Scientists tussle over climate change, polar bears, blogs

A polar bear caught inside a luring station in 2014 outside Arviat, where an abundance of polar bears has become a threat to public safety. Wildlife officers relocated the animal north of the community to reduce the threat to the human population. (FILE PHOTO)

A newly published paper in a scientific journal says “fake news” is misleading the public through material posted on online blogs, highlighting the chasm between climate change deniers and the scientific community.

The paper entitled Internet Blogs, Polar Bears, and the Climate Change Denial by Proxy, is published in the journal BioScience.

The article claims that the chasm is produced by debates over the health of the polar bear, a symbol of equal importance for zealots on both sides of the climate change debate, and a critical “proxy” issue to be won to validate beliefs on both sides of the chasm.

The paper calls on the scientific community to rally against misinformation and anti-climate change rhetoric disseminated to the public over social media and the internet by unaccredited sources.

“Polar bears have become kind of a universal symbol of climate change, because they depend on sea ice to make their living and sea ice can only melt as the world gets warmer,” one of the writers of the paper, Steven Amstrup, told Nunatsiaq News, Nov. 30.

“If you want to deny global warming, or its impacts, if you can find something that looks inconsistent or claim something looks inconsistent in the polar bear world, then by proxy you can deny the dangers of climate change.”

The report accuses climate change deniers of arguing in half-truth and semantics: by misleading or confusing the public on issues such as whether shrinking sea ice levels are caused by human activities, they can cast doubt on larger arguments supporting the reality of climate change.

“By appearing to knock over the keystone domino,” the report said. “Audiences targeted by the communication may assume all other dominoes are toppled in a form of ‘dismissal by association’.”

Many of the anti-climate change blogs focus on specific issues such as the polar bear population and the extent of seasonal sea ice, the paper discovered.

Those blogs are either challenging the impact that humans have on Arctic sea ice, or whether polar bears are threatened as a species, if sea ice continues to shrink.

Arctic seas reached their lowest recorded levels in 2016, and experts predict 2017 will rank second lowest.

The polar bear, which hunts primarily on the sea ice in winter, is listed as a vulnerable species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and as “threatened” on the United States’ endangered species list.

Currently, polar bear populations in Nunavut are considered stable and animals are hunted under strict quota systems.

“We believe that it is imperative for more scientists to venture beyond the confines of their labs and lecture halls to directly engage with the public and policymakers, as well as more strongly confronting and resisting the well-funded and organized network of anthropogenic [or human-caused] global warming denial,” the report said.

The 14 scientists behind the report based their conclusions on an analysis of 90 popular science blogs dealing with climate change.

Forty-five of the blogs studied published information that supported the idea of human-caused climate change, while the 45 science-denier blogs in the study—visited by millions of readers—relied on manipulative rhetoric, peddling information traced back to “fake” experts, the report alleges.

The primary source for 80 per cent of anti-climate change blogs studied in the report cited “Polar Bear Science,” a blog published by writer Susan Crockford.

The report alleges that Crockford “has neither conducted any original research nor published any articles in the peer-reviewed literature on polar bears,” but has instead published “notes and briefings” through the conservative think-tank Global Warming Policy Foundation.

“Crockford’s blog frequently extracts partial research outcomes and portrays them as contrary to the documented effects of [human-caused global warming] on sea ice or polar bears,” the report said.

Crockford attacked the validity of the report’s accusations, and on a post, dated Dec. 5, she called on BioScience to retract the “shoddy and malicious” paper.

In an earlier post, Polar Bear Science characterized the BioScience article as “academic rape.”

“Characterizing a professional, respected scientist as an unqualified vengeful opinion writer is the same kind of power attack as rape. It’s meant to humiliate and intimidate,” a Dec. 2 blog entry said.

Amstrup said the “ramifications of continuing on our current path are huge.”

“And yet, there are people out there, like those that we wrote about in this paper, who would prefer that we don’t even acknowledge climate change is real.”