Decimation of the polar bear: bearfaced lies?

Armstrong and his colleagues are no strangers to controversy. Last summer, they launched the ‘Global Warming Challenge’, betting Al Gore $10,000 that over the next 10 years global temperatures would remain about the same (see Put your money where your myth is, by Brendan O’Neill ). But while they are not averse to taking a contrarian line, this is not what drives them. As their audit makes clear, the forecasting principles contravened by the Department of the Interior reports are not esoteric points only of interest to mathematical pedants; rather, the Department contravened principles that are the scientific equivalent of common sense. For instance, according to Armstrong, the government-sponsored reports failed to ‘conduct experiments to evaluate forecasts,’ ‘be conservative in situations of high uncertainty or instability’, or ‘ensure that information is reliable and that measurement error is low’. These are just some of the 41 principles of scientific forecasting contravened.

If climate itself is difficult enough to predict, then attempting to predict the effect it will have on the polar bears’ habitat is doubly so. Moreover, the interactions between the polar bear and their environment add another set of variables to an already confusing whirl of possible scenarios. It is unsurprising, then, that a chain of assumptions compensate for the want of unambiguous evidence. This chain runs something like this: global warming will occur; summer sea ice will reduce and thin; polar bears will obtain less food by hunting from the sea ice than they do now; there will be no supplementary food; the polar bear population will decline; the endangered species act will help; and no other policies would prove as effective.

Such a causal whitewash occludes factors that should temper the wilder assertions of forecasting. For instance, the pro-listing Amstrup report fails to consider the species’ sheer adaptability. Having evolved from brown bears some 250,000 years ago, in that time, polar bears have experienced arctic conditions much warmer than they are now. As Amstrong told spiked: ‘Polar bears are adaptable – they’ve been around 250,000 years. They’ll keep figuring things out.’

Or take the forecasting imperative to ‘be conservative in situations of high uncertainty or instability’, an imperative that the government-sponsored researchers also ignored. Assuming that higher temperatures will lead to a decline in the polar bear population ignores the fact that lower temperatures have also had the same effect: for example, an abnormally high ice coverage during 1973-74 led to a fall in the polar bear population. Regional variability also sheds light on the difficulty of distinguishing correlation from causation. The Antarctic ice mass, for example, has actually been growing while the sea and air temperature has been increasing. At the same time, the depth-averaged oceanic temperature around the Southeastern Bering Sea has been cooling in 2006. And despite warming of local air temperatures by approximately 1.6 degrees the continental shelf of Canadian Beaufort Sea has seen no sharp decline in area. Such variability, indeed, uncertainty as to the precise environmental outcome of climatic changes has simply been eschewed in the reports Armstrong et al audited.

This gloomy prognosis for the polar bear is not surprising, however, when one considers that the secretary of the Interior employed the USGS to generate models to support the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision to list the polar bear. In short, the science was always driven by political imperatives. Results that failed to lend unambiguous support to the desired outcome were always to be avoided. This indicates the role that science can play in political debate today. It becomes that which cannot be doubted, an instruction handed down from on high. In this context, the science always says ‘Thou shalt…’

But what of the object of all this research? Why has the polar bear itself become so politically significant? According to Armstrong ‘it’s such an emotional issue – people just think what nice beautiful animals they are’. Indeed, as Armstrong told spiked, during the Senate Committee meeting, Senator Barbara Boxer, a key sponsor of the legislation, backed up her constant citation of the Amstrup report with one main ploy: pictures of polar bears. When invocation of the ‘science’ fails to compel agreement, try emotional blackmail. Polar bears, the poster boys for man-made climate change, have come to symbolise man’s degradation of the environment. Their plight acts as a contemporary morality play: that something so majestic, so beautiful can be brought so low shows the extent of man’s unthinking folly.

Armstrong demands a slightly more robust attitude to fluctuations in the polar bear population. ‘The Eskimos regard it as “things change”, that it’s just the way things are’, he says. From those who are used to hunting polar bears, such a lack of sentimentality is perhaps to be expected. We should also call for less sentimentality in the broader debate about climate change and the future of the planet.

Tim Black is senior writer at spiked.

Read Polar population forecasts: a public policy forecasting audit here. To find out more visit The Global Warming Challenge.

(1) Interior Secretary Kempthorne Announces Proposal to List Polar Bears as Threatened Under Endangered Species Act, US Department of the Interior 27 December 2006

(2) Polar Bears: Alaska polar bears are doomed, Anchorage Daily News, 08 September 2007

(3) Polar Bear Population forecasts: A Public-Policy Forecasting Audit