Bishop Hill Polar bears and the media
Jun 11, 2014 Climate: WG2 At the Breakthrough Institute, Zac Unger looks at past misconceptions over what was known about polar bear numbers and seeks to lay the blame on the way these figures were reported:
What’s news isn’t the idea that polar bear totals are a best-guess estimate. Of course they are. What’s new is the emerging understanding by established polar bear scientists that they may have done themselves a disservice by tacitly allowing the public to treat their good-faith estimates as rigid facts. In proceedings, papers, and press availabilities, polar bear scientists have repeatedly referenced the 20,000+ number. But what was never made clear was that the PBSG has been assigning a zero value to the unstudied areas, territory that encompasses as much as half of the bears’ geographic range. A casual observer, even one who is fully invested in protecting polar bears, would be justifiably upset at discovering that the total count has been consistently under-estimated...
In fact, the standfirst to the article suggests that we don't even know whether populations are going up or down:
Polar bears may face tough times ahead, but we don’t know if their numbers are increasing or decreasing, and we won’t know for a long time.
With this in mind, it's interesting to return to the push by environmentalists a few years ago to get the polar bear put on the endangered species list. At the time this was heavily promoted by, among others polar bear scientists themselves, some of whom seemed quite sure of themselves. Take this quote from Ian Stirling, a scientist working with the Polar Bear Specialist Group:
“It has been frustrating,” acknowledges Ian Stirling, a Canadian Wildlife Service scientist who has worked on polar bears for more than 35 years. “But nothing that has been said or written changes anything. The science here is as solid as it can be.”
This strongly suggests that Unger is wrong when he suggests that the problem is the media rather than the scientists. After all, if we really don't know whether the populations are increasing or declining, it's hard to credit the idea that that we should be putting them on the endangered species list. The reality seems to be that all there was to go on at the time were some projections based on hypothetical future sea ice losses and considerable ignorance about contemporary population changes. This presumably was going to make the endangered species move something of a hard sell.
You can see why the scientists might be tempted to say that the science was as solid as it could be.
Reader Comments (37)
"Nobody likes uncertainty, but it often ends up being the best that we can do" (from article)
If only climatologists could admit as much...
Is it science counting polar bears? Is polar bear counting right up there with quantum mechanics or CERN experiments as a branch of science?
What qualifications do you need to count polar bears? Perhaps I'm being unkind in my ignorance and it requires a deeper understanding of arithmetic than I have.
Polar Bear counting has much in common with quantum mechanics. Most notably the existence of an extremely powerful Uncertainty Principle.
(Apologies to any quantum mechanics reading this if that isn't the exact field which has the uncertainty principle. I wasn't sure.)
The polar bear is a very useful animal to tamp down on downward price movements of oil.
Schrodinger's bears.
Rhoda.
"(Apologies to any quantum mechanics reading this if that isn't the exact field which has the uncertainty principle. I wasn't sure.)"
Perhaps I can help you here.
It's known as Icenberg's Ursus certainty.
So the "scientists" have been working with the bear necessities?
I'll see myself out....
'What’s new is the emerging understanding by established polar bear scientists that they may have done themselves a disservice by tacitly allowing the public to treat their good-faith estimates as rigid facts.'
This approach they brought a load of cash and opportunities that otherwise they never seen , and for some fame.
From day one they knew full well what they were up to and how much ‘snake oil’ they were selling , why should anyone feel any sympathy for them now ?
It's all the polar bears fault. If they didn't use camouflage we would find it much easier to count them! Perhaps seals have a better idea of whether or not polar bear numbers are decreasing.
Oops, Rhoda, It should have, of course, have been.
"Ice 'n Bergs Ursus certainty"
(I missed out the catastrophe)
Jun 11, 2014 at 10:20 AM | Unregistered Commentergeronimo
You know as a general rule I'm against interpolation because it give scope for people making things up, but if it's done properly there's no reason to believe that it would give a result with some skill. Now I don't know what's involved with the science of counting bears, but it seems to me that where they've counted bears they know the terrain and climatic conditions it wouldn't be terrible unscientific to take a weighted guess of how many bears there would be in the same terrain and climatic conditions and not be far wrong. Unless it didn't fit your political agenda of course.
'How Environmentalists and Skeptics Misrepresent the Science on Polar Bears'
From the article headline,
See its all down to those nasty skeptics, the one who thought that the numbers were problematic. The skeptics were right but there is no way any climatophile is going to admit it.
