Polar Bear Truth not Welcomed in Copenhagen

[Gary Wright]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/c...-warmists.html

Over the coming days a curiously revealing event will be taking place in Copenhagen. Top of the agenda at a meeting of the Polar Bear Specialist Group (set up under the International Union for the Conservation of Nature/Species Survival Commission) will be the need to produce a suitably scary report on how polar bears are being threatened with extinction by man-made global warming.

This is one of a steady drizzle of events planned to stoke up alarm in the run-up to the UN's major conference on climate change in Copenhagen next December. But one of the world's leading experts on polar bears has been told to stay away from this week's meeting, specifically because his views on global warming do not accord with those of the rest of the group.


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Army chief kills off plans for European Army Dr Mitchell Taylor has been researching the status and management of polar bears in Canada and around the Arctic Circle for 30 years, as both an academic and a government employee. More than once since 2006 he has made headlines by insisting that polar bear numbers, far from decreasing, are much higher than they were 30 years ago. Of the 19 different bear populations, almost all are increasing or at optimum levels, only two have for local reasons modestly declined.

Dr Taylor agrees that the Arctic has been warming over the last 30 years. But he ascribes this not to rising levels of CO2 – as is dictated by the computer models of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and believed by his PBSG colleagues – but to currents bringing warm water into the Arctic from the Pacific and the effect of winds blowing in from the Bering Sea.

He has also observed, however, how the melting of Arctic ice, supposedly threatening the survival of the bears, has rocketed to the top of the warmists' agenda as their most iconic single cause. The famous photograph of two bears standing forlornly on a melting iceberg was produced thousands of times by Al Gore, the WWF and others as an emblem of how the bears faced extinction – until last year the photographer, Amanda Byrd, revealed that the bears, just off the Alaska coast, were in no danger. Her picture had nothing to do with global warming and was only taken because the wind-sculpted ice they were standing on made such a striking image.

Dr Taylor had obtained funding to attend this week's meeting of the PBSG, but this was voted down by its members because of his views on global warming. The chairman, Dr Andy Derocher, a former university pupil of Dr Taylor's, frankly explained in an email (which I was not sent by Dr Taylor) that his rejection had nothing to do with his undoubted expertise on polar bears: "it was the position you've taken on global warming that brought opposition".

Dr Taylor was told that his views running "counter to human-induced climate change are extremely unhelpful". His signing of the Manhattan Declaration – a statement by 500 scientists that the causes of climate change are not CO2 but natural, such as changes in the radiation of the sun and ocean currents – was "inconsistent with the position taken by the PBSG".

So, as the great Copenhagen bandwagon rolls on, stand by this week for reports along the lines of "scientists say polar bears are threatened with extinction by vanishing Arctic ice". But also check out Anthony Watt's Watts Up With That website for the latest news of what is actually happening in the Arctic. The average temperature at midsummer is still below zero, the latest date that this has happened in 50 years of record-keeping. After last year's recovery from its September 2007 low, this year's ice melt is likely to be substantially less than for some time. The bears are doing fine.

Remember the alarmist video about how the polar bears are running out of space?

I guess that it doesn't make a good story if their populations are fine, and it's even a legitimate "scientist" saying so.

"not helpful" according to the morons in Copenhagen. Looks like they're really out for honesty there, huh? Nothing like creating your own permanent problem, making yourself the official global meeting place, and then barring anyone who has factual evidence that disagrees with your manufactuered problem.

I wonder if they'll run the segment from Blue Planet or whatever that was showing the polar bears swimming where there is no ice.

[Gary Wright]

Addendum, I suppose there is one simple question that answers why the truth isn't welcome:

Which gets you more money:

* There is a problem with the polar bears and we need to research it or they may become extinct

* It appears from all of the real evidence that polar bears are doing fine, everyone find something else to worry about.

[Ron Weasley]

Hmm . . .

Rather inconvenient.

(Okay, someone had to do it.)

[Fish Actuary]

Originally Posted by Gary Wright

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/c...-warmists.html



Remember the alarmist video about how the polar bears are running out of space?

I guess that it doesn't make a good story if their populations are fine, and it's even a legitimate "scientist" saying so.

"not helpful" according to the morons in Copenhagen. Looks like they're really out for honesty there, huh? Nothing like creating your own permanent problem, making yourself the official global meeting place, and then barring anyone who has factual evidence that disagrees with your manufactuered problem.

I wonder if they'll run the segment from Blue Planet or whatever that was showing the polar bears swimming where there is no ice.

Except when the populations aren't doing fine.

At the most recent meeting of the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group(Copenhagen, 2009), scientists reported that of the 19 subpopulations of polar bears, eight are declining, three are stable, one is increasing, and seven have insufficient data on which to base a decision—this is a change from five that were declining in 2005, five that were stable, and two that were increasing. During the meeting, delegates renewed their conclusion from previous meetings that the greatest conservation challenge to the polar bear is ecological change in the Arctic related to climate warming.

Link to the summary table from the working group:

[Dr T Non-Fan]

Create a sub-population in Antarctica. Mission accomplished.

[BigBen]

500 scientists, huh?

