Polar bears and big bollocks

Two polar bears on an ice outcrop. Not stranded, because these hairy bastards can swim up to 100 miles without much problem. And the picture is by Amanda Byrd.

Via young Timmy, I come across this massive load of fucking horseshit from The Times.

Brandon Frazier, of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, said: “An endangered listing can affect the sell-off of the oil-drilling rights. That's why the decision on the polar bear has been delayed. They are trying to wait it out, get the lease sale through and then make the decision.”

Pictures of exhausted and emaciated polar bears clinging forlornly to shrinking ice floes have become icons of the global movement to halt climate change. Populations are in sharp decline, a trend that environmentalists blame on the shrinking of their sea ice habitats because of man-made global warming. Critics say that the global polar bear population, at 25,000, is far from extinction and question the human hand in their decline.
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Listing an animal under the Endangered Species Act compels the US Government to protect it. If the polar bear were to be added to the list, it would create an extraordinary political and environmental precedent.

Yes, it would be an extraordinary precedent: to list a species at a point when its population is actively and massively increasing would be a somewhat perverse precedent, would it not?

For, as EU Referendum has continually pointed out, the polar bear population is increasing—and significantly.

A survey of the animals' numbers in Canada's eastern Arctic has revealed that they are thriving, not declining, because of mankind's interference in the environment.

In the Davis Strait area, a 140,000-square kilometre region, the polar bear population has grown from 850 in the mid-1980s to 2,100 today.

"There aren't just a few more bears. There are a hell of a lot more bears," said Mitch Taylor, a polar bear biologist who has spent 20 years studying the animals.

As EU Referendum also pointed out, that classic images of the polar bears clinging to an ice outcrop—most memorably used by that fucking lying charlatan, Al Gore—was a classic issue of framing. Not only that but, with typical enviro-loon dishonesty, the picture was stolen from the original photographer.

The picture, wrongly credited to Dan Crosbie, an ice observer specialist for the Canadian Ice Service, was actually taken by Amanda Byrd while she was on a university-related research cruise in August of 2004, a time of year when the fringe of the Arctic ice cap normally melts. Byrd, a marine biology grad student at the time, was gathering zooplankton for a multi-year study of the Arctic Ocean.

Crosbie, who was also on the trip, pilfered the polar bear photo from a shared computer onboard the Canadian icebreaker where Ms. Byrd downloaded her snapshots; he saved it in his personal file. Several months later, Crosbie, who is known as an avid photographer, gave the photo to the Canadian Ice Service, which then allowed Environment Canada to use it as an illustration for an online magazine.

Today that photo, with credit given to photographer Dan Crosbie and the Canadian Ice Service, can be found all over the Internet, generally with the caption “Two polar bears are stranded on a chunk of melting ice”.

It’s a hoax, folks. The bears, which can swim distances of 100 miles and more, weren’t stranded; they were merely taking a break and watching the boat go by when a lady snapped their picture.

So, to return to the Times article and this paragraph...

Brandon Frazier, of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, said: “An endangered listing can affect the sell-off of the oil-drilling rights. That's why the decision on the polar bear has been delayed. They are trying to wait it out, get the lease sale through and then make the decision.”

Might I suggest that the reason that the US government is not listing the polar bear as an endangered species is not that they are in the pocket of "big oil" but instead that polar bears are not, in fact, endangered and are, indeed, actually thriving?

Enviro-loons: about as trustworthy as politicians. But less so.

Journalists: about as accurate as rumour blogs. But less so. I mean, seriously, don't these people have researchers?

UPDATE: Spiked also have an article on this.

Despite the steady growth of the polar bear population over the past 40 years—it now stands between 20,000 and 25,000—there is no shortage of doom-laden reports about the bears’ imminent demise on our warming planet. Some refer to polar bears as the ‘canaries of climate change’. Indeed, so strong is the misery-mongering about polar bears that the US is currently trying to list them as an endangered species; and its campaign has been aided and abetted by several pieces of US government-sponsored research into polar bear numbers. Yet according to experts in the field of forecasting methods, official rumours of the polar bear’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.

No kidding.