Tag Archives: IPCC

Tipping points, Attenboroughesque narratives of climate doom and dying polar bears

Outlandish ‘tipping point’ rhetoric is about to be regurgitated once again during the promotion of the latest IPCC report, due today. Tipping points are those theoretical climate thresholds that, when breeched, cause widespread catastrophe; they are mathematical model outputs that depend on many assumptions that may not be plausible or even possible.

Polar bears often get caught up in motivational tales of sea ice tipping points.

Tipping points are not facts: they are scary stories made to sound like science.

This is why Sir David Attenborough has totally embraced the tipping points narrative. He even made a movie fully devoted to them, called, Breaking Boundaries – The Science of Our Planet. Tipping points are the animal tragedy porn of mathematical models and Attenborough has adopted them both.

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IUCN polar bear specialists reject IPCC- supported forecasts of sea ice based on CO2

In case you missed it — or missed the significance of it — polar bear specialist Mitch Taylor correctly pointed out in his recent essay (a response to the New York Times article that appeared Tuesday (10 April) about the Harvey et al. (2018) BioScience paper) that the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group have given up using computer models of future sea ice extent based on rising CO2 levels supported by the IPCC.

Polar_Bear_male_Regehr photo_March 21 2010_labeled

Their latest assessment (Regehr et al. 2016) does not link polar bear survival models to climate modeled forecasts of Arctic sea ice decline but rather to an assumption that declines already documented will continue in linear fashion over this century.

This means that CO2 emissions blamed on human fossil fuel use is no longer directly tied to the predicted future decline of polar bear numbers: IUCN polar bear specialists simply assume that sea ice will continue to decline in a linear fashion with no cause attributed to that decline except the broad assumption that anthropogenic climate change is to blame for Arctic sea ice declines since 1979.

No wonder former USGS polar bear biologist Steve Amstrup never refers to this IUCN PBSG study: he and the organization that now employs him, Polar Bears International, are still firmly wedded to the concept that CO2 is the sea ice control knob.

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Amstrup knows his polar bear predictions are flawed – but continues to promote them

The largest conservation organization in the world says that predictive models developed by polar bear biologist Steven Amstrup are utterly unsuitable for scientifically estimating future populations. Earlier this year, mathematical modeling experts  at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, who maintain the Red List of Threatened Species, made it clear that Amstrup’s models (used in 2008 to convince the US Fish and Wildlife Service to list polar bears as ‘threatened’ due to predicted global warming) do not meet IUCN standards.

I’d say this makes Amstrup’s polar bear projections (Amstrup et al. 2008, 2010) no more scientifically useful than a crystal ball prophesy, but you wouldn’t know it by his recent actions — or the silence of his fellows.

crystal ball_3c

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Polar Bears International responds to “The Politics of Polar Bears”

Well, sort of — what they did was provide a logical fallacy reply to an almost incoherent comment by a PBI Facebook supporter who had watched the documentary and complained of bias (such a predictable response).

See what you think, screen-cap below (taken September 3, 2014 at about 2PM Pacific Time.
[UPDATE added September 4, 2014 at 8:30PM Pacific, see below]

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What about the polar bears? Disconnect between predictions and observations

With all the talk this week about future climate – the global warming imagined by IPCC crystal ball models, that is – the focus for many is rightly on the gulf between predictions and observations that have taken place so far. This follows on reminders a few weeks ago of the many failed predictions that we would have seen an “ice-free Arctic” by now.

[by “ice-free” they mean “nearly ice-free,” or “when ice coverage is less than 1 million square kilometers, or about 386,000 square miles.”]

But what about the polar bears? Is there a similar disconnect between predictions and observations for polar bear survival? Yes, indeed.

Many Arctic biologists insist that polar bears are not just threatened by future global warming and a “melting ice cap.” They contend polar bears are already being harmed by declines in summer sea ice coverage, or will be shortly.

The problem is, the results of scientific studies show otherwise. Virtually all of the evidence generated by polar bear researchers shows that polar bears are not being harmed by declines in summer sea ice, and in some cases, they are doing very well indeed. In other words, they are not responding as expected.

A few weeks ago, I summarized these studies, which reveal that:

Less summer ice ≠ few bears (evidence from Davis Strait; S. Hudson Bay; Barents Sea; S. Beaufort; W. Hudson Bay).

Less summer ice ≠ “skinnier” bears (evidence from Chukchi Sea; S. Hudson Bay).

“Skinnier” bears ≠ fewer bears (evidence from S. Hudson Bay; S. Beaufort; Davis Strait).

Less summer ice ≠  lower cub survival (evidence from S. Hudson Bay; Chukchi Sea).

Less summer ice ≠ more cannibalism & hybridization

Have a look if you missed it (August 18, 2013, with pdf copies to download), “Polar bears have not been harmed by sea ice declines in summer – the evidence.”

[Update Sunday Sept 29 2013: these two stories (on the temperature pause and polar bears thriving (in which I get a mention), just out in the Mail on Sunday (UK)]

Mail on Sunday_Temp pause and polar bears_Sept 29 2013

Cannibalism update and insight on the timing of media hype

In my last post, I went over some of the spin and misrepresentation of fact contained in the claim by leading polar bear biologists Steven Amstrup, Ian Stirling and Andrew Derocher (Amstrup et al. 2006; Stirling and Derocher 2012) that cannibalism is on the increase because of the effects of global warming on Arctic sea ice.

I’ve had an opportunity to follow up on three points that puzzled me. Three relate to the Amstrup et al. paper that described three cases of cannibalism in the southeastern Beaufort Sea in 2004 and one to the incidents in western Hudson Bay in 2009. In the process, I found at least three more misrepresentations of fact and gained some insight on why these incidents of cannibalism were hyped so enthusiastically when they were. Continue reading