Category Archives: Conservation Status

Misleading “State of the Polar Bear” graphic still not fixed

Posted on April 1, 2013 | Comments Off

This is an update regarding the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG)’s fancy, multilevel State of the Polar Bear web graphic that I discussed previously here, here, and here.

To refresh your memory, two points about this graphic stand out, both regarding polar bear population estimates:

1) The population estimates listed on the Nations map (copied below) add up to 22,600-32,000 - far higher than the official estimate of 20,000-25,000 polar bears worldwide.

2) The population estimates listed on the upper layer of the Subpopulation map add up to just 13,036 – not even close to the official estimate of 20,000-25,000 polar bears worldwide.
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Posted in Conservation Status, Population

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Matt Ridley’s foreword to my “10 good reasons not to worry” list – “We should be listening to Susan Crockford”

Posted on March 13, 2013 | Comments Off

Benny Peiser over at the Global Warming Policy Foundation has just posted an essay by well-known author Matt Ridley (including “The Rational Optimist”), entitled “We should be listening to Susan Crockford” which is included as a foreword to a pdf of my earlier post, “Ten good reasons not to worry about polar bears.”

This stand-alone pdf is especially suitable for sharing with friends and policy makers.

I encourage you to have a look.

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Posted in Conservation Status

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Polar bear spin reaches epic proportions at Bangkok CITES meeting

Posted on March 10, 2013 | Comments Off

As I mentioned here in an update to my March 7th post, Damian Carrington at the Guardian Environment blog had this telling quote about the CITES deliberations that took place prior to the vote to ban polar bear trade (by uplisting its status from Appendix II to Appendix I):

As the debate raged, national delegates from other countries got confused by the strident but conflicting claims. “Where is the truth? Is it true that the polar bear is declining. Is it true that trade is increasing? We need to know,” said the Egyptian delegate.[my bold]

Indeed. Was there “truth” in the presentations heard by delegates? By that I mean, honest presentations of facts so that delegates could make up their own minds, or facts loaded with spin to sway the decision one way or another? I wasn’t there so I can’t say. But we can get some impression of what might have been said from two press releases statements issued after the vote failed by two parties that were actively promoting acceptance of the US-led proposal.[Update: Humane Society Press Release is here] Continue reading

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Posted in Sea ice habitat, Population, Conservation Status, Advocacy

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US proposal to ban polar bear trade FAILS

Posted on March 7, 2013 | Comments Off

Just in, the BBC reports (Matt McGrath): [UPDATE FOLLOWS]

A proposal by the US to ban cross-border trade in polar bears and their parts was defeated on Thursday at an international meeting.

The result marks a victory for Canada’s indigenous Inuit people over their bigger neighbour to the south.

Delegates at the Cites meeting in Thailand rejected the proposal to change the bear’s status from a species whose trade is regulated, not banned.

A similar proposal was defeated three years ago at the last Cites meeting.

The latest plan fell far short of the two-thirds needed to pass the Bangkok conference. It garnered 38 votes in favour, 42 against and 46 abstentions.

Sanity and good science prevailed.

See the full story here.

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Posted in Conservation Status

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CITES Secretariat recommends rejecting US proposal to ban polar bear trade

Posted on March 2, 2013 | Comments Off

I missed this somehow when I discussed the upcoming (March 3-14) CITES vote on banning polar bear trade (here). But a recent story in the Nunatsiaq News (excerpt below) alerted me to this recommendation by the CITES Secretariat, which rather echoes my December post, “did the PBSG game the polar bear listing process” as well as my most offering,  “ten good reasons not to worry about polar bears”:

Re: Proposal 3 Ursus maritimus (Polar bear) – Transfer from Appendix II to Appendix I
(CoP16 Doc. 7, Annex 2-p. 10 back up here)

Recommendation by the Secretariat

In accordance with the criteria in Annex 1 and the guidelines in Annex 5 of Resolution Conf. 9.24 (Rev. CoP15), the global population of Ursus maritimus does not appear to be small, the area of distribution of this species extends over several million square kilometers and is not restricted and there is insufficient evidence to show that the species has undergone a marked decline in the population size in the wild (when applying the definitions, explanations and guidelines in Annex 5). Whilst the guidelines provide for population declines to be projected by extrapolation to infer likely future values, in this instance such a projection is heavily dependent on estimates of future sea ice coverage which vary widely. An Appendix I listing would not appear to be a measure proportionate to the anticipated risk to the species at this time.

Based on the available information at the time of writing (late January 2013), the Secretariat recommends that this proposal be rejected.

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Posted in Advocacy, Conservation Status

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Ten good reasons not to worry about polar bears

Posted on February 26, 2013 | Comments Off

IMPORTANT UPDATE March 13, 2013 Benny Peiser over at the Global Warming Policy Foundation has just posted an essay by well-known author Matt Ridley, entitled “We should be listening to Susan Crockford” which is included as a foreword to a pdf of this very post (“Ten good reasons not to worry about polar bears”), suitable for sharing. I encourage you to have a look.   Susan

Polar Bear-Cubs-Canada_Wallpaper

PB logo colouredThis year marks the 40th anniversary of the signing of an international agreement to protect polar bears from commercial and unregulated sport hunting. The devastating decades of uncontrolled slaughter across the Arctic, including the Bering Sea, finally came to an end. And so in honor of International Polar Bear Day (Wed. February 27) – and because some activists are calling 2013 The Year of the Polar Bear – I’ve made a summary of reasons not to worry about polar bears, with links to supporting data. I hope you find it a useful resource for tuning out the cries of doom and gloom about the future of polar bears and celebrating their current success.

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Posted in Conservation Status, Population, Sea ice habitat

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Where were the appeals to feed starving polar bears in 1974?

