Tag Archives: science blog

Failed Amstrup polar bear predictions have climate change community in a panic

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.

Cover image_Twenty Reasons_polarbearscience

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).

Crockford 2017_Slide 12 screencap

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):

Stroeve 2017 we are all ice dependent species

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.

Mann_tantrum that saved the world Dec 2017 cropped

Fig 3 Sea ice prediction vs reality 2012

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.

Footnote (added 30 March 2018):

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.

References

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

Harvey et al. attack article mum on real selection process for polar bear papers used in their analysis

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.”

Temper-Tantrum graphic

“Consensus science pounds the floor and chews the carpet in angry frustration.” [mpainter, 25 December 2017]

Other critics have pointed out that the Harvey paper used 92 such references:

“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).

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Reflections on my House of Lords lecture: Healthy polar bears, less than healthy science

Here is an excerpt of an essay I wrote reflecting on the recent (11 June 2014) lecture I gave at the House of Lords in London (“Healthy polar bears, less than healthy science”). The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) has just published that 14 page essay in its entirety as its 10th such report but you can get a taste of it here.

polarbears-arcticnatlwildliferefuge-suzannemiller-usfws_labeled_sm

My piece addressed the following issues that I talked about in the lecture or which came up afterwards during the question period and discussions later:

•  On what do you base your assertion that polar bear populations are “healthy”?
•  Are the media — or polar bear scientists — to blame for hyping the “polar bears are dying” meme?
•  How significant was the recent dismissal of a petition to force Canada into listing polar bears as ‘threatened with extinction’?
•  What do the recent actions of the Polar Bear Specialist Group say about their commitment to good science?
•  Is my blog helping to “self-correct” the science on polar bears?

The highlighted point is copied in full below. See the full essay here.
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The first 6 months of a new science blog: PolarBearScience Aug 2012-Jan 2013

Here’s a bit of “new blog” stats. It might be of interest later or for others starting a new blog and looking for comparisons.

I started blogging on July 26 2012, so technically my first six months ended a few days ago. But I thought I’d focus on the first 6 full months, since WordPress calculates many of its stats that way.

From Aug. 1, 2012 to Jan. 31, 2013, PolarBearScience had readers from 96 countries around the world, see map below, which was not a big surprise. Polar bear conservation is an international issue that feeds off a global fascination with polar bear life history and evolution.

Views of PolarBearScience by country, Aug. 1, 2012 to Jan. 31, 2013

Views of PolarBearScience by country, Aug. 1, 2012 to Jan. 31, 2013

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