Author Topic: 97% Consensus: Scientists Admit Guessing Size of Polar Bear Population  (Read 822 times)

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97% Consensus: Scientists Admit Guessing Size of Polar Bear Population

Posted By Daniel Greenfield On May 31, 2014 @ 11:25 pm In The Point | No Comments




Science isn’t magic. It’s not the product of a higher power or some absolute truth machine. It’s trained professionals who occasionally put the data together correctly, but sometimes are responding to various pressures, from the financial to the political.

Researchers are people. They’re better qualified to put together a picture of what is going on in their particular neck of the woods. It doesn’t mean that they always get it right. Like everyone else, sometimes they’re just giving their bosses what they want.


Researchers with the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG) recently admitted to experienced zoologist and polar bear specialist Susan Crockford that the estimate given for the total number of polar bars in the Arctic was “simply a qualified guess given to satisfy public demand.”

Crockford has been critical of official polar bear population estimates because they fail to include five large subpopulations of polar bears. Due to the uncertainty of the populations in these areas, PBSG did not include them in their official estimate — but the polar bear group did include other subpopulation estimates.

PBSG has for years said that global polar bear populations were between 20,000 and 25,000, but these estimates are likely much lower than how many polar bears are actually living in the world.

“As part of past status reports, the PBSG has traditionally estimated a range for the total number of polar bears in the circumpolar Arctic,” PBSG says in its proposed footnote. “Since 2005, this range has been 20-25,000. It is important to realize that this range never has been an estimate of total abundance in a scientific sense, but simply a qualified guess given to satisfy public demand.”

“It is also important to note that even though we have scientifically valid estimates for a majority of the subpopulations, some are dated,” PBSG continues. “Furthermore, there are no abundance estimates for the Arctic Basin, East Greenland, and the Russian subpopulations.”

All this is a complicated way of saying that there is no true assessment of the current number of polar bears and that any discussion about population numbers is more pseudoscience than science.

Now the number of polar bears is a lot easier to quantify than some of the claims that Global Warmists make. If we can’t get a good read on the number of polar bears, how good is our understanding of the overall climate?

Not very good. The last winter was supposed to be warm. It wasn’t. Now revisionism is explaining why Global Warming was responsible for a cold winter, but that kind of revisionism isn’t science, it’s an attempt to fit incompatible data in to support a discredited theory.

When the numbers for Warmists don’t add up, they manipulate them so more. They’re so certain that their overall idea is right that they massage every piece of data until it fits. But that’s not good enough for impoverishing a billion people, for making it harder for families to afford to buy food or heat their homes. It’s not a consensus. It’s a bunch of politically correct guesses.


Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://www.frontpagemag.com

URL to article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/97-consensus-scientists-admit-guessing-size-of-polar-bear-population/