Svalbard polar bear data 2016 through 2018 shows no impact of low ice years

Posted on June 15, 2018 | Comments Off on Svalbard polar bear data 2016 through 2018 shows no impact of low ice years

Last week, the Norwegian Polar Institute updated their online data collected for the Svalbard area to include 2017 and 2018 — fall sea ice data and spring polar bear data. Older data for comparison go back to 1993 for polar bears and 1979 for sea ice, showing little to no impact of the reduced ice present since 2016 in late spring through fall.

Svalbard polar bear_NP015991-isbjorn-JA

Here’s what the introduction says, in part [my bold]:

“…The polar bear habitat is changing rapidly, and the Polar Basin could be ice-free in summer within a few years. Gaining access to preferred denning areas and their favourite prey, ringed seals, depends on good sea ice conditions at the right time and place. The population probably increased considerably during the years after hunting was banned in 1973, and new knowledge indicates that the population hasn’t been reduced the last 10-15 years, in spite of a large reduction in available sea ice in the same period.”

See Aars et al. 2017 for details on the 2015 Svalbard polar bear population count, keeping in mind that the subpopulation region is called “Barents Sea” for a reason: only a few hundred individuals currently stick close to Svalbard year round while most Barents Sea bears inhabit the pack ice around Franz Josef Land to the east (Aars et al. 2009; Crockford 2017, 2018).
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Environment Canada maps of polar bear population and status assessments 2018

Posted on June 11, 2018 | Comments Off on Environment Canada maps of polar bear population and status assessments 2018

Just out (6 June 2018) — new population assessment and status maps of the 19 polar bear subpopulations according to Environment Canada. Contrary to the map presented at the Range State meeting in February 2018 (pdf here), these maps show Western Hudson Bay and Southern Hudson Bay (along with the Southern Beaufort) as “likely declined.” A new category has been added for the Barents Sea: it’s considered “data deficient/uncertain,” but a population estimate of 2,001-3,000 has been provided.

No press release or other notice regarding the availability of these new maps was issued, as far as I know: I came across them by accident while looking for something else.

Global pb status and population map EC 2018

Global map above, more below, including a comparative map that shows 2010, 2014, and 2018 together. I will update the two recent posts of mine (here and here) that used the February Range State map with the information that more recently revised maps are now available.

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Lingering late season sea ice brings polar bear visitor to northern Newfoundland

Posted on June 11, 2018 | Comments Off on Lingering late season sea ice brings polar bear visitor to northern Newfoundland

Polar bear season for St. Lunaire-Griquet Newfoundland ran from 6 March to 10 June this year — three long months when polar bears came to visit the community during the season when bears are usually occupied with feeding on young seals and mating.

Newfoundland polar bear 10 June 2018_Iceberg Festival Committee_Thresa Burden photo

Below is a map of the region: St. Lunaire-Griquet is at the tip of the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland, just north of St. Anthony (where some of the action in my polar bear attack thriller, EATEN, takes place):

Saint Lunaire Griquet Newfoundland location_Google maps

As of yesterday (June 10), when the last sighting of a fat and healthy polar bear took place, there was still quite a mass of thick first year ice (>1.2 m thick) off the northern peninsula of Newfoundland, amongst a field of icebergs:

Hudson Bay North daily stage of development 2018 June 10 ice warning

The first sighting in the area this year was back in early March, which I blogged about here. Fortunately, the Davis Strait bears that occupy the East Coast pack ice are usually well feed at this time of year and seldom pose a serious threat to humans: the fact that visitors ashore are often easily pursuaded to leave (or do so on their own) suggests they are more curious than hungry.

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Critical evidence on W Hudson Bay polar bears still not published after 25 years

Posted on June 6, 2018 | Comments Off on Critical evidence on W Hudson Bay polar bears still not published after 25 years

Polar bear researchers have been doing capture/recapture studies in Western Hudson Bay for decades yet most of the data claimed to be critical for assessing effects of human-caused global warming on this species have not been published. I raised this point in one of my early blog posts (27 Sept 2012) but the situation has not changed in 6 years. Here’s an update.

Derocher in the field in WH_CBC story 2016

From CBC story 14 Sept 2016.

Years ago now, in an oft-cited paper, Stirling and Derocher (2012) claimed to summarize the evidence that climate warming was negatively impacting polar bear health and survival. Several life history parameters were considered crucial, particularly body condition.

Despite almost a dozen papers (and perhaps more) on various aspects of WH polar bear health and life history studies based on capture/recapture data published since 2004  (e.g. Castro de la Guardia 2017; Lunn et al. 2016; Pilfold et al. 2017), none have reported the body condition data that supposedly support the claim that sea ice loss is having a severe impact — and the same is true for litter size, proportion of independent yearlings, and cub survival.1

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Southern Hudson Bay polar bear region shows slight decline after decades of low sea ice

Posted on June 3, 2018 | Comments Off on Southern Hudson Bay polar bear region shows slight decline after decades of low sea ice

A newly-published paper by Martyn Obbard and colleagues in the journal Arctic Science claims a 17% decline in abundance of polar bears in the Southern Hudson Bay region after years of reduced sea ice and declining body condition (Obbard et al. 2018). The decline in numbers was not statistically significant but an additional statistical analysis (“Monte Carlo simulation”) not applied to any other estimate in recent years suggested the decline could be real, so a real decline is what was reported to the press.

James Bay polar bear_ministry of Ontario_Walton photo

Only one Canadian Press story has so far been circulated amongst outlets in the media (published hours after the paper appeared online, not at the same time), suggesting there was no press release issued for this study. Odd, that — especially if the decline is as real and significant as the authors suggest.

