It’s official: Polar bear not an endangered species The word comes from the Obama Administration, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, no less, and some environmentalists’ heads are exploding right about now. This pretty well slams the door on the polar bears threatened by global warming meme. http://wattsupwiththat.com/201... Also...
POLAR BEARS Canada - Dr Mitchell Taylor (Biologist) has been researching the status and management of polar bears in Canada and around the Arctic Circle for 30 years, as both an academic and a government employee. More than once since 2006 he has made headlines by insisting that polar bear numbers, far from decreasing, are much higher than they were 30 years ago. Of the 19 different bear populations, almost all are increasing or at optimum levels, only two have for local reasons modestly declined.
He agrees that the Arctic has been warming over the last 30 years. But he ascribes this not to rising levels of CO2 – as is dictated by the computer models of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and believed by his PBSG colleagues – but to currents bringing warm water into the Arctic from the Pacific and the effect of winds blowing in from the Bering Sea. He has also observed, however, how the melting of Arctic ice, supposedly threatening the survival of the bears, has rocketed to the top of the warmists' agenda as their most iconic single cause. The famous photograph of two bears standing forlornly on a melting iceberg was produced thousands of times by Al Gore, the WWF and others as an emblem of how the bears faced extinction – until last year the photographer, Amanda Byrd, revealed that the bears, just off the Alaska coast, were in no danger.
Her picture had nothing to do with global warming and was only taken because the wind-sculpted ice they were standing on made such a striking image.
Dr Taylor had obtained funding to attend this week's meeting of the PBSG, but he was told that his views running "counter to human-induced climate change are extremely unhelpful". His signing of the Manhattan Declaration – a statement by 500 [over 800 now] scientists that the causes of climate change are not CO2 but natural, such as changes in the radiation of the sun and ocean currents – was "inconsistent with the position taken by the PBSG".
and Dennis Compayre, Polar bear expert, formerly of the conservation group Polar Bears International, has studied the bears for almost 30 years in their natural habitat. “I think I know as much about polar bears as anyone, and I tell you there are as many bears here now as there were when I was a kid.” “They come here preaching doom, but I question whether some of them really have the bears' best interests at heart.”
and Biologist Dr. Matthew Cronin, a research professor at the School of Natural Resources and Agricultural Sciences at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, called predictions that future global warming would devastate polar bear populations “one extreme case hypothesis.” “We don’t know what the future ice conditions will be, as there is apparently considerable uncertainty in the sea ice models regarding the timing and extent of sea ice loss. Also, polar bear populations are generally healthy and have increased worldwide over the last few decades,” Cronin said in March 2007. “Recent declines in sea ice and indications that polar bears in some areas may be negatively impacted are cause for concern, but in my opinion do not warrant designation of the species as threatened with extinction,” Cronin said. “I believe that consideration of multiple hypotheses regarding the future of sea ice and polar bear populations would provide better science than reliance on one extreme case hypothesis of loss of sea ice and associated drastic declines in polar bear populations,” Cronin said.
