Jim, What's Natural about Polar Bear habitat disruption?

Steele Which Narrative to Believe?

This review of May 1st What’s Natural? will take the form of a direct letter to Mr. Steele.

Jim Steele,

I thought your title “Polar Bears. Which narrative to believe?” was apropos considering your freewheeling narrative. You ask which narrative to believe?  Indeed, that is the question.  So, lets get on with it.  Why should we believe your’s?

In the first column (4/17/18) of this double-bill, you use an Inuit word in a way, which I found out, locals of Nunavut found foreign.  Yes, I shared your column with a few.  That got me to thinking that perhaps your usage was simply a gratuitous prop to impress your audience.  Or what?

Then you drag a scientist from the middle of New York City into the middle of the Nunavut Polar Bear controversy - though said scientist has never spoken on the topic in any way.  He’ll tell you frankly: “I know nothing about it.” 

Why did you need to fabricate words to put into Gavin Schmidt’s mouth?  Simply to set him up as the straight-guy for your zinger punchline:  

“If you dare disagree with models of gloom and doom, you are attacked as an ignorant denier.” 

Kappiananngittuq, Inuits, Constructive Learning in Nunavut - The Safe Space

http://inuktitutilinniaqta.com/naq/

In reading through Steele's followup column about Polar Bears in a warming world, I became curious and decided to look up the word Kappiananngittuq, so I googled _Inuit Kappiananngittuq_.  I was blindsided by the four pages worth of google search results to forty articles that upon closer examination turned out to include 29 that mirrored the same deceptive Steele article.  What is going on?  Is Steele and Sherman Frederick and Anthony Watts mainlined into a social media troll factory or something?  

Never mind, those questions will have to wait for another post.  Here I want to share the results of my search to learn about “Kappiananngittuq.”

After I recovered my bearing and turned to the remaining eleven links, I found what I was looking for http://inuktitutilinniaqta.com - it seemed to me an authoritative source for Inuit language.  To my confusion I found “Kappiananngittuq" actually translates to “It’s not scary.” 

click on image for clearer viewing

http://inuktitutilinniaqta.com/naq/

Climate-Change Denial by Proxy, Polar Bears, Blogs and Steele

The two most recent "What's Natural?" columns worth of crazy making by Jim Steele revolves around Polar Bear studies, which Steele first misrepresents, then he offers his tortured conclusion, it's proof that manmade global warming is a hoax.  In reaching out to scientists he named, one shared the following with me when I asked about any papers that looked into contrarian deception on this topic:

“The paper by Harvey et al. https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/68/4/281/4644513 is the best rebuttal against the deniers when it comes to polar bears.”  

I was so impressed with the read and since it has a Creative Commons Attribution, I'm going to take advantage of their invitation and share the entire paper here and hope that a few make the time to read this informative collection of facts.

EDITOR'S CHOICE

Internet Blogs, Polar Bears, and Climate-Change Denial by Proxy

Jeffrey A Harvey, Daphne van den Berg, Jacintha Ellers, Remko Kampen, Thomas W Crowther, Peter Roessingh, Bart Verheggen, Rascha J M Nuijten, Eric Post, Stephan Lewandowsky ... 

BioScience, Volume 68, Issue 4, April 2018, Pages 281–287, https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/bix133

Published: 29 November 2017

Abstract

Increasing surface temperatures, Arctic sea-ice loss, and other evidence of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) are acknowledged by every major scientific organization in the world. 

However, there is a wide gap between this broad scientific consensus and public opinion. 

Internet blogs have strongly contributed to this consensus gap by fomenting misunderstandings of AGW causes and consequences. 

Polar bears (Ursus maritimus) have become a “poster species” for AGW, making them a target of those denying AGW evidence. 

Here, focusing on Arctic sea ice and polar bears, we show that blogs that deny or downplay AGW disregard the overwhelming scientific evidence of Arctic sea-ice loss and polar bear vulnerability. 

By denying the impacts of AGW on polar bears, bloggers aim to cast doubt on other established ecological consequences of AGW, aggravating the consensus gap. 

To counter misinformation and reduce this gap, scientists should directly engage the public in the media and blogosphere.  

(CC:  May I suggest students and lay-people have a responsibility to defend the science - scientists are busy with their work!  Besides most contrarian arguments have nothing to do with the actual science and everything to do with rhetorical deception.)

Jim Steele this is 2014 !

Lately I haven't had much time for this, but Mr. Steele smacked me with another one yesterday.  After reading his SKEP thread reprinted below and his full article and looking up some stuff I started a response but it's such a gish gallop with the guy, then I got all caught up in an aside now I've run out of time. So I'll just post it over here.  Let him know I'm doing my homework and I'll be back. 

Re: Amputating Contrary Data:Stock & Trade of Climate Alarmi

Post #46  by JIm Steele » Thu May 15, 2014 6:14 am

Not only did warming alarmist amputate data that showed improving polar bear condition, in a dubiously named 2012 article " Effects of climate warming on polar bears: a review of the evidence" they amputated data that reported it is actually heavy ice years that are the worse for seals and bears.

Polar bear experts Ian Stirling and Andrew Derocher {check out the links I added} (who predicts by the middle of this century, two-thirds of the polar bears will be gone due to rising CO2) published in a section titled, “Why progressively earlier breakup of the sea ice negatively affects persistence of polar bearsubpopulations" to illustrate the importance of ringed seal pups they wrote, “In the mid-1970s and again in the mid-1980s, ringed seal pup productivity plummeted by 80% or more for 2–3 years…. A comparison of the age-specific weights of both male and female polar bears from 1971 to 1973 (productive seal years), to those from 1974 to 1975 (years of seal reproductive failure), demonstrated a significant decline in the latter period.”

They referenced those years of bad seal and bad bears in Stirling’s 2002 paper. But if you actually read that paper Stirling contradicted his own “review of the evidence” writing, “Heavy ice conditions in the mid-1970s and mid-1980s caused significant declines in productivity of ringed seals, each of which lasted about 3 years and caused similar declines in the natality of polar bears and survival of subadults, after which reproductive success and survival of both species increased again.” In 2012, Stirling coauthored another paper with a seal researcher and concluded all declines were caused by heavy ice years. Their paper proposed that “the decline of ringed seal reproductive parameters and pup survival in the 1990s could have been triggered by unusually cold winters and heavy ice conditions that prevailed in Hudson Bay in the early 1990s, through nutritional stress” 

{my red highlights}

Here we have a favorite tactic.

Think about what's going on here,  
Steele is reaching back to the seventies, eighty when conditions had been relatively stable, and had been for millennia (even considering the LIA/MWP).  

Amount of old ice in Arctic, 1987 2013

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMYTh8vWRNY

Cloud .Tube

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climatecentraldotorg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1J09xL0NGQ