Bishop Hill Polar bears
Aug 7, 2013 Climate: WG2 I was just on Radio 5 to talk about the Guardian's "polar bear dies of climate change" article. I was up against Greenpeace's John Sauven. I think I was better read on the subject than he was.
I liked this tweet from 4d2b
Easy victory for @aDissentient over Greenpeace spox re polar bears on @bbc5live just now.
and this one from Barry Woods:
AM: I read the report it says computer models. - greenpeace: andrew should read the report, AM: I said I read the report!!
There are a couple of points I should probably follow up on. The bear was found 150 miles from where they have seen it in previous years and the Guardian says this represents "an unusual movement away from its normal range". However, given that polar bears normally range over hundreds of miles, this doesn't quite seem to stack up.
I'll try to upload the audio when it's available.
Bishop Hill
The audio file is here.
Reader Comments (105)
Not listened yet (will do later), but I heard the article on 5Live Breakfast coming in today. I am pleasantly surprised to see that the story has not made it to the BBC website as yet
The bear was a Guardian reader, a committed feminist and a old friend of Damian Carrington . She walked 150 miles to the nearest wifi to express her support for Guardian whistleblower Edward Snowden, but died of climate change 100 yards short of the cyber cafe.
A climate change diagnosis kit should be available in 20 years, but a spokesman for Greenpeace said she was a classic case. She was a polar bear, she was dead and that was enough for any right thinking person.
How does this square with the fact that this year's ice area/extent data is far better than last years 'record' low...
http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/ice-area-and-extent-in-arctic
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/arctic.sea.ice.interactive.html
...or maybe Svalbard is a special case?
You're a funny guy, smiffy.
There are some good punchy answers in the comments section on the guardian e.g.
Guardian comments are here
It looks like it just died of a natural old age death ... according to Tom Nelson a few days ago -
http://tomnelson.blogspot.se/2013/08/bummer-wild-polar-bear-has-been-found.html
The bear is dead, long live climate propaganda!
"Ice loss due to climate change"
Great. Science has careened into another "survival of the fittest" moment.
Somebody let me know when the stupidity is over. I can't watch anymore.
Andrew
Yeah - saw the headline. Thought: 'I can't even be bothered to read the article' - because unfortnately I get my FACTS about sea ice from the totally unbiased satellite readings as interpreted by the graphs on Wattsupwithtat Sea Ice Page...
Is The Guardian still registered as a 'newspaper'..? Should we be invoking the Trade Descriptions Act..?
"John Sauven was educated at St Benedict's School, Ealing and trained as an economist at University of Cardiff graduating with a BSc (Econ)" - Wikipedia
Obviously a Polar bear expert!
Since John Henry, sports entrepreneur (Liverpool FC and the Boston Red Sox) and former commodities trader, bought one of my local papers - the Boston Globe and Jeff Bezos of Amazon bought the Washington Post, perhaps we can get the Greenpeace to buy the Guardian. The price for US newspapers is apparently about 7 cents on the $ - with the $ based on the last time it was sold. That way there will be no confusion as to the factual content of the Guardian's news reporting.
I have just noticed at the end of the Guardian article:
"Jeff Flocken, at the International Fund for Animal Welfare, said: "While it is difficult to ascribe a single death or act to climate change it couldn't be clearer that drastic and long-term changes in their Arctic habitat threaten the survival of the polar bear."
Do these people realise what they are saying - difficult to ascribe => it couldn't be clearer????????
Scientists are surprised to find a bear on Svalbard? Were the scientists born yesterday? Is it possible the bears are recovering territories they retreated from during the days of overhunting?
I recall a similar story about a mother and her two cubs that were shot in Whitehorse which is well south of their "normal" range. Again AGW/CC/EW was the attributed cause.
Whenever I read something like:
- Ice loss due to climate change is "absolutely, categorically and without question" the cause of falling polar bear populations, said Richardson
(similar things having been suggested about bees, frogs, sparrows and various other creatures) I'm reminded of an introductory book on chaos theory that I read maybe 20 years ago. It included a classic demonstration of an unstable 'predator-prey' model which, depending on the selection of one or two parameters, would show wild and unpredictable swings in the populations of both predator and prey from one 'year' (iteration) to the next.