I can't believe anyone wrote the phrase 'Polar bear scientist' and thought it looked ok. I also wonder what Stirling has been doing for 35 years if he doesn't know that Polar bears will eat almost anything - the reason they mainly eat baby seals is only because that's usually all there is available in that barren landscape (it always seemed to me that the bears had a much better PR agent than the baby seals). But given a warming world the bears would thrive along with every other mammal that prefers warmth (ie almost all) - as indeed they did in the medieval warm period, which according to the Gisp2 ice cores was clearly warmer than now. The main danger for them is being shot as they stray too close to human encampments and, dare-I-say, polar bear researchers.
Susan Crockford has written about this type of issue at WUWT e.g:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/06/02/polar-bear-group-admits-population-estimates-were-a-guess/
Of course greenpeace et al are too busy calling her a denier to bother themselves about whether she is telling the truth.
For those interested in population counts etc I highly recommend the book "Landscapes & Cycles" by Jim Steele. There is a link on the WUWT sidebar to Amazon.
This is all very weird. The Polar Bear Specialist Group has been behaving oddly for some time, such as disinviting Mitch Taylor from their meetings, and making claims about declining bear numbers based on computer models.
Now they've leaked the fact that most of their numbers were pure guesswork to Susan Crockford, one of their harshest critics. Why would they do that?
So yet another green/climate obsessed con-job.
Tentative studies were produced, and the climate hype industry presented the studies as unquestionable evidence that CO2 was killing the Arctic.
The results were lots of money for polar bear researchers, an icon for climate fear, and media echoing without regard to honesty the claims for climate doom.
And skeptics all along have been saying that the studies and the claimed results don't make sense.
Once again, climate skeptics are proven right and climate hype promoters are proved to be less than truthful.
You said "...scientists might be tempted to say that the science was as solid as it could be." and indeed they might. But Stirling is quoted in the article as saying, "The science here is as solid as it can be.” It would be stupid to think he is saying that, given an army of extra researchers and monitoring gear and satellites and so on, the science could not be better.
I guess you have been told to delegitimise Polar Bears as an icon of climate change, but your readers should ask themselves whether a species that lives on sea ice is likely to do well when the area and volume of that sea ice declines significantly.
@RoyFOMR:
I got the Heisenberg joke.
@ La Buena Jun 11, 2014 at 2:17 PM
"Told"? By whom, pray?
I'm not sure whether polar bear populations are going up or down currently has a particular significance anyway. What appears to be clear from those that live in polar bear country is that there are far more than there were fifty years ago, which is thought to be mainly because it's much more difficult to hunt them now.
The Canadian Inuit were incensed by the deceit shown by the "scientists" in reporting polar bear populations. The Inuit kept saying publicly that the scientists were wrong and made presentations in Europe and elsewhere on the issue. No one listened as the "scientists" had the media ear. Mr Unger's headline has spread the blame for the population deceit to skeptics as well. That is complete nonsense. The "scientists" were in charge of the census agenda and fed the media the numbers and explanations they wanted to see in print.
In Canada there are about 250-300 polar bears killed annually by Inuit for subsistence and/or acting as highly paid guides for non-Inuit hunters under an Inuit-obtained govt bear license. The revenue from those bears is very substantial. You can purchase a polar bear skin in many northern canadian communities, that has been harvested by an Inuit under this system.
It is so predictable when an extremist is forced to admi tdefeat that they claim it was really equally the fault of those who were claiming the extremist was wrong.
Unger is as wrong as he is predictable in his faux equivalncy gambit.
The plain truth is that skeptics were right to doubt the claims about polar bears being in trouble, much less trouble due to CO2.
Because the skeptics were correct.
But the US has declared polar bears endangered, which was a part of the supporting ratinoalization for deciding CO2 is a pollutant to be regulated by the EPA.
So the rent seeking by scientists in enabling the deceitful stories about polar bears to exist unchallenged for decades in the public square has done more than funded a lot of fun vacations for Principal Investigators and their entourage of indentured grad students. These selfish con-artists helped manipulate the public into accepting the idiocratic policies demanded by the climate obsessed. Unintended consequences indeed.
I guess you have been told to delegitimise Polar Bears as an icon of climate change...+
No, were told that Polar Bears were an icon of climate change by alarmists. We said they weren't and now the scientists are telling us, that they weren't recording all the polar bears, so no one knows whether they are threatened or not. It transpires that in areas where they had no way on knowing how many polar bears there were they assumed there weren't any for no good reason, and they've just told us so. They could easily have interpolated their data based on normalising the number of bears in similar climatic conditions and assigning a notional number to the population based on there understanding of similar places, but they chose not to. You'd have to ask them why, but their job, or at least one of their jobs, was to keep tabs on Polar Bear numbers. Maybe they've got a new supervisor who wants to do his/her job properly and has asked them to tell the world what they've been doing and get it over with. Who knows?
