Tag Archives: social media

False starving polar bear meme from 2019 making social media rounds with Greenland added

Posted on January 17, 2022 | Comments Off on False starving polar bear meme from 2019 making social media rounds with Greenland added

I have discovered that an entirely false meme has been circulating social media. For the record, here it is with an explanation of what’s wrong with it, which is everything.

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Posted in Advocacy, Sea ice habitat

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Fat adult polar bear shot in Svalbard New Years Eve after persistent visits to Longyearbyen

Posted on January 2, 2020 | Comments Off on Fat adult polar bear shot in Svalbard New Years Eve after persistent visits to Longyearbyen

Another rare winter visit by a polar bear on New Year’s Eve, this time in Svalbard, comes with far more detail than the sighting in Newfoundland that I wrote about yesterday.

Svalbard 7 yr old male polar_bear shot 31 Dec 2019_photo_sysselmannen

The Svalbard problem bear was shot over safety concerns after repeated visits to the downtown streets of the main town of Longyearbyen on the west coast (see map below). Neither of the reports bothered to mention that this was not a starving juvenile bear but a fat, healthy young adult – and no one blamed global warming for the incident because Svalbard has had extensive ice on the west coast this fall for the first time since 2010. The shooting of course sparked an outburst of social media outrage.
Longyearbyen_location_Wikipedia

UPDATED 16 January 2020: As I predicted would happen (see below), there has been another polar bear incident about 10 km outside of Longyearbyen in Bolterdalen. On Wednesday 15 January, a bear attacked a dogteam loaded with tourists near the end of their trip. The bear was advancing so fast there was no time for the driver to grab his rifle, so he used the heavy rope used to brake the sled to hit the bear across the muzzle several times. This stopped the attack and made the bear run off.  Svalbard officials are now chasing the bear well out of the area. From this report:

“Starinsky, a guide for Green Dog Svalbard, located about 10 kilometers east of Longyearbyen, told the newspaper there was no time to grab his rifle as they stopped the sleds within seconds, and the bear got within yards of a sled carrying a mother and her daughter. He grabbed “the first and best” thing he could think of – the noose-shaped brake rope hanging on the front of his sled.”

It turns out the bear’s tracks were spotted the day before just south of town. All that remains of the attack are the tracks of the bear near the dog kennel, below, and the nightmares of the people involved in the days ahead. They were very lucky indeed.

Svalbard polar bear encounter 15 Jan 2020_footprints

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Polar bears do not outnumber people in Svalbard and the backlash against ecotourism over a justified defensive kill

Posted on August 2, 2018 | Comments Off on Polar bears do not outnumber people in Svalbard and the backlash against ecotourism over a justified defensive kill

It is often said that there are more polar bears than people in Svalbard, Norway (see BBC, “Polar bear shot dead after attacking cruise ship guard” 29 July 2018). But that isn’t true now and probably hasn’t been for a very long time. This pseudo-fact (a misunderstanding made by tourism promoters) continues to be quoted as the story about the Svalbard polar bear shot by a cruise ship bear guard last week evolves in the online and print media. The media continue to focus on social media backlash against ecotourism, which is nothing like the pushback about the starving polar video from last year.

Svalbard dead bear_Gustav Busch Arntsen_Governor of Svalbard_NTB Scanpix via AP 28 July 2018

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Consensus polar bear experts dealt with criticism differently in 2007

Posted on January 12, 2018 | Comments Off on Consensus polar bear experts dealt with criticism differently in 2007

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.

Dealing with criticism 2007 vs 2017

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.
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