Although this was a very simple model and not directly applicable to the real world, it does suggest that large and apparently random changes in populations can 'just happen' and do not require the invocation of impending catastrophe for an explanation.
Unfortunately, I can't find an online reference right now, but I'm sure readers here may know more.
... or suggesting that it was sick and tired of these f-ing scientists capturing it every year so this year it kept well away.
If it was hungry why did it search for seals on land? Had it learned nothing?
Tom Nelson has questions.
"Lots of questions about that "starved" 16-year-old polar bear
"If it was healthy in April, can we just assume "from its lying position" that CO2 reduced it to skin and bones by July? What about the admission that "there may have been some underlying disease"--did anyone actually check? What did its teeth look like? How big a factor was old age? If pregnant female polar bears in Hudson Bay can fast for up to 8 months, how did CO2 cause this particular bear to starve so quickly?
"After Ian Stirling found the animal dead in July, how did global warming activist photographer Ashley Cooper end up at the scene? What was the process of hyping this dead bear to the media? Didn't thousands of polar bears end up looking like this well before the invention of the internal combustion engine?"
http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2013/08/lots-of-questions-about-that-16-year.html
Hasn't someone posted already that the polar bear was 16 and a normal polar bear life span is 15-18 years?
A great many human old people starve to death despite there being no shortage of food they are able to consume. The bear could have had a bowel obstruction or some other physical ailment. It could have been brain damaged and yes, it could even have died of an ice shortage. However pointing to one... repeat one dead polar bear has to be the height of desperation.
I should have pointed out the Jeff Flocken has:
Bachelor of Arts (BA), English and Communications, University of Michigan and Juris Doctor, Wayne State University School of Law
A degree in English perfect for Green science
I have noticed the Dr Ian Stirling has produced a paper Striling & Smith (2003)- Arctic, vol 57, p59 which he acknowlegdes Esso Resources Canada? Weren't they involve in drilling for oil near the Arctic Circle?
Can't be as that would mean in the past some of his funding is from evil fossil fuel people!
The Guardian article says that:
This implies that the bears of Svalbard seldom travel long distances. Yet the same Norwegian Polar Institute http://www.npolar.no/en/species/polar-bear.html in this presentation claim…
Is it not more likely that starvation is caused by the competition for food amongst a very large population in a small area?
Another opinion piece titled: “Polar Bear Population Higher than in 20th Century: Is Something Fishy about Extinction Fears?” has something interesting to say about the artic sea ice impact.
It seems that the Guardian’s expert at the Norwegian Polar institute should check-in and compare notes with some of his colleagues.
Chris Long - I put that model in a spreadsheet years back. I'll see if I can find it and the reference.
The segment is here on iPlayer.
Chris Long - the model I have in a spreadsheet appears to be called a Logistic Map model. The formula is:
currentValue = a*previousValue*(1-previousValue)
If you set an initial cell with a value 0 < x < 1 and you have an a value where 3 < a < 4 then you get a series which is oscillatory, values closer to 3 tend to be regular oscillations, greater than about 3.5 to close to 4 they get more irregular. I recall this model being a predator/prey model eg foxes and rabbits.
How much can a polar bear??! Maybe it died of boredom - or was it beardom!? n = 1, unbearable!
I found it, then listened to it. Mind-blowing. No wonder there's been so much effort expended trying to exclude sceptics from the air-waves. Sauven's appeal to authority will no doubt convince those already strongly committed to polar bear catastrophe but for anyone with even a slightly open mind this was a bloodbath. Linguistically I especially liked you turning the phrase "you can deny this all you like" around with "I'm not denying anything, I'm just pointing out that it's a hypothesis and when they count polar bears it doesn't fit the facts." Or words to that effect. Shelagh Fogarty was right to say you were both repeating yourselves by the end - but only because Sauven had no answer. More please. :)
Surely the Guardian editors don't really believe the crass rubbish they publish. This is the most idiotic article printed by this rag for some time. It would certainly be good if one of the ecoloon organisations purchased it. Then we would all know for sure that it published nothing but outlandish propaganda, when ever climate change was involved.
