black bears is conflict with humans, which is being driven by population growth, both bears and humans, urban expansion into bear habitat, and poor garbage storage.
WPLN reporter Caroline Eggers begins the story headlined, “Black bears are threatened by climate change. How can we help?,” by writing, “Black bear encounters are on the rise in Tennessee, and climate change is often a hidden culprit[.]”
The problem with Eggers story is that its headline and lead sentence are woefully misleading. Most of the story’s details are pretty accurate. She notes that before large-scale European occupation and widespread forest clearing, black bears were common across Tennessee. After a sharp decline, bears populations have made a big comeback with an estimated 6,000 bears across the state.
Bear populations are doing so well, they are increasingly being seen in edge communities being developed in formerly wild areas and even in urban areas.
Black bear encounters with people are on the rise in Tennessee, and they are not always […] idyllic […]” writes Eggers. “Bears scrounge through trash, cars and sometimes even homes for an easy source of calories.
“The furry creatures arguably have the best noses in the animal kingdom, 300 times better than people,” Eggers continued. “The trend is, in part, driven by convenience for the bears. They are opportunistic feeders.”
So far, so good, but then the story begins to go off the rails. Eggers notes that rainfall from Hurricane Helene in 2024 caused flooding, knocking down a lot of trees, and then leapt to discuss a current drought in the Great Smoky Mountain national park. Yet neither of these events are historically unique or historically unusual. Flooding and drought, while never the norm, have been common throughout Tennessee’s history, and there is no evidence in the data that hurricanes, droughts, and floods have become more common or severe over time in Tennessee, or in general elsewhere in the United States, as detailed in various Climate at a Glance posts, here, here, and here, for example.
For Tennessee specifically, while rainfall amounts vary regionally across the state, data show no increasing trend in drought numbers or severity since 1895, but rather a modest increase in precipitation. (see the figure, below)
Temperatures in Tennessee have increased very modestly, about 0.5℉ over the past century. This is significantly below the national average rise in temperature and is likely due in large part to the Urban Heat Island effect from the growth of Tennessee’s large and midsized cities. In fact, Tennessee’s maximum high temperature was set and matched on two dates in 1930, more than 90 years of climate change ago.
Concerning forests, the data are clear that urban development and agriculture has replaced forests in some areas. But overall, the amount of forested lands has increased from lows set after initial European settlement, when many forests were cleared for small scale farming and grazing. In fact, forests cover approximately 52 percent of Tennessee, with rebounding coverage over the past 100 years. Natural forest coverage has doubled over the last century from 25 percent.
What’s more, connected forest cover and better precipitation has produced improved ecosystem conditions for bears, including increased animal and plant foods sources, which largely explain Tennessee’s growing bear population.
Since modest warming over the past hasn’t made habitat and ecological conditions worse for bears in Tennessee, but rather has improved such conditions, contributing to a growing population, climate change can’t be “threatening” bear survival, as Eggers claims in her WPLN story.
Had Eggers not tried to drag climate change into her WPLN story about problems some Tennesseans are having with bears, she might have written a valuable and interesting story. She could have explained the dangers bears face due to urban expansion, some people’s propensity to think of bears as cute and feeding them, and poor garbage storage – all of which have led to problem bears and human/bear conflicts. Instead, she opened with a misleading, but perhaps attention-grabbing headline, and then wandered off the trail in an effort to feed the narrative popular with the media that “climate change causes everything bad.” In this case, that climate change is harming bears—despite clear evidence the black bear population is flourishing amid climate change. There is no trend or evidence, none at all, suggesting this will change in the foreseeable future.
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News. In addition to directing The Heartland Institute’s Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy, Burnett puts Environment & Climate News together, is the editor of Heartland’s Climate Change Weekly email, and the host of the Environment & Climate News Podcast.
You don’t hate journalists enough. You think you do but you don’t. As far as I can see, when it comes to global warming, virtually every journalist is a paid liar.
It does seem that very few are willing to fact-check their bias and avoid fallacious claims instead of inserting them into most articles.
WPLN A NPR station …
About UsNashville Public Radio
As the famous journalist Hunter S. Thompson so eloquently said
“Journalism is NOT a profession or trade.
It is a cheap catch all for fuckoffs and misfits –
a false doorway to the backside of life. ”
And the same can be said about climate science.
” We are the jumping jacks; THEY pull the strings and we dance.
Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men.
We are intellectual prostitutes.”
What sounds like the standard statement of every congress-member
is a quote from NYT Editor Swinton from 1901 at an “Independent Press Banquet “.
“There is no such thing at this stage of the world’s history in America, as an Independent Press.
YOU KNOW IT – and i know it.
There is NOT ONE of you who dare write his honest opinion,
and if you did,you know beforehand that it would never appear in print.
I AM PAID weekly to KEEP MY Honest OPINION OUT of the paper I’m connected with.
…. any of you foolish enough as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job.
If I allowed my honest opinion to appear, before 24 hours my occupation would be gone.
The business of a journalist is to destroy the truth , to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon,and to sell his country and his race. “
Climate change is responsible for everything bad and it’s all caused by awful humans and CO2. The public needs to be educated to understand that rain is bad, drought is bad, sun is bad, clouds are bad, warm is bad and cold is bad, all caused by Climate Change. Once the Ignorati have been properly conditioned, they will understand why destroying their way of life is necessary to save the Earth.
Yes, the alarmists’ work can’t be done until we all adopt the perversion of language that makes change a force rather than the result of some force. The fact that climate change has no units of measure makes it especially useful to “chicken little” alarmists.
True Believers cannot help but preach.
Once the alarmists’ claim that the polar bear numbers globally were declining was proven wrong, they had to invent a new lie, and black bears fit nicely into their constantly shifting extinction scenario. Once they run out of existing species to claim are doomed, they’ll turn to long-extinct ones like the saber-toothed cats, wooly mammoths, giant sloths and longhorn bison and claim it was the activities of early humans that caused their demise by putting too much carbon into the atmosphere from cooking fires.
A bit of reading suggests extensive logging in the first half of the 1900s caused a decrease in bear population. Since the 1970s onward, regrowth of forests has contributed to an increase. Carbon Dioxide is plant food so is good for bears.
Kentucky: Vast portions of the Kentucky region cleared for timber once again became mature hardwood forests. This meant that bears filtering into Kentucky from our Southern Appalachian neighbors had access to large, remote tracts of quality forest habitat. This has resulted in Kentucky now being home to a resident bear population experiencing considerable increases in both numbers and range.
West Virginia: The current black bear population in West Virginia is estimated to be between 12,000 and 14,000, a significant increase from around 500 bears in the early 1970s.
Pennsylvania: Black bear population in Pennsylvania is estimated to be around 18,000, a significant increase from about 4,000 in the 1970s.
{I’m from a hunting and fishing clan in western PA but left in 1965. We used to take spotlights to the town dump to watch bears.}
How long until we see a report assuring us that the shrinking of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is due to human-caused climate change?…
Bears don’t eat trees, but if they did, a flood knocking them down would make them easier to feed on.
Bears are over populated in most of Canada due to compulsive bear hugging. They used to be hunted aggressively, especially by indigenous peoples.