Failed Amstrup polar bear predictions ‘Panics’ climate alarmists

Polar bear experts who falsely predicted that roughly 17,300 polar bears would be dead by now (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.

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).

My paper demonstrates that the polar bear/sea ice 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. Theymade 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):

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.

Predicted sea ice changes (based on 2004 data) at 2020, 2050, and 2080 that were used in 2007 to predict a 67{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} 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.

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{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} 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

Read more at Polar Bear Science

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Comments (5)

  • Avatar

    Dr Pete Sudbury

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    Okay. Noting that your article has not been peer reviewed, so it’s methodology has not been checked (and I’m assuming it might not be cited alongside articles that have been peer reviewed), the subtitle could be “good news for bears, but not for ice cover”. As you note, sea ice declines have been faster than predicted, but the bears may have done better, because (a) some populations have benefited from a cessation of hunting as a result of their endangered status, (b) there are reports of them changing their diet and hunting behaviour.
    With regard to sea ice, we know 75% of it’s mass has been lost since 1980, with a lot more now being only a few seasons old, and the area collapsed down to a new normal range in the mid 2000s.
    Here is the summary section from NOOA’s (peer reviewed) 2017 Arctic Report Card:
    “…The Arctic shows no sign of returning to reliably frozen region of recent past decades

    Despite relatively cool summer temperatures, observations in 2017 continue to indicate that the Arctic environmental system has reached a ‘new normal’, characterized by long-term losses in the extent and thickness of the sea ice cover, the extent and duration of the winter snow cover and the mass of ice in the Greenland Ice Sheet and Arctic glaciers, and warming sea surface and permafrost temperatures.

    Highlights
    The average surface air temperature for the year ending September 2017 is the 2nd warmest since 1900; however, cooler spring and summer temperatures contributed to a rebound in snow cover in the Eurasian Arctic, slower summer sea ice loss, and below-average melt extent for the Greenland ice sheet.
    The sea ice cover continues to be relatively young and thin with older, thicker ice comprising only 21% of the ice cover in 2017 compared to 45% in 1985.
    In August 2017, sea surface temperatures in the Barents and Chukchi seas were up to 4° C warmer than average, contributing to a delay in the autumn freeze-up in these regions.
    Pronounced increases in ocean primary productivity, at the base of the marine food web, were observed in the Barents and Eurasian Arctic seas from 2003 to 2017.
    Arctic tundra is experiencing increased greenness and record permafrost warming.
    Pervasive changes in the environment are influencing resource management protocols, including those established for fisheries and wildfires.
    The unprecedented rate and global reach of Arctic change disproportionally affect the people of northern communities, further pressing the need to prepare for and adapt to the new Arctic…”

    Reply

    • Avatar

      John Nicol (PhD Radiation Physics)

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      I think you are snatching at straws Pete. Show us the evidence that
      1. Extraordinary warming took place between 198 and 2018 in line with increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide
      2. The sea is not warming by any measurable extent, and sea levels are not rising as fast as the models predicted, nor any fast=er thanit has for the past 100 years or more.
      3. Astrophysicist Svensmark has shown that most if not all the changes in the global temperatures for the past 1,000 years and over the past 50 years, has been very closely related to a very strong theory which links cloud formation – the ultimate cooler, and in its absence warmer, of the globe – with changes in the magnetic field characteristics of the sun which either focus or deflect the charged particles largely responsible for cloud nucleation.

      There are many other pieces of strong evidence from physicists and chemists as well as historic records determined by geologists which denounce the theory that global warming can be caused by increases in carbon dioxide.

      Perhaps if you can produce clear SCIENTIFIC refutation of these facts from the “hard” sciences, we might be prepared to listen to the arguments you present without one reference or explanation of a scientific kind.
      John Nicol 60/50 Coriander Place, Forest lake, Q4078 Australia

      Reply

  • Avatar

    Charlie Bates

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    Peer-reviewed is no guarantee of accuracy. Quite often. authors of studies make sure that the peer reviewers are people exactly in tune with their beliefs. As for NOAA, they’ve been caught cooking the books more than once. You might also want to take a look at their prediction for a warm winter in the United States.

    Reply

  • Avatar

    GPAltaBob

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    I just read last week that Al Gore had to cancel one of his BS Global Warming talks because of the extreme cold in the eastern states!

    Reply

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