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Originally Posted by OldDartmouthMark
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I thought we were talking about my point? Anyway, good effort! Full marks for digging in and doing some research. You just need to pay a bit more attention to details, and maybe sources, but that will come quickly if you keep this up. I should take a moment here to correct my terminology from last time. When I was saying threatened I was really meaning endangered. I got my terms crossed up. It’s not going to matter much but I’ll start using the term endangered now instead of threatened.
Here is a key page:
https://arcticwwf.org/species/polar-bear/population/
The detail you maybe should have picked up on was the statement that polar bears are threatened
in the US. Why would they say that? The arctic is much bigger than just the US part after all. A deeper dive on that point would have revealed that every country has its own status. From the above link:
“Status by country
-International: Vulnerable
-Canada: Special Concern
-Greenland / Denmark: Vulnerable
-Norway: Vulnerable
-Russia: Indeterminate, Rare, or Recovering, depending on population
-United States: Threatened”
Special Concern is somewhat less than Vulnerable. They don’t seem to be endangered anywhere, and I’m not exactly sure how Threatened fits in, or the Russian classifications for that matter, but the key information comes just below this on the page.
There are 19 subpopulations of polar bears. 7 of them have stable populations, 9 are data deficient, 2 have increasing populations, and only 1 has a decreasing population, and that one is the mostly American polar bears in the northern part of Alaska. I’m guessing that this will be a surprise to you, you and a lot of other people. In fact in at least one place in Canada their numbers are growing so much they’re becoming a serious problem.
Nunavut’s polar bear population is unsafe, government document says
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/cana...population-is/
So the obvious question at this point is, if polar bear populations are overall very stable why are they being classified in categories like vulnerable? I haven’t exhaustively researched this but one of your links also shows what I’ve found as well:
“Because of ongoing and
potential loss of their sea ice habitat resulting from climate change, polar bears were listed as a threatened...”
So in other words, “polar bear populations are fine now but because we think there is the POTENTIAL for their habitat to degrade at some point in the future we’re listing them as vulnerable now.”
On to the ice quickly. As your graph shows the ice area has NOT been shrinking every year. In fact the low point was in 2012, 7 years ago, and the next lowest was in 2007, 12 years ago, and the trend since 2007 has not been down overall. This is a LOT different than saying that “the ice is shrinking every year”. It could start to go down again, of course, but it’s not going down every year now. The truth is important. Also note that the bottom of that graph is chopped off. The bottom line is not 0, it’s 3. We’ve gone from 7.5 ish to 4.5 ish since 1980, which is a lot, but not nearly as much as you might think if you didn’t notice how that graph was laid out. And there may well be other factors at play here as well. Some scientists think that carbon black and soot from Russian and Chinese coal fired power plants may have been dusting the arctic, and that the black may have been absorbing heat and driving some of the melting. And as China starts to bring their smog inducing emissions in check this effect may lesson. I don’t know where the latest research is on this but the point here is that these issues are generally fairly complicated, so if someone gives you a simplistic statement like, “arctic ice is shrinking every year”, you can pretty much tell without even doing any research that they have no idea what they’re talking about, or they’re lying.
So here’s the problem in a nutshell. When you lie to people and tell them, “Polar bears are endangered!” or “Arctic sea ice is shrinking every year!”, and they check the facts and catch you lying, they’re not going to believe you anymore. And when the media repeats these lies then the people stop believing the media. And when so called liberal institutions, like the media and “environmental groups”, come to be seen as liars the moderate middle voters swing to the right, and we start to see a lot of right wing governments being elected. This is a thirty second summary of a subject that could take many hours to discuss, but hopefully you starting to get the point now.
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