While no evidence was provided for a correlation of this decline in numbers to recent (2012-2016) sea ice decline, previous evidence from the region (Obbard et al. 2016) showed a decline in body condition was correlated only with much later than usual freeze-up, a situation that did not occur from 2012 to 2015 (freeze-up was late in the fall of 2016 but occurred months after the Obbard et al. (2018) survey was completed).

Moreover, the paper reports that a decline in survival of yearling cubs (from 12% of the population in 2011 to 5% in 2016) was not associated with especially poor sea ice conditions in spring. We are likely to see a follow-up paper next year reporting the body condition and sea ice data from this study (as for the previous survey: Obbard et al. 2015, 2016), but there is no suggestion in this paper that body condition declined further from 2011/2012 levels or that sea ice conditions deteriorated markedly enough after 2012 to precipitate a population decline.

UPDATE 11 June 2018: See below, more recent versions of population and status assessment maps has been issued by Environment Canada that conclude Southern Hudson Bay is “likely declined.”

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Harvey et al. paper becomes the poster child of the reproducibility crisis in science

Posted on June 1, 2018 | Comments Off on Harvey et al. paper becomes the poster child of the reproducibility crisis in science

You can now own an awesome mouse pad featuring Josh’s ‘stupidest paper ever’ cartoon, as a reminder of the depths to which some people will descend to silence the voices of rational scientific debate just as the authors of the 2018 Harvey et al. BioScience paper qualifies it for the honour of poster child of the reproducibility crisis in science.

Poster Child of the reproducibilty crisis in science

By insisting — repeatedly and as recently as this month — that the information they released as supplementary data (find it here) was all that was used to construct the two figures in the paper (see Rajan and Tol 2018), the authors tacitly admit:

1) the data used to construct the figures were not derived from the methods they said they used

2) the work is not replicable

In other words, it is not science. That surely qualifies the Harvey et al. (2018) paper for the honour of poster child of the reproducibility crisis in science, discussed here and here (Baker 2016; Nosek et al. 2015). It’s an example the public will readily grasp, since the data said to have been used are easily accessible (and understood) by anyone who uses the Internet.

Below is the letter outlining the data release issue sent more than a week ago (18 May 2018) by Dr. Richard Tol, University of Sussex, to the president of the university highest academic authority in the Netherlands, where Jeff Harvey, lead author of the Harvey et al. 2018 BioScience paper, is employed as an academic [h/t R. Tol for the correction]. While Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen [KNAW] in Amsterdam has a clearly stated data sharing policy, it is clearly not being upheld for the Harvey et al. paper — which nullifies the point of having a policy at all.

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Josh’s ‘stupidest paper ever’ cartoon on a mousepad and polar bear science tote bags

Posted on May 31, 2018 | Comments Off on Josh’s ‘stupidest paper ever’ cartoon on a mousepad and polar bear science tote bags

You can now own a mouse pad featuring Josh’s ‘stupidest paper ever’ cartoon or treat yourself to a versatile tote bag for your summer activities with a positive, non-confrontational message about polar bears. Or give them as gifts. Proceeds from these useful items will help support my work here at Polar Bear Science.

mousepad and tote together_PolarBearScience

 

Josh’s cartoon on a mouse pad

Josh’s cartoon commemorates the Harvey et al. 2018 paper published in the journal BioScience (“Internet blogs, polar bears, and climate-change denial by proxy”), described by climate scientist Judith Curry as “absolutely the stupidest paper ever published.”

See my April 2018 blog summary of the issue here, in pdf format here.

Presented as a work of peer-reviewed science by the editor’s of the journal BioScience, this paper attempts to destroy my professional scientific credibility on polar bears (Rajan and Tol 2018) due to my criticisms of Steve Amstrup’s 2007 polar bear survival predictive model and Ian Stirling’s continued insistence that polar bears are unable to survive an Arctic with less summer sea ice than they had in the 1980s.

With Josh’s permission, the mouse pad is available to order at my PolarBearScience2 store at Zazzle via the links below for $15.00. Makes a great gift!

Or in black, if you prefer:

_______________

Polar Bear Science Tote Bags

For shopping, the beach, or carrying books, I also offer two sizes of canvas bags with a positive, non-confrontational message about the status of polar bears. Decorated with the same fabulous image of a polar bear that graces the cover of my novel (“EATEN”), the text simply reads, “Outstanding Survivors of Climate Change.”

1) Polar Bear Survivor Large Canvas Tote [“Outstanding Survivors of Climate Change”], $27.90:

Relative size of large tote:

Polar bear survivor large tote image 1

Close-up:

Polar bear survivor large tote image closeup

2) Polar Bear Survivor Small Canvas Bag [“Outstanding Survivors of Climate Change”], $13.65:

Relative size of small canvas bag:

Polar bear survivor small tote image 1

References

Harvey, J.A., van den Berg, D., Ellers, J., Kampen, R., Crowther, T.W., Roessingh, P., Verheggen, B., Nuijten, R. J. M., Post, E., Lewandowsky, S., Stirling, I., Balgopal, M., Amstrup, S.C., and Mann, M.E. 2017. Internet blogs, polar bears, and climate-change denial by proxy. Bioscience 68: 281-287. DOI: 10.1093/biosci/bix133 Open Access, available here. Supplementary data file available here and the data for the principal component analysis is available here and (h/t to R. Tol), the R code is available here Corrigendum here (issued 28 March 2018). Scheduled for the April print issue.

Rajan, A. and Tol, R.S. 2018. Lipstick on a bear: a comment on internet blogs, polar bears, and climate change denial by proxy. Open Science Framework osf.io/7j3z2. January 2018, DOI10.13140/RG.2.2.18048.12804. Available here.

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