The United States Fish and Wildlife Service is considering listing the polar bear a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. This report details the scientists debunking polar bear endangerment fears and features a sampling of the latest peer-reviewed science detailing the natural causes of recent Arctic ice changes.
The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service estimates that the polar bear population is currently at 20,000 to 25,000 bears, up from as low as 5,000-10,000 bears in the 1950s and 1960s. A 2002 U.S. Geological Survey of wildlife in the Arctic Refuge Coastal Plain noted that the polar bear populations “may now be near historic highs.” The alarm about the future of polar bear decline is based on speculative computer model predictions many decades in the future. And the methodology of these computer models is being challenged by many scientists and forecasting experts.
Canadian biologist Dr. Mitchell Taylor, the director of wildlife research with the Arctic government of Nunavut: “Of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct, or even appear to be affected at present,” Taylor said. “It is just silly to predict the demise of polar bears in 25 years based on media-assisted hysteria.”
Evolutionary Biologist and Paleozoologist Dr. Susan Crockford of University of Victoria in Canada has published a number of papers in peer-reviewed academic journals. “Polar bears, for example, survived several episodes of much warmer climate over the last 10,000 years than exists today,” Crockford wrote. “There is no evidence to suggest that the polar bear or its food supply is in danger of disappearing entirely with increased Arctic warming, regardless of the dire fairy-tale scenarios predicted by computer models.”
Award-winning quaternary geologist Dr. Olafur Ingolfsson, a professor from the University of Iceland, has conducted extensive expeditions and field research in both the Arctic and Antarctic. “We have this specimen that confirms the polar bear was a morphologically distinct species at least 100,000 years ago, and this basically means that the polar bear has already survived one interglacial period,” Ingolfsson said. “This is telling us that despite the on-going warming in the Arctic today, maybe we don’t have to be quite so worried about the polar bear.”
Internationally known forecasting pioneer Dr. Scott Armstrong of the Wharton School at the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania and his colleague, forecasting expert Dr. Kesten Green of Monash University in Australia, co-authored a January 27, 2008 paper with Harvard astrophysicist Dr. Willie Soon which found that polar bear extinction predictions violate “scientific forecasting procedures.” Excerpt: The study analyzed the methodology behind key polar bear population prediction and found that one of the two key reports in support of listing the bears had “extrapolated nearly 100 years into the future on the basis of only five years data - and data for these years were of doubtful validity.”
Biologist Dr. Matthew Cronin, a research professor at the School of Natural Resources and Agricultural Sciences at the University of Alaska Fairbanks: “We don’t know what the future ice conditions will be, as there is apparently considerable uncertainty in the sea ice models regarding the timing and extent of sea ice loss. Also, polar bear populations are generally healthy and have increased worldwide over the last few decades,” Cronin said… [more]
January 31, 2008 | Topic: Endangered Specious, Bears
February 1st, 2008 at 7:01 pm
There must be something to this global warming thing. I just saw a news piece (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSnPZhGa39s) from the San Diego Zoo and the situation with polar bears sounds bad.
February 1st, 2008 at 8:13 pm
No, cas, you are mistaken. The speaker is a non-expert from BiRD (the Biological Resource Division, USGS). BiRD is a completely politicized outfit, with the worst wildlife biologists on the planet. The speaker freely admits to being a non-expert. He’s not kidding.
Look at the names in the post above. Those are the real thing, real polar and boreal wildlife ecologists, not low-level politicos from the BiRD at the San Diego Zoo.
Your golly gosh logic is seriously flawed. A dimwit makes an inexpert comment, and you go with that and discount the real experts. Not smart. Just the opposite.
February 18th, 2008 at 10:03 pm
I don’t get all the people trying to put an Endangered Species Act designation on anything that is not in danger of extinction.
The spotted owl here in the Southwest was in no way endangered. They stopped logging and the logging was something that helped the spotted owl. Owls would eat the mice and chipmunks etc. that would nest in the slash piles that would take a few years to burn. The turkeys could nest in them as well. The people that are messing with nature don’t seem to do the right amount of background study before listing an animal as endangered.
I feel these groups need to really think and do their homework before declaring an endangered species when it really isn’t endangered. All these people that are playing with nature to save a frog, or minnow, or a spotted owl, or the sage grouse that shut down oil drilling, have put thousands of people out of work. These people counted on work to feed their families and now they can’t because of some little creature that some group declared endangered. This is wrong no matter how you look at it. Animals become extinct for a reason, and these groups cannot save the world or what is in it. How long will it take before no one will be able to work because of some endangered creature that might not even be endangered.
America will pay a very big price for all this wrong doing. People for the most part will all be on welfare and government assistance. This country cannot and will not continue in this manner. People all need to be a asset to their job and country, not a liability.
But from the sounds of it, the government just might want it that way. What will it take to change it, a revolution? People dying seems to change things, but when it gets to that point it might be too late.