A press release issued yesterday (23 January 2018) by the University of Stavanger tells the story of decades of work on the most complete ancient polar bear skeleton in the world, found in 1976 in southern Norway, that culminated in an articulated museum display. This specimen was described in my research paper, Annotated Map of Ancient Polar Bear Remains of the World (Crockford 2012), which shows how many very early Holocene remains have been found outside current polar bear range.
Comments Off on Early Holocene polar bear skeleton from Norway vs. other ancient remains
Posted in Evolution, History, Sea ice habitat
Tagged ancient, archaeology, bones, fossils, geology, Holocene, ice age, Norway, polar bears, range, sea ice, skeleton, Younger Dryas
According to Harvey and colleagues (2017), any internet posting that discusses polar bears without a link to PolarBearScience or a mention of my name can be considered a ‘science-based’ blog. But they missed an obvious catch: bloggers who use my content without attribution.
For example, so-called ‘science-based’ blog Churchill Polar Bears, written by Churchill polar bear guide Steve Seldon, used text and two of the four figures provided in a 15 February 2017 post at PolarBearScience to create a Churchill Polar Bears post on 17 February but did not include a single link to PolarBearScience indicating that’s where he got his information (Wayback machine link here).
A few would not consider this plagiarism but most do. That is to say, failure to attribute a source when work or information is not your own is a big no-no in science, as it is in all of academia.
Consider this evidence: Continue reading
Comments Off on Blog uses my polar bear info but no link to PBS means they are ‘science-based’
Posted in Advocacy, Scientists hit back
Tagged Amstrup, attribution, blogs, Churchill Polar Bears, Harvey, plagarism, Polar Bears International, science
In scanning comments generated by the recent flurry of internet interest in polar bears and blogs I noticed that a good many people, fed alarming media stories, are still convinced that polar bear numbers are declining rapidly when nothing could be further from the truth.
Comments Off on Polar bear numbers not declining despite media headlines suggesting otherwise
Posted in Advocacy, Population
Tagged climate change, estimates, facts, global warming, good news, observations, population size, science, sea ice, status
Optimism in conservation science — which the Smithsonian says we desperately need (Earth Optimism Summit 21-23 April 2017, apparently a huge success) — means it’s time to acknowledge and celebrate real conservation success stories. The Smithsonian folks probably won’t say it but I will — one of those successes is the recovery of polar bears.
It’s time to abandon the focus on prophesies of impending loss and accept that recovery of polar bears from the over-hunting of last century has continued despite a decade of low summer sea ice (Aars et al. 2017; Crockford 2017; Dyck et al. 2017; SWG 2016; York et al. 2016). Why not focus on the numerous images of fat, healthy bears rather than the anomalous starving ones?
It’s time to let go of imagined future catastrophes based on pessimistic failures of adaptation (Amstrup et al. 2007, 2008; Atwood et al. 2016; Stirling and Derocher 2012) and acknowledge that polar bears and Arctic seals, just like Pacific walrus (MacCracken et al. 2017; US Fish & Wildlife Service 2017), are resilient species with adaptive capabilities we are only just beginning to comprehend (Crawford and Quakenbush 2013; Crawford et al. 2015; Escajeda et al. 2018; Rode et al. 2014; Stirling and Lunn 1997; Stirling et al. 1975a; Vibe 1965). Continue reading
Comments Off on Science, optimism, and the resilience of polar bears in an ever-changing Arctic
Posted in Conservation Status, Summary
Tagged abundance, conservation, facts, observations, optimism, populations, save the polar bear, science, sea ice, success, walrus
Frustration with criticism over the fate of polar bears decades into the future has plagued consensus experts since they first brought their concerns to the attention of conservation organizations in the mid-2000s. But now that catastrophe has not materialized, these researchers have shifted their defensive style from logical reasoning to relentless insult.
A decade ago, doubts about the veracity of the proposed ESA conservation status of “threatened” with extinction due to predicted effect of global warming came primarily through the media, who were seen to give critics a platform.