Posted on February 21, 2013 | Comments Off

The so-called “policy paper” that polar bear biologist Andrew Derocher has been promoting over the last few weeks, which I commented on briefly when the press release came out, is still grabbing headlines. Online news outlets continue to run stories on this bizarre discussion of what officials might decide to do 40 years from now if global warming causes Western Hudson Bay polar bears to spend 6 months on land (Molnar et al. 2010), causing some of those polar bears to starve (see here, here, and here) – as if this is something likely to happen within the next couple of years.

But forget imagined future starvation: where was the media attention on the plight of starving polar bears back in 1974  and 1975 when polar bears were actually starving in large numbers in the eastern Beaufort Sea?

At least two of the co-authors of the paper getting all the attention – Drs. Ian Stirling and Nick Lunn – witnessed polar bears starving in the Beaufort in 1974 because of an especially cold winter and said nothing – even though polar bear populations worldwide at the time were already low due to the wanton slaughter of previous decades. Did Stirling and Lunn humanely euthanize the bears they saw starving? Contact the media? [If they did, I’d like to know.] Appeal to governments to make a plan in case it happened again? Apparently not, because it did happen again, at least twice in the following two decades – with no attendant hue and cry then either. No, those Beaufort Sea bears starved to death, time and time again, without a word to the media from Ian Stirling and Nick Lunn.
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Posted in Advocacy, Conservation Status, Sea ice habitat

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Misleading “State of the Polar Bear” graphic cost advocate scientists more than US$50,000

Posted on February 10, 2013 | Comments Off

I’ve had some time to do a little digging regarding the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG) State of the Polar Bear web graphic. It turns out this fancy but misleading document was designed by a US company called Periscopic (Portland, Oregon) at a cost of US$50, 000-70,000. So apparently, rather than put $70,000 towards much-needed polar bear research, the PBSG chose to use the money to tell people, in a slightly different way, that it thinks polar bears are doomed. [see UPDATE: April 1 2013]

Just to refresh your memory, last month I pointed out that this fancy summary “tool,” which sits prominently on the home page of the PBSG website, suggests that there are now 22,600-32,000 polar bears worldwide, when tallied by nation (when you add up the individual population estimates provided on each of the two maps on this web “tool” (without clicking through to more detail), you get two different numbers that have no resemblance to the “official” estimate of 20,000-25,000: the page “Nations” gives totals by country that add up to 22,600-32,000 and the numbers given on the “Subpopulations” page (when you hover your mouse over each of the 19 regions) add up to only 13,036 – a far cry from 20,000-25,000 official estimate).

A few days later, I got a response to the email I’d sent to Norwegian polar bear biologist Dag Vongraven, who said it was his job to supervise work on this summary. But, he said, he had “not yet had time to review all details in it as well as I should.” So it seems that without a careful review of the final product, the graphic was posted on the home page of the PBSG website (sometime in October 2012).

It turns out there had been a discussion at the 2009 PBSG meeting, documented in its official report (Obbard et al. 2010:11, Fig. 1 below), about their intention to hire Periscopic as part of on-going PBSG website developments supervised by Vongraven. Several PBSG members agreed this would be a good idea and offered to help by providing data. Continue reading

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Posted in Advocacy, Conservation Status, Population

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Andrew Derocher refuses to accept that polar bears have been saved

Posted on February 5, 2013 | Comments Off

Update Feb 12, 2013 – I now have a copy of the Derocher et al in press paper. If anyone would like to see it, please send me a note via the “Commments-Tips” page above

Andrew Derocher, an known polar bear advocate, has been making headlines again, this time promoting a new “policy paper” he is lead author on that has just been accepted for publication. He and his colleagues simply refuse to accept that the polar bear has been saved (population numbers have rebounded dramatically since protective legislation was introduced in 1973) and it seems all they can think of to do now is press for ever more restrictive regulations.

The timing of the release of this paper is very convenient: Fish and Wildlife biologists and polar bear activists worldwide are actively campaigning to get CITES, at their meeting next month, to make it illegal to trade in legally harvested polar bear parts (see previous post here). Canada is also under international pressure to up-list the status of the polar bear to “threatened,” see post here.

The article itself is behind a paywall (abstract and co-author list below), so it is unlikely that many people outside the choir of conservation advocate subscribers of the journal will ever read it, so Derocher is talking it up big time, with the help of his university PR department. Timely indeed. [h/t WUWT]

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Why is the US pushing to ban polar bear trade? Polar bears have been saved

Posted on February 4, 2013 | Comments Off

One of the items on the agenda at the upcoming 16th meeting of the signatories to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) in Bangkok Thailand (3-14 March, 2013) is a proposal to upgrade the polar bear from Appendix II to Appendix I status - prepared by the US Fish & Wildlife Service. The suggested change is based on what is claimed to be “a marked decline in the population size in the wild, which has been inferred or projected on the basis of a decrease in area of habitat and a decrease in quality of habitat.” If this proposition is adopted by CITES, it would be illegal to trade legally harvested polar bear parts of any kind.

The US tried this maneuver at the last CITES meeting in 2010 and it failed rather miserably. I see little reason to believe it will pass this year, even though the US is actively campaigning and has motivated activists worldwide to pressure other countries to vote in their favour (see “Activists push for international ban on legal trade in polar bear items” which discusses the absurdity of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) not supporting the CITES proposal because they want to keep the focus on model-predicted future “threats” of global warming, see Clark et al. 2012, abstract below).

But here’s the question I have for all the folks involved in this CITES petition and other similar proposals to upgrade the conservation status of the polar bear to a “threatened” or “endangered” level: why is all this time, money and effort going toward ever-more restrictive regulations for a species that has clearly been saved but about which we still know so little?

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