In April 2008, environmental journalist Richard Littlemore wrote that a bibliography written by Dennis Avery and posted on Heartland’s Web site, titled "500 Scientists with Documented Doubts of Man-Made Global Warming Scares,”[8] included at least 45 scientists who neither knew of their inclusion as "coauthors" of the article, nor agreed with its claims regarding global warming. Dozens of the scientists asked the Heartland Institute to remove their names from the list; for instance, Gregory Cutter of Old Dominion University wrote, "I have NO doubts... the recent changes in global climate ARE man-induced. I insist that you immediately remove my name from this list since I did not give you permission to put it there." Dr. Robert Whittaker, Professor of Biogeography, University of Oxford wrote "Please remove my name. What you have done is totally unethical!" [9]

In response, the Heartland Institute refused to remove any names from the list. It quoted Dennis Avery saying “Not all of these researchers would describe themselves as global warming skeptics,” said Avery, “but the evidence in their studies is there for all to see.” Heartland’s president, Joseph Bast, wrote “They have no right -- legally or ethically -- to demand that their names be removed from a bibliography composed by researchers with whom they disagree. Their names probably appear in hundreds or thousands of bibliographies accompanying other articles or in books with which they disagree. Do they plan to sue hundreds or thousands of their colleagues? The proper response is to engage in scholarly debate, not demand imperiously that the other side redact its publications.” [10]

FYI - Heartland Institute was the sponsor of the 'Manhattan Declaration' on climate change

[NoName]

http://www.npr.org/2013/02/02/170779...rs?ft=1&f=1025

In 2008, reports of polar bears' inevitable march toward extinction gripped headlines. Stories of thinning Arctic ice and even polar bear cannibalism combined to make these predators into a powerful symbol in the debate about climate change.
The headlines caught Zac Unger's attention, and he decided to write a book about the bears.
Unger made a plan to move to Churchill, Manitoba, a flat, gray place on the Hudson Bay in northern Canada accessible only by train or plane. For a few months out of the year, as the bay starts to freeze, tiny Churchill boasts as many polar bears as it does people.
Unger packed up his wife and three small kids, and set out with a big bold idea. He wanted to write the quintessential requiem of how human-caused climate change was killing off these magnificent beasts.
In the end, he came away with something totally different, Unger tells NPR's Laura Sullivan.

"My humble plan was to become a hero of the environmental movement. I was going to go up to the Canadian Arctic, I was going to write this mournful elegy for the polar bears, at which point I'd be hailed as the next coming of John Muir and borne aloft on the shoulders of my environmental compatriots ...
"So when I got up there, I started realizing polar bears were not in as bad a shape as the conventional wisdom had led me to believe, which was actually very heartening, but didn't fit well with the book I'd been planning to write.
"... There are far more polar bears alive today than there were 40 years ago. ... In 1973, there was a global hunting ban. So once hunting was dramatically reduced, the population exploded. This is not to say that global warming is not real or is not a problem for the polar bears. But polar bear populations are large, and the truth is that we can't look at it as a monolithic population that is all going one way or another."

Now I guess he could be doing the old "pretend I used to believe the opposite as a PR hook", but I don't think so, and I think the hysteria was way overdone

[Guerilla poster]

The left wing (mainstream) media keeps hiding the truth

[PeppermintPatty]

Maybe, due to the remote location of most polar bears, they are hard to study, and different scientists have legitimatelycome to different conclusions about the health of the populations.

(I'll duck now)

[Fish Actuary]

I didn't realize that polar bears only live in and around Churchill, Manitoba...

The article and the audio are kind of vague on details. It seemed to be pretty much focused on the polar bears living in and around Churchill which has lots of polar bears, and in fact uses this to drive their local tourist trade (e.g. http://www.tundrabuggy.com/). I haven't read the book he's talking about, "Never Look a Polar Bear in the Eye: A Family Field Trip to the Arctic's Edge in Search of Adventure, Truth, and Mini-Marshmallows", but from the reviews on Amazon, it sounds like it's a good story about a family's extended trip to Churchill, but it sounds like the sciencey part is only so-so.

I took a <very> quick look, but couldn't find anything to confirm Unger's claims that world polar bear numbers are up since the 1960s when the hunting ban was put in place, but it wouldn't surprise me if he's right on that part. In a lot of areas, hunting was the major cause for the recent historical decline in polar bear numbers, and so the population is bouncing back from that.

On the other hand, it sounds like the polar bear (as of 2004) in the Churchill area is down vs. 1987.

Between 1987 and 2004, WH declined from 1194 (95% CI = 1020, 1368) in 1987 to 935 (95% CI = 794, 1076) in 2004, a reduction of about 22% (Regehr et al. 2007). In particular, the survival of cubs, sub-adults, and old bears were negatively correlated with the date of breakup, i.e., the earlier the breakup, the poorer the survival and conversely. Before 1998 the subpopulation had apparently remained stable (Stirling et al. 1999), indicating that, prior to the onset of a decline brought about by the negative effects of climate warming, the annual harvest of approximately 50 bears had been sustainable.

I have heard anecdotally, that part of the reason that polar bears are so abundant in the Churchill area is that the timing of the freeze-up of Hudson Bay has been shifting to later and later dates in the year. Polar bears are starting their migration towards the ice at about the same time as they historically have and they end up stacking up around Churchill waiting for the ice to form.

In my quick search, I did see that there was a lot of discussion about polar bear sightings being up, but population size estimates declining <e.g. aerial surveys, or other abundance sampling methods>. The science argument on this is that people are seeing more polar bears because they are aggregating around human settlements because there is more accessible food for them there, than elsewhere. Corroboration for that hypothesis comes from the poorer condition of polar bears being sighted around towns (e.g. skinny, small bears). I didn't see anything on methodology for the population size estimates in question, and I'd be a bit worried that maybe the surveys aren't doing a good job of accounting for bears aggregating around human settlements. The population is small and very widely distributed. If the aerial surveys missed as few as 4 or 5 bears because they are now more likely to be found living around towns than in the survey area, it could result in estimates showing a declining bear population, when the population size is actually increasing. On the other hand, the managers may be including towns in the aerial surveys as they know that bears aggregate there. I'm really not sure.