Tag Archives: Climate Feedback

Expert reveals size of another Canadian polar bear subpopulation is increasing

In case you missed it buried in the details of my rebuttal two weeks ago about Facebook labelling a short PragerU polar bear video as “false information”, in his review of the video (18 May 2020) Canadian polar bear biologist Ian Stirling revealed that a recent survey of M’Clintock Channel polar bears documented a population increase. The problem is we have no scientific details about the survey – apparently completed four years ago, in 2016 – because the final report has not been made public (COSEWIC 2018, pp. 42-43; Crockford 2020).

bear-on-snowbank_Radstock_Stirling

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ClimateFeedback review of PragerU video challenges good news on polar bears

Facebook has labelled a recent short PragerU polar bear video as “false information” based on a ClimateFeedback review featuring statements by Andrew Derocher and Ian Stirling published 18 May 2020.

 

The video, posted on Facebook 5 May 2020, is also available here and here. Also here on the PragerU website.

I was approached yesterday by Nick Coltrain, a reporter for the Des Moines Register and USA Today, asking for a statement about the accuracy of the PragerU video, which cites me as a source for two of their three ‘inconvenient facts.’

My comments are below but I reminded Nick that what is going on is a classic conflict that happens all the time in science: it presents no proof that I’m wrong or that the PragerU video is ‘false information’. Climate Feedback is not ‘factchecking’: it is presenting its preferred side of a disputed science issue.

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Steve Amstrup is lying to the media about my critique of his 2007 model

Until now, my scientific paper post at PeerJ Preprints for review, about the failure of Steve Amstrup’s 2007 USGS polar bear survival model (Crockford 2017), has been formally ignored by Amstrup and his colleagues. But now Amstrup and his colleagues have taken to lying to the media about my analysis because he can’t refute it in a scholarly manner.

Mother with cubs Russia_shutterstock_71694292_web size

Amstrup was quoted by Erica Goode in her New York Times article on the Harvey et al. (2018) BioScience attack paper published Tuesday (10 April 2018: “Climate Change Denialists Say Polar Bears Are Fine. Scientists Are Pushing Back”):

“Dr. Amstrup, however, said that according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, the average September sea ice extent for the years 2007 to 2017 was 4.5 million square kilometers, “nowhere near the low levels projected it would be by the middle of the century.”

“To say that we already should have seen those declines now when we’re not early [sic] to the middle of the century yet is absurd,” he said.” [my bold]

And over at the online outlet Mashable (11 April 2018: “Climate scientists fight false polar bear narrative pushed by bloggers”), reporter Mark Kaufman quoted Jeff Harvey, lead author of the BioScience paper on the issue, although Harvey is hardly an authority:

“(Harvey noted Crockford misunderstood and then mischaracterized this prediction).”

Amstrup also presented a lame critique of the portion of my Financial Post 27 February 2018 op-ed that dealt with his 2007 predictions, published 2 March 2018 by Climate Feedback (self-proclaimed “fact checkers”), that is easily refuted because it’s a blatant lie. He’s saying 2015 sea ice models are relevant to his 2007 predictions that used 2005/2006 sea ice models.

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Amstrup & colleages can’t refute my critique of their 2007 polar bear survival model, Part 2

Polar bear specialists Andrew Derocher and Steven Amstrup recently spent inordinate energy trying to refute the opinion piece I’d written for the Financial Post in celebration of International Polar Bear Day last month, ignoring my fully referenced State of the Polar Bear Report for 2017 that was released the same day (Crockford 2018) and the scientific manuscript I’d posted last year at PeerJ Preprints (Crockford 2017).

polar_bear_USFWS_fat Chukchi Sea bear

Their responses use misdirection and strawman arguments to make points. Such an approach would not work with the scientific community in a public review of my paper at PeerJ, but it’s perfect spin for the self-proclaimed “fact-checking” organization called Climate Feedback. The result is a wildly ineffective rebuttal of my scientific conclusion that Amstrup’s 2007 polar bear survival model has failed miserably.

This is Part 2 of my expose, see Part 1 here.
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