+
So is polar bear science just a subdivision of bear science which I then guess is just a subdivision of mammal science
Which is a subdivision of life science. If only there were a word to describe the study of living things.
Could be worse Earle, one of my previous employers saw fit to create a "College of Natural Science". At the time I commented that this was a bit tautological, but in hindsight it looks remarkably prescient given the prevalence of prefabricated synthetic guff that we suffer daily.
In my humble opinion, Inuit and other locals know and always did now very well the numbers of Polar bears AS IT AFFECTS THEM in their environment, but if an area had no human population, scientists could arrive at any conclusion that their observations led them to. To me, the problem appears to be the ideology of scientists and the groups who employ them, unfamiliar with either bears, the Inuit or the environment that both groups shared, rather than mere arithmetic or counting methodology.
To blame sceptics who did not believe in scary scenarios for errors made by scientists in counting populations of Polar bears seems rather strange and misguided to me and rather like the angry child who shouts at a parent 'YOU MADE ME DO IT!'.
Aarrgh!!
Know, instead of 'now', sorry!
"What’s new is the emerging understanding by established polar bear scientists that they may have done themselves a disservice by tacitly allowing the public to treat their good-faith estimates as rigid facts."
Hahaha.
The same happens with climate science where conclusions rich with uncertainty are boiled down to something more certain for the abstract which is then further reduced to a 'fact' by the press releases promoting high profile work. Scientists have been burying their heads in the sand about this practice for far too long. Hell, mangling uncertain science into a fully formed 'fact' is the whole point of the IPCC summary for policymaker documents. That it gets done for political reasons without a public squeak of protest from the scientists involved is telling.
Dr. Susan Crockford's recent piece on the matter mentioned by michael hart includes the following line in the footnote that was brought to her attention: "It is important to realize that this range never has been an estimate of total abundance in a scientific sense, but simply a qualified guess given to satisfy public demand."
I doubt the public demand spoken of is the actual public - we are not all clamouring for updates on polar bear numbers are we? Governments want the numbers. Policy advocates want the numbers. The media want the numbers. It is a form of policy based evidence making as uncertainty damages the claims that these groups want to make.
"After all, if we really don't know whether the populations are increasing or declining, it's hard to credit the idea that that we should be putting them on the endangered species list."
Actually we could, but they would be in the "DD" (Data Deficient) category which doesn't carry nearly the same heft as "CR", "EN" or "VU" (Critical, Endangered and Vulnerable to the uninitiated)
La Buena says:
"I guess you have been told to delegitimise Polar Bears as an icon of climate change, but your readers should ask themselves whether a species that lives on sea ice is likely to do well when the area and volume of that sea ice declines significantly"
Ice bears live on sea-ice in winter. There are actually very few bears in the Central Arctic which has sea-ice the year around (the population there is guessed to be "hundreds", rather than the "thousands" of all the other populations in areas with seasonal ice cover. In summer polar bears are found either on land (mostly) or on local areas of fiord ice.
In the past there was a thriving population on St Lawrence Island which is ice-free about 6-7 months a year, though they were exterminated by hunters in the nineteenth century.
La Buena,
Try thinking this through for yourself. No one has instructed skeptics what to say.
Climate obsessed people have been telling us polar bears were in huge trouble and dying off.
Skeptics have been pointing out that the facts do not support that claim
It now turns out skeptics were correct.
And that means no, polar bears do not mind at all the last 30 year cycle of decreasing Arctic sea ice and slightly less cold temperatures.
That means you are wrong about what polar bears like because while 30 years is a very short period of time in terms of geology and climate, it is a long time for polar bears.
If you are up to it, read the well documented historical reports which show that polar sea ice is actually highly dynamic and that this past few years of sea ice decline is not really unusual at all.
And if you want to be up with current events, you might consider seeing where Arctic sea ice is based on the recent historical average.
But please don't make yourself look so easily manipulated by repeating the categorically untrue claim about skeptics.
The situation is unbearable..
We could organize a commute for polar bears to
Where ice is in abundance. Think hollandamerica
Lines but also for bears who are not
Pensioned yet
Once again sceptics are castigated for questioning data that turns out to be questionable.
<sarc> Well done the other side. </sarc>
Australian scientists have pioneered the Automated Penguin Monitoring System which has revolutionised the gathering of data on Antarctic Penguins.Each penguin is identified by a tiny electronic device implanted under its skin. Why not a similar system for polar bears?
Then again I suppose there aren't many volunteers to tag a polar bear ( estimated height for male polar bear standing on hind legs is 10 feet!)