Secretary of the Interior ignores scientific evidence on forecasting, instead favoring experts’ opinions to list thriving polar bear population as threatened
Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne announced on May 14, 2008 that he is accepting the recommendation of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dale Hall to list the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The listing is based on the best available science, which shows that loss of sea ice threatens and will likely continue to threaten polar bear habitat. This loss of habitat puts polar bears at risk of becoming endangered in the foreseeable futures”. See the U.S. Department of the Interior website for the full announcement.
This extraordinary announcement is at odds with evidence that the polar bear population is currently thriving, and is based on false assumptions and unscientific forecasting procedures. The forthcoming Interfaces paper by Armstrong, Green, and Soon, provides evidence that the “best available science” does not support a listing.
The Polar Bears Are All Right
Michael Goldfarb’s article “The Polar Bears Are All Right” in the Weekly Standard questions the current push to have polar bears listed as a “threated species” as a policy implemented under climate change. Below is an excerpt, full text available.
Polar bears, on the other hand, are expected to see few benefits, even if the threat they face from warming is a matter of dispute. Lindzen flatly describes worry over polar bears as “gibberish.” “Polar bears are going up in number,” he says. “They’re not worried; they can swim a hundred kilometers.” The notion of threatened polar bear populations was recently challenged by J. Scott Armstrong, a professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. In an article for the journal Interfaces, Armstrong and his coauthors argued that a series of complex and “erroneous assumptions” undergird much of the research showing polar bears at risk, and they offer compelling evidence that the animals have survived far warmer conditions in the past.
Still there is a push to have the polar bear officially listed as a “threatened species.” Hugh Hewitt, who practices natural resources law in addition to hosting a radio show, explained in a recent column that the move would clear a path for environmentalists to “argue that every federal permit that allows directly or indirectly for increased emissions of hydrocarbons is a federal act that might impact the polar bear.” Such permits would thus be subject to a new range of environmental regulations affecting all manner of industry.
Polar bear fears groundless
The U. S. government commissioned studies to support the listing of polar bears as a threatened or endangered species. Polar bear numbers are currently high and the population has been increasing rapidly in recent decades. Everyone likes polar bears, so this is good news. A decision to list would require forecasts that the current upward population trend will reverse. The government studies concluded that polar bear populations would decrease substantially.
Decision makers and the public should expect people who make forecasts to be familiar with the scientific principles of forecasting just as a patient expects his physician to be familiar with the procedures dictated by medical science. Three scientists, J. Scott Armstrong of the University of Pennsylvania, Kesten Green of Monash University, and Willie Soon of The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, audited the government studies to assess whether they were consistent with forecasting principles. Their paper, “Polar Bear Population Forecasts: A Public-Policy Forecasting Audit,” has been accepted for publication in the management science journal Interfaces. It is the only peer-reviewed paper on polar bear population forecasting that has been accepted for publication in an academic journal.
They concluded that the government forecasts were based on false assumptions and their polar bear population forecasts contravened many principles for scientific forecasting. Indeed, the reports followed fewer than one-sixth of the relevant principles. Given the importance of the forecasts, all principles should be properly applied. In short, the government reports do not provide relevant information for this decision.
Research shows that for issues such as the population of polar bears—situations that are complex and where there is much uncertainty—the best forecast is that things will follow a “random walk;” in effect, this model states that the most recent value is the best forecast for all periods in the future. Because the polar bear population has been increasing over recent decades, however, a continuation of that trend over the short term is possible.
Copies of Armstrong, Green and Soon’s forthcoming paper are available at http://publicpolicyforecasting.com.
Q&A With Senator Boxer
Below are excerpts from the Q&A session between Armstrong and Senator Boxer. Full Text of Examining Threats and Protections For the Polar Bear.
Senator Boxer. Now, Dr. Scott, you are a Ph.D. in what? Dr. Armstrong.
Mr. Armstrong. I went to MIT, so I basically had three areas, one was economics, the other was social psychology and the other was marketing.
Senator Boxer. Economics, social psychology and marketing. Are you a biologist?
Mr. Armstrong. No.
Yes, Virginia, there is a polar bear
Yes, Virginia, there is a polar bear
Margaret Wente
Friday, February 01
Every eight-year-old knows the polar bears are drowning. “I feel sad for them,” said one friend’s kid the other day as he bundled up for school. Maybe he’d seen those TV ads featuring adorable baby bears with voiceovers by appealing children. “The ice is melting because of global warming,” lisps a little girl over pictures of polar bears apparently swimming for their lives. “Baby bears have died. Please help them.”
