Yesterday, the DailyMail (among others) was suckered into running virtually the same story The Guardian (among others) hyped last year about this time.
Using a science journal version of the 2015 IUCN Red List assessment report, polar bear data collectors and their fortune-teller colleagues have managed to get polar bears back in the news.
I wrote about this last year – it’s actually good news, although you wouldn’t know it from the headlines.
Let me paraphrase the ‘sperts:
“After 10 years of ice conditions we didn’t expect would happen until mid-century (a worst-case scenario we said would cause more than 30% of the world’s polar bears to die – except they didn’t), we have now determined (using a new model and a brand new definition of sea ice specific to polar bears) that by mid-century, there is only a 70% chance that 30% of polar bears will die.”
This is how they explain away all the bears that didn’t die as they should have when summer sea ice declined to about 5 mkm2 and below after 2006.
Continue reading
Posted in Conservation Status, Uncategorized
Tagged crystal ball, ESA, experts, future threats, polar bear, predictions, Red list, Regehr, sea ice, USGS
You must be logged in to post a comment.