Fixed gloomy predictions have been an try and counteract the efficient criticism of polar bears as an AGW icon, says the outgoing chairman of the PBSG
From polar bear science
By Susan Crockford
In an unexpected statement, Dag Vongraven (the outgoing chairman of the Polar Bear Specialist Group) points out that many of the relentless warnings of the doom of PBSG members were a countermeasure to offset the effective efforts made by me and the polar bears others to expose the erroneous rhetoric of this group.
You may remember Vongraven, who famously emailed me in 2014 alerting me to a PBSG statement that came back later to bite you (in part because it was in a CBC documentary later that year entitled The Politics of Polar Bears, see below). :
It is important to know this area [i.e. their polar bear population estimate] It was never an estimate of total deposits in the scientific sense, but merely a qualified estimate given to meet public demand.
Will that be someone else? You decide.
In an interview available only in Norwegian on the website of the Norwegian Polar Institute, Dag Vongraven expressed his opinion that “climate change will ultimately lead to the extinction of the polar bear population in Svalbard and much of the Russian Arctic”. This dire forecast was published in English by the Barents Observer (July 2, 2021).
It turned out, however, that Vongraven had more to say, which the Observer’s reporter left out, but what the writers of IcePeople (July 2, 2021) thought worth mentioning. They write:
By the way, Vongraven confirmed in this week’s report [sic, they mean the NPI interview] the increasing visibility of climate change deniers in recent years – and explains that this is in part why more dire reports are being published.
“Before the (section) meeting in Tromsø in 2009, a physical meeting in the section on polar bears and a report every four years was sufficient, but after 2009 this was no longer sufficient as there was constant information about the status and future prospects of the polar bear”, he said. “But the increase is also due to the fact that climate deniers and this kind of force have become much more active and polar bears as symbols of climate change have been reduced to ‘climate hysteria’.”
Incidentally, the IcePeople article also contained a link to my blog post from July 1 (“Barents Sea polar bears thrive despite huge summer ice loss, spring research results are in”), in which I reported on the results of polar bear research in the spring of 2021 in Svalbard von NPI polar bear biologists published on the NPI website for all to see. Apparently, posting data like this is evidence of “denier activity” to some people.
The failure of polar bears in the Svalbard area to show evidence of damage to their health or population size from the tremendous summer sea ice decline in the Barents Sea is a problem as it is in stark contrast to the ongoing claim that polar bears are in South and Western Hudson Bay has already seen significant declines in cubs’ body condition and survival in response to just a fraction of the ice loss Svalbard bears have suffered. As I pointed out last year and in The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened, this contradiction is one of the real mysteries plaguing the PBSG.
The PBSG website is now unavailable because the NPI has discontinued hosting (as has been the case since 2001) and the PBSG has to “move” to a new platform. In the announcement I saw on May 28, 2021, there was no indication of how long this might take. This website link therefore only provides a snapshot of the PBSG homepage and an obituary for Markus Dyck: The rest of the content from years ago has in fact disappeared. Good thing I’ve downloaded practically all of the content into my own archive over the years.
Therefore, without the NPI interview reported by the Barents Observer, we would never find out that Vongraven is stepping down as chairman of the PBSG and is being replaced by Nick Lunn (Canada) and Kristin Laidre (USA / Greenland) as co-chairs, which I know so far never before (with two chairmen). It is certainly high time for this group to have a female chair (which they certainly never had before), but to me it looks like these macho men aren’t expecting a woman to do her job on her own . Maybe I’m wrong: maybe she’s so busy she turned down the post, unless she had help. I find it strange, however, that none of the previous male chairmen ever had to share the chairman’s burden.
As an added bonus to Vongraven’s admission that my colleagues and I did a good job exposing the unfounded hysteria surrounding polar bear doom predictions, IcePeople’s article link to the NPI interview accidentally took me to their “release page” (which I hadn’t before had seen). There you will find links to articles by NPI researchers and critical, PDF copies for downloading of many articles that are otherwise only available by subscription. A gold mine. Thanks, people!
Below: The Politics of Polar Bears of the CBC (from 2014), short version (the full version has disappeared):
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