In a revealing article published 10 years ago in the fall of 2007 (before the ESA decision had been made) by polar bear biologists Ian Stirling and Andrew Derocher (“Melting Under Pressure: The real scoop on climate warming and polar bears”) in The Wildlife Professional, some of the same concerns were being raised as in 2017 by Harvey and colleagues (that including Stirling and fellow polar bear biologist Steven Amstrup) in BioScience (“Internet blogs, polar bears, and climate-change denial by proxy”), but the approach and the language is startlingly different.
Continue reading
Comments Off on Consensus polar bear experts dealt with criticism differently in 2007
Posted in Conservation Status, Population
Tagged attack, disagreement, observations, professional, science, skeptic, social media
Consensus polar bear expert Andrew Derocher has been busy over the last few weeks, expounding a story of doom regarding Svalbard area polar bears (e.g. here and here), ridiculing the suggestion that Franz Josef Land is viable alternate habitat for Barents Sea bears, especially pregnant females looking for a place to den and give birth. But the facts say otherwise.
Below are the long answers, with references and ice maps, to the questions Derocher asked in his 21 December 2017 tweet (above), a refreshing change from the ‘take my word for it, I’m the official expert’ answer one gets from him, along with derogatory slurs directed at those who don’t share his pessimism.
UPDATED 1 February 2019. Two references added.
Comments Off on Franz Josef Land is a sea ice refugium for most pregnant Barents Sea polar bears
Posted in Life History, Population, Sea ice habitat
Tagged abundance, Arctic islands, Barents Sea, den habitat, estimates, Franz Josef Land, Norway, polar bears, pregnant, Russia, sea ice, Svalbard
A recent New Time Times article about Google’s practice of generating ad revenue via ‘promoted’ search results (“How Climate Change Deniers Rise to the Top in Google Searches” 29 December 2017) had a surprising and disquieting ending about the prospect of internet censorship.
It was a quote from Jeff Harvey of “Internet Blogs, Polar Bears, and Climate-Change Denial by Proxy” (Bioscience, 29 November 2017) fame:
Continue reading
Comments Off on Did Harvey et al. authors aim to help Google censor polar bear information?
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged attack, censorship, consensus, contrarian, freedom of speech, internet, sceptic, search engines, skeptic
Polar bear experts who falsely predicted that roughly 16,400 polar bears would be dead by now1 (given sea ice conditions since 2007) have realized their failure has not only kicked their own credibility to the curb, it has taken with it the reputations of their climate change colleagues. This has left many folks unhappy about the toppling of this important global warming icon but ironically, consensus polar bear experts and climate scientists (and their supporters) were the ones who set up the polar bear as a proxy for AGW in the first place.
I published my professional criticisms on the failed predictions of the polar bear conservation community in a professional online scientific preprint journal, which has now been downloaded almost 2,000 times (Crockford 2017; Crockford and Geist 2017).
My paper demonstrates that the polar bear/seaice decline hypothesis, particularly the one developed by Steven Amstrup, is a failure. I’m not the only one who thinks so, as emails obtained from the US Fish and Wildlife Service show. The argument the paper lays out and the facts it presents have not been challenged by any one of the consensus polar bear experts who object to it so strenuously. Instead, they have chosen to misrepresent my work, and publicly belittle my credentials and scientific integrity in the published literature (Harvey et al. 2017) and online.
Harvey and colleagues suggest in their paper that I and others use polar bears as a proxy for AGW as part of a deliberate plan to undermine the public’s confidence in global warming.
Harvey et al. state:
“…the main strategy of denier blogs is therefore to focus on topics that are showy and in which it is therefore easy to generate public interest. These topics are used as “proxies” for AGW in general; in other words, they represent keystone dominoes that are strategically placed in front of many hundreds of others, each representing a separate line of evidence for AGW. By appearing to knock over the keystone domino, audiences targeted by the communication may assume all other dominoes are toppled in a form of “dismissal by association.” [my bold]
I do not recall ever stating or implying that if polar bear predictions of doom were wrong, then general climate change models must also be wrong. But if any other bloggers have done so, they can hardly be blamed.
A bit of reflection shows it was the climate science community itself — in collaboration with Arctic researchers and the media — who by the year 2000 (below left) set the polar bear up as an icon for catastrophic global warming. They made the polar bear a proxy for AGW.