Just listened to the radio piece.
Putting aside, for one moment, the ludicrous notion that the alarmist camp are making a ‘martyr’ out of the body of a single dead polar bear – bearing in mind the trouble that polar bears have got them into in the past (Al Gore's lies, pictures of polar bears on ice flows, polar bear researchers being investigated for fraud) — and just dealing with the interview.
It's extraordinary, the level of cognitive dissonance from the other guy. It's clear that he hasn't even read the report. He quotes it without any awareness of what it is based on. And then when he's called on that, instantly resorts to nonsensical drivel: Andrew believes the world is square etc.
Maybe being concerned about saving the planet it died for the cause? A vegetarian polar bear would not fare well in Svalbard:-)
Due to the climate change induced tropical heatwave currently melting arctic ice into nothing but a puddle, it's perfectly obvious the polar bear over-did his sun tan and died of heat stroke.
New models suggest that by the year 2025 the number of polar bear scientists in the arctic will exceed the number of polar bears by a factor of 2 to 1 and that only by adapting to this bountiful new food source will the bears continue to thrive.
The Climate Change section of the Guardian is one continuous wail. Cassandras the lot of them.
Who can take that seriously?
Stuck-Record: The problem with Sauven's world-is-square jibe at the end is that anyone with even a few grey cells functioning could tell that Montford was making an argument based on facts, namely polar bear counts and their survival of the Holocene Optimum. Such crude analogies begin to wear thin in the face of that. That's why they can't afford to let a sensible sceptic near the mic.
Andrew,
Is the report available on the net? Can we all read it?
The IUCN reports on polar bear populations are discussed at http://www.climate-resistance.org/2011/12/the-polar-bear-affair-part-1001.html with some interesting graphics that help to make Andrew's point.
...or maybe Svalbard is a special case?
Aug 7, 2013 at 2:18 PM | Dave Salt
It may be. The populations doing best are in the high latiude Canadian Arctic islands, where the sea ice remains in contact with the coast all year round and the bears can hunt all year. Polar bears hunt seals on floating ice floes, way out at sea. They come ashore in Summer to breed, hunting on coastal ice.
Without floating ice the seals move away and the bears cannot hunt. On Svalbard and onthe coasts of Western Canada, Alaska and Asia there is a Summer period when the sea ice retreats from the coastline and the bears on land are unable to feed. Their survival depends on the fat store built up during their seal hunting on the ice. If the fat runs out before the ice returns, they starve.
The key parameter is the relative lengths of the two periods. If the feeding period is long, and the starvation period short, the bears survive. A short feeding period and prolonged starvation kills them.
Svalbard is one of the worst affected areas from the bear's viewpoint. It is an isolated group of islands at a relatively low latitude, and showing rapid warming even by Arctic standards. The ice is moving offshore much earlier and returning much later.
This is not the first starving bear I've heard of on Svalbard and it probably wont be the last. With the islands becoming marginally habitable for them, this may become the first polar bear population to die out.
Another source is here.
http://pbsg.npolar.no/en/dynamic/app/
"Arctic standards"
...and these are?
Andrew
Isn't nonsens that Polar bears only can hunt from Ice? What I understand some Polar Bears (or all) give child birth on land.
Is it just me or do others find the mispronunciation of "Arctic" as "Artic" as in articulated, intensely irritating?
I find it hard to believe that a species which raids rubbish bins elsewhere only hints seals and therefore starves in this particular location.
Still I'm not checking EM's references as last time I did the proved my point rather than his.
Read an article from the "inside":
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323452204578288343627282034.html
Entropic Man -
And life on Earth may be wiped out in an instant by the impact of an as yet unknown comet from somewhere out of the Oort Cloud, just before tea-time on Friday. But the odds of this are very small; a bit like the odd of polar bears becoming extinct in Svalbard, or you having a rational view on the typical climate change bollocks in the Guardian article.