No one wants the polar bears to die. Obviously the grownups should do something – and so they are. A host of scientists, environmentalists, legislators and worried citizens is pressuring the U.S. government to add polar bears to the list of endangered species. A decision is expected soon, and they’ve got an impressive array of studies to back them up. One study forecasts that the melting of the Arctic sea ice could kill off two-thirds of the polar bear population by 2050 by destroying their habitat.
Q&A With Senator Inhofe
Below are excerpts from the Q&A session between Armstrong and Senator Inhofe. Full Text of Examining Threats and Protections For the Polar Bear.
Dr. Armstrong, when you were talking, this chart up here, first of all, did you say that you had a paper that you wrote in 1978?
Mr. Armstrong. I was writing books on long range forecasting then.
Senator Inhofe. You were writing books in 1978?
Mr. Armstrong. Well, I have been in this field for 48 years now.
Senator Inhofe. Wow. I thought maybe I heard wrong. You are the forecasting expert, I recognize that.
Armstrong’s testimony available on YouTube
Below is Armstrong’s testimony from YouTube; it is approximately 6 minutes in length. Before you watch the video, please take this brief poll. Based on the image, what do you think will be the trend for the rest of the 21st century? Then, after watching the video, click to see Exhibit 3 found at the end of this post to see how Hunter et. al came to their conclusions.
I think the trend will be:
1) sharply upward
2) upward
3) slightly upward
4) hard to say
5) slightly downward
6) downward
7) sharply downward
Click here to see Exhibit 3. It shows the data used to estimate the key relationship.
Spiked Online: Bearfaced Lies?
Decimation of the polar bear: bearfaced lies?
A leading expert in forecasting tells spiked that research into the impact of climate change on polar bears has been shockingly shoddy.
Tim Black
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.
Armstrong presents testimony at the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works
On January 30, 2008, Scott Armstrong gave a talk presenting his findings to the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works’ “Examining Threats and Protections for the Polar Bear”. Click here for full text of the talk. The following are selected excerpts. Full text is available of the paper “Polar Bear Population Forecasts: A Public Policy Forecasting Audit” by Armstrong, Green, and Soon.
We conducted forecasting audits of two of the nine administrative reports that were prepared in 2007 to “…Support U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Polar Bear Listing Decision.” We selected the reports Amstrup et al. and Hunter et al. as they appeared to be the primary forecasting documents. Our concern was to establish whether the reports’ forecasts of the polar bear population over the balance of the 21st Century were the product of scientific procedures.
(more…)
Anchorage Daily News: Lacking studies, state still disputes polar bear ‘doom’
The following are some excerpts from the article discussing Alaska’s decision whether to list polar bears as endangered or not. Click here for the full text available online.
Ken Taylor has had easier jobs than this one. It’s not like the good old days chasing rhinos, climbing into bear dens and wrestling beluga whales in shallow water.
These days, sitting at a desk as deputy commissioner of fish and game, the veteran wildlife biologist has to muster the best science he can find to argue that Alaska’s polar bears are in good shape and need no special protection from hypothetical doomsday scenarios.
This requires Taylor to stand up to the prevailing wisdom about global warming in most of the world’s scientific community and the public — not to mention some pretty strong opinions in his own department.
But Taylor, the Palin administration’s point man on polar bears, argues that the scientific justification simply isn’t there — at least not yet — to declare the polar bear “threatened” and touch off a cascade of effects under the Endangered Species Act. A decision on the bears is expected from the U.S. Department of the Interior in the next few weeks.
“From my perspective, it’s very difficult to put a population on the list that’s healthy, based on a projection 45 years into the future,” Taylor says. “That’s really stretching scientific credibility.”
…
The state also pokes at studies used to predict the future of polar ice, quoting at length from the climate scientists’ own demurrals about margins of error. The chain of predicted problems following from those studies are based on “unsupported conjecture,” the state says.
The state’s critique was based on the work of a consultant, J. Scott Armstrong, a University of Pennsylvania expert on mathematical forecasting who has elsewhere challenged former vice president Al Gore to a $10,000 bet on whether the globe is truly warming.