Al Gore used the polar bears on an ice flow image (above right) to seal global warming icon status for the polar bear in his 2007 movie, An Inconvenient Truth (see National Post March 2007 article here).
As Harvey et al. co-author Michael Mann said only a few years ago (24 March 2014):
“We are now the polar bear.”
A clear association was made between polar bear survival and AGW, time and time again, as recently as last February (2017):
So, when the polar bears failed to die by the thousands as polar bear models predicted, after years of lower summer ice than any sea ice models predicted (see graphic below), some people may have logically stated or implied that perhaps general climate models are similarly flawed.
In essence, Mann’s “we are now the polar bear” statement came back to bite him and his colleagues in the ass, Amstrup and Ian Stirling included. Predictably, they would like to blame someone else for their failure and embarrassment, so they wrote a sloppy tantrum paper that pretends my polar bear/sea ice decline document doesn’t exist.
I guess we all should have seen it coming.
UPDATE 8 January 2018: Forgot to add that Mann’s upcoming children’s book depends on the polar bear being an appealing icon for global warming: he uses the bears as a hook to grab the interest and sympathy of naive youngsters so that he can sell them his scary modeled prophesy of the future. In contrast, my children’s book Polar Bear Facts & Myths deals with the current status and science of polar bears, sea ice and Arctic ecology and draws no parallels between global warming predictions and polar bear survival.
Predicted sea ice changes (based on 2004 data) at 2020, 2050, and 2080 that were used in 2007 to predict a 67% decline in global polar bear numbers vs. an example of the sea ice extent reality experienced since 2007 (shown is 2012). See Crockford 2017 for details.
Just to clarify, this represents the predicted decline of 67% of the population (i.e. 24,500 bears) estimated to exist in 2005 by the US Geological Survey.
Crockford, S.J. and Geist, V. 2018. Conservation Fiasco. Range Magazine, Winter 2017/2018, pg. 26-27. Pdf here.
Crockford, S.J. 2017. Testing the hypothesis that routine sea ice coverage of 3-5 mkm2 results in a greater than 30% decline in population size of polar bears (Ursus maritimus). PeerJ Preprints 2 March 2017. Doi: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.2737v3 Open access. https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2737v3
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. DOI: 10.1093/biosci/bix133
Comments Off on Failed Amstrup polar bear predictions have climate change community in a panic
Posted in Advocacy, Conservation Status, Population, Sea ice habitat
Tagged attack, failed predictions, global warming, icon, keystone domino, proxy, science blog, tantrum
The Harvey et al. Bioscience article that attacks this blog and others that link to it — a veritable tantrum paper that took 14 people to write — included a sciency-looking analysis of peer-reviewed articles said to have been retrieved by the database “Web of Science” using the search terms “polar bear” and “sea ice.”
“Consensus science pounds the floor and chews the carpet in angry frustration.” [mpainter, 25 December 2017]
“Of the 92 papers included in the study, 6 are labeled ‘controversial.’ Of the remaining 86, 60 are authored or co-authored by Stirling or Amstrup, or Derocher. That is, close to 70% (69.76%) of the so-called ‘majority-view’ papers are from just three people, 2 of whom wrote the attack paper themselves.” [Shub Niggurath, crossposted at Climate Scepticism, 14 December 2017]
The bias of co-author papers used to represent the “expert consensus” on polar bear biology is only one problem with this particular attempt at making the Harvey paper look like science: in fact, the short list of papers used for analysis is a far cry from the original number returned by Web of Science for the search terms the authors say they used in the supplementary information.
How that large original number (almost 500) was whittled down to less than 100 is not explained by the authors. As a consequence, I can only conclude that the “methodology” for paper selection was likely defined after the fact. While the method of paper selection sounds simple and reasonable, apparently not one of the Harvey et al. paper’s co-authors checked to see if it was plausible (or didn’t care if it was not).
Comments Off on Harvey et al. attack article mum on real selection process for polar bear papers used in their analysis
Posted in Advocacy, Life History, Sea ice habitat
Tagged analysis, BioScience, critique, defamation, Harvey, literature, principal components, science, science blog
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