Internet Blogs, Polar Bears, and Climate-Change Denial
Jeffrey A. Harvey Daphne van den Berg Jacintha Ellers Remko Kampen Thomas W. Crowther Peter Roessingh Bart Verheggen Rascha J. M. Nuijten Eric Post Stephan Lewandowsky Ian Stirling Meena Balgopal Steven C. Amstrup Michael E. Mann.
–
A star studded line up to attack one person, or should I say woman?
Yes. Why not, it is late 2017 after all. I guess they did the paper before Harvey.
They need to attach her.
Ragnaar says:
“I Googled this: population polar bears Crockford gets hits 2, 3 and 4.”
–
For what it is worth I totally agree with Joshua and Steven on this in their first comments.
–
The paper is a statement of the obvious. If AGW, ice all melts and polar bears die. Logic impeccable for warmists.
However, If AGW is denied, if ice melt is denied, then polar bears live. Logic impeccable for denialists.
–
Hence the problem, how many polar bear specialists are there? Like one does not get up real close and friendly like gorillas in the mist. How many reports on numbers are there and how reliable?
Ragnaar again
“There’s is a lack of data. I looked at a few maps, and there are large unknown areas.”
–
Then there is this
“A boatload of tourists in the far eastern Russian Arctic thought they were seeing clumps of ice on the shore, before the jaw-dropping realisation that some 200 polar bears were roaming on the mountain slope.”.
Perhaps it was fake news. Perhaps 1 litter of 200 babies was born in this area last year.
All I can think of is that if one extrapolates out 200 bears in 1 square kilometer then the number of Polar bears in the Arctic has been sadly and badly underestimated by everyone , including Dr S Crockford.
–
It is good to see Jeff Harvey put up his perspective on his paper.
A few comments for consideration
The article was never about the science.
It was about the *direction the planet is going in and how to save it.
Consequently the aim of the paper
–
“My final point. Our paper was about scientific transparency and integrity ”
“one of the major aims of the paper was to advise general readers not to take at face value what they read on blogs.”
was lost in the execution which resulted in
“Instead they accuse us of ad hominem smears of Susan Crockford and leave it at that. They can dish it out but can’t take it.”
–
“[I] and the other authors had the courage to show that blogs which habitually dismiss climate change-related threats to polar bears do not refer to the primary literature but to a blogger that disagrees with the primary literature, and not through scientific journals but through her blog.”
–
Instead of dismissing a scientist as a mere blogger the intent of the article would have been best achieved by providing the data on Polar Bear numbers, distribution and time changes, real and known firstly extrapolated secondly and then addressing the scientist bloggers extrapolations and conclusions and scientifically, with transparency and clarity, proving her wrong.
Simple.
Can the paper be redone with this aim?
Who raised it first? Polar Bear numbers.
Who then linked it to global warming??
Polar Bear numbers had been in decline because of hunting and human encroachment for ages.
Eli says “The ice is shrinking at times of the year when the bears need it and more.”
–
May I be so bold as to ask for the quote or source?
–
Yet Bart’s introduction points out the obvious .
“The polar bear species has survived the previous interglacial ~125,000 years ago. even though during the previous interglacial summers were probably not completely ice-free, as is expected to happen later this century as a consequence of continuing warming.
Besides shrinking sea ice there are currently also other factors that negatively affect polar bears, such as human settlements, industrial activities, hunting, bio-accumulation of toxins, and smaller seal populations.”
[disclaimer yes I have only taken parts of the quote that I like as usual].
At WUWT this comment
“The skeptics of AGW will point to the fact the polar bear population is up to approx 26,000 vs the 10k when hunting was stopped.”
cannot be true?
–
Eli, I acknowledge that if the ice all went all year round the Polar Bears would be forced to evolve or perish.
How far do you go in insisting a little loss of mid summer ice would imperil them totally in the next 1000 years?
Using a sledgehammer to crack a nut in a a china shop and then finding the nut was in another building and perhaps was not a nut at all.
–
“We have clearly hit the target dead-on judging by the bitter response of the climate change skeptics and deniers. They are inadvertantly helping to spread the message.”
–
As opposed to advertently helping, I guess.
–
Look Arctic Ice is down on all measures since satellites were “formally”” used to measure it.
The time span is short to know anything about long term trends.
If one shows CO2 increase, and then the CO2 increase shows the warming it is predicted to, then the ice will melt over the long term.
The long term result of this in thousands of years is that Polar Bears may or may not be endangered [they may or may not adapt].
Speculation on linking the two separate calamities if they eventuate is fraught with difficulty and should never have been poster childed in the first place.
“How blogs convey and distort scientific information about polar bears and Arctic sea ice”
Starts with this lovely line
“Internet blogs have strongly contributed to this consensus gap by fomenting misunderstandings of AGW causes and consequences. Polar bears (Ursus maritimus) have become a “poster species” for AGW, making them a target of those denying AGW evidence. Here, focusing on Arctic sea ice and polar bears, we show that blogs that deny or downplay AGW disregard the overwhelming scientific evidence of Arctic sea-ice loss and polar bear vulnerability.”
–
Problem ?
All the blogs try to promote scientific information, some for and some against AGW. This is the money comment.
–
“overwhelming scientific evidence of Arctic sea-ice loss and polar bear vulnerability.”
–
So Bart,
what is your estimate, from the experts, of
1.The number of Polar bears in the Arctic now.
2. The number of Polar bears back when satellite records showed the decrease in Arctic ice from AGW starting.
3. How much the ice extent in feeding time has diminished
4 How the decline in Polar bear numbers over this time matches.
–
I would expect a paper attacking concepts of Polar bear numbers now and in the future would set these facts out in large clear scientific numbers and hence shoot Crockford down. .
. much of the public remains unconvinced of the human influence on climate, This chasm between public opinion and scientific agreement on AGW is now commonly referred to as the consensus gap
climate-change denial involves a growing labyrinthine network of Internet blogs
Watts Up With That (WUWT), which consistently denies AGW and/or threats linked to it, is described as “perhaps the most visited climate website in the world,
Many denier blogs exist described as “foot soldiers of AGW denial”
Despite the growing evidence in support of AGW, these blogs continue to aggressively deny the causes and/or the projected effects of AGW and to personally attack scientists who publish peer-reviewed research in the field with the aim of fomenting doubt to maintain the consensus gap.
science-based and science-denier blogs may draw on similar examples, they frame their claims differently. For example, scientific blogs provide context and associated evidence, whereas denier blogs often remove context or misinterpret examples
The same frame can be presented in both negative and positive ways,
A growing body of scientific research reports the wide array of negative effects of AGW on biodiversity
, when alleging sea ice recovered after 2012, Crockford downplayed the contribution of sea-ice loss to polar-bear population declines in the Beaufort Sea.
Yet habitat loss is not always immediately followed by abundance declines of species dependent on that habitat. (Kuussaari et al. 2009)
As in other ecosystems, when critical thresholds in habitat availability are passed, tipping points occur, and species dependent on that habitat suddenly experience sharp declines (Dai et al. 2012)