Polar bear world population:
1960: 6,000
2010: 25,000
The Norwegians noted significant ice loss north of Svalbard in the 1920s. Polar bears did not die out.
The Royal Society Report 1817 noted significant ice retreat:
As Andrew tried to get across in the discussion, there is sound archaeological, palaeontological and geological evidence for there being was much less sea-ice in the Arctic during the Holocene Optimum, even open seas in summer at least off the north coast of Greenland: BBC - less sea ice 5000 years ago Here's a more scientific reference: Stewart, T. and England, J., Holocene Sea-Ice Variations and Paleoenvironmental Change, Northernmost Ellesmere Island, NWT., Canada, Arctic and Alpine Research, Vol 15, No. 1, 1983. Abs. Stewart and England examined more than 70 samples or Holocene driftwood on Ellesmere at 82° N Latitude. The time distribution of the driftwood indicates “prolonged climatic amelioration at the highest terrestrial latitudes of the northern hemisphere” from 4200 to 6000 years before the present.
And the polar bears evidently did not die out.
More details on these and other periods of 'warming' in the Arctic Tony Brown's excellent essay.
The last time I was on Svalbard a few years ago the bear population was estimated at about 2000 animals, which is really astonishing for a top predator in such a small area. Incidentally the estimates are probably pretty good, a friend of mine who was up in the Storfjorden area last April told me that over 90% of the bears he saw were tagged.
If we generously assume that all polar bears live to be 15 years old, that means that on average 133 Svalbard bears die each year, but you very rarely see a bear carcass or bear bones and polar bears are notoriously rare as fossils or subfossils everywhere in the Arctic (they are very rare at archaeological sites too, people were smart enough not to hunt them until they got repeating rifles). Harington for examples lists a total of 6 holocene records for all of Alaska, Canada and Greenland, compared with e. g. >100 for Walrus.
So why is this so? The explanation is found in the very few existing fossil records, which as far as I know are all from marine deposits. Nearly all Polar Bears die in winter and out on the sea ice. So, yes, it is a bit unusual to find a dead polar bear on land, even though at 16 years old, it was at an age when polar bears normally die.
By the way that bit about the polar bear having to walk around the fiords is silly, they are consummate swimmers. I actually saw one crossing a fiord in Svalbard once, and it did not take the long way around.
Entropic man says:
"Without floating ice the seals move away "
Nope, lots of seals around Svalbard in summer, but then they haul out either on skerries or isolated ice floes where the bears can't sneak up on them.
Sorry posted this on the previous item
Bishop,
next time an Ecomentalist tries to talk you down try the classic response "so you're frighten to let me tell the truth" and see how that goes down. You barely got a dozen words out before the first interjection, You're too polite.
That was the sort of interview where the BBC lets one side (usually green or socialist) continually interrupt the other. Normally I end up shouting at the radio or TV.
This poor Polar Bear is going to starve as it's having problems hunting on shore.
Nice Meal
Seals seek safety from Polar Bears
We'll be safe here guys polar bears can only hunt on ice
Alternative food source.
Adapt or Die
SandyS: I thought Shelagh Fogarty was fine in this case - she made it clear early on that John Sauven wasn't letting Andrew make his point, which counted badly against the Greenpeace man. And I think Andrew's polite but factual style is key to the respect he's obviously gaining from mass media folk. Ain't broke, don't fix.
The fellow from Greenpeace was a good example of why it's director resigned. People prepared to bend the truth to support their case do not deserve air-time.
What happened to Entropic Man?
Did his own Superpower/Identifying Characteristic finally do him in?
Andrew
Looking at the sad passing of the Svalbard polar bear in its wider ecological context, I suppose this will mean there are more fluffy seals, which Greenpeace will surely welcome? This reminds me of one of Steven Goddard's classics:
Tofu? (WARNING - do not click if you are vegetarian).