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.