Death of the polar bear as climate change icon validates Mitch Taylor’s skepticism
By Paul Homewood
The latest post from Dr Susan Crockford:
You could call it karma — the death of the polar bear icon after the shameful hubris of polar bear experts back in 2009.
That year, the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group booted 20-year member Mitch Taylor out of their organization, explaining that his skeptical views on human-caused global warming were “extremely unhelpful” to their polar bear conservation agenda.
Said chairman Andrew Derocher in his email to Taylor: “Time will tell who is correct.”
It’s now clear that Mitch Taylor was right to be skeptical of sea ice models based on pessimistic climate change assumptions; he was also right to be more optimistic than his PBSG colleagues about the ability of polar bears to adapt to changing sea ice conditions (Taylor and Dowsley 2008), since the bears have turned out to be more resilient than even he expected.
Fat polar bears — not starving ones — dominate photos taken in recent years. The total failure of polar bear numbers to crash as predicted in response to the abrupt decline in summer sea ice in 2007 and persistent low summer sea ice levels since then (Crockford 2017), is vindication for Mitch Taylor. It’s time someone said so.
Read the full story here.
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
I’m sure we can all look forward to Sir David covering this extensively during Blue Planet II. After all, much of the programme will be about how much more we know, how science has moved on, and similar, since Blue Planet came out in 2001.
Could this mean that Sir David will stop advocating for the death of older human beings to save the planet? Nah. Just noticed that the venerable David is 91. What better a person to show us the way of exiting life for the greater good.
The breathless build up to tonight’s first episode has singled out the walrus for our attention.
It would appear that the ice flows in summer are no longer large nor stable enough for nursing mothers to rest their offspring upon!
And all this because of AGW / CC.
It is a great shame that what what promises to be a fascinating program of wonderful photography and exposure of life in the hidden 70% of our world will be rendered unwatchable by the prejudiced and wrong headed myths promulgated by a very silly old man.
I suppose I could try watching with the sound off, but other than that sadly I will have to give it a miss.
Reblogged this on Wolsten.
Polar Bears are doing fine?
The truth about polar bears…in 2012
http://www.canadiangeographic.ca/magazine/dec12/polar_bears3.asp
EXCERPTS…
“Terry Audla, the president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, Canada’s national Inuit organization, says that when it comes to really understanding how healthy the polar bear population is, it makes no sense to pit the feelings and hunches of far-flung conservationists against the direct observations of local people who deal with the bears all the time. As far as overhunting goes, says Audla, “if you’re reliant on something as a source of food, you’re going to make darn sure that you’re keeping that source healthy.” When you live in Resolute Bay, Nunavut, it’s hard to give a lot of weight to a conservation organization in southern California or a worldwide endangered species treaty that is signed in Qatar.”
“Consider Mitch Taylor’s story. He spent more than two decades as a polar bear researcher and manager for the Nunavut government and has published around 50 peer-reviewed papers. That should garner widespread respect. But Taylor has been highly vocal about his belief that polar bears are mostly doing fine, that cub mortality varies from year to year and that the much ballyhooed predictions of extinction by 2050 are “a joke.” He also alleges that a lot of the “exaggerated decline” is just a way to keep certain scientists well funded and to transfer control of the polar bear issue from territorial to federal hands. In response, Taylor’s critics disinvited him from meetings of polar bear specialists that he’d been attending since 1978. They also like to point out that he’s a signatory of the Manhattan Declaration, which questions the very existence of climate change. But amidst all the heated charges and countercharges, it’s hard to argue the fact that few people know polar bears the way Taylor does. And while it might be inconvenient for current political posturing, there’s no denying that certain subpopulations of polar bears are managing to survive, even thrive.”
Well tine has told and what we have learned beyond any reasonable doubt is that IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group and Andrew Derocher are about politics and not science and should be treated as such.
I have been campaigning in the ‘AGW & liberal-left capital’ of Totnes, Devon, UK, for years, praying for an eventual breakout of logic and truth. But, sadly, emotional hype reigns supreme in these parts. On the climate topic, the all-time high spot for local madness was reached a year or two ago when the local Greens made a ‘litter’ consisting of a stuffed polar bear effigy mounted on a 2-pole stretcher, and paraded it ostentatiously on Dartmoor in mourning for the coming extinction of polar bears. A lovely photo of this was displayed in our local paper, The Totnes Times.
I wondered if I had missed something, and rapidly checked via the Polar Bear Science site. Happily, I was able to write in to the paper that polar bear numbers, under constant scientific monitoring, were estimated at that time as between 21-28,000 and rising.
Polar bears have not received any mention since….!
Time told who was correct. And Dr. Andrew Derocher is a professor of biology at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and a longtime scientific advisor to PBI.