Climate change and polar bear blogs revisited: the importance of scientists speaking out

A paper by NIOO researcher Jeff Harvey on the fate of polar bears and its coverage by internet blogs has been widely read and cited by social and other media - including Newsweek and The New York Times - since coming out just over a year ago. But Harvey has also had to fend off some personal attacks from deniers of climate change.

“Doom scenarios can be put on ice”, said a recent headline in Dutch daily De Telegraaf. "Polar bears are doing fine." It didn’t take long for fact-checkers from another national paper, NRC, to dismiss this conclusion as a "fairytale", citing scientific sources such as Biology Letters, the journal of the venerable British Royal Society.

Since ‘Internet Blogs, Polar Bears, and Climate-Change Denial by Proxy' was published in the journal BioScience, a lot has changed, says Jeff Harvey. He quotes polar bear expert Andrew Derocher, who said that journalists always used to ask him about 'the other side' and to treat climate change deniers equally as 'statured experts'. "But not anymore."

Harvey believes the paper and its coverage by a wide range of national and international media - from NRC and Trouw to The Guardian, Newsweek and The New York Times - have contributed to this much-needed emphasis on fact-checking and original scientific sources.

"Our paper suggested that if people make extraordinary claims or claims that go against the prevailing wisdom, you should look into their background. And the prevailing wisdom is that polar bears are arctic ice specialists, their habitat is literally melting away beneath their feet and when it’s gone they’re in serious trouble."

Bloggers on the offensive

Polar bears have long been regarded as icons of climate change, making their fate even more important to discussions about human-driven global warming. Harvey and his international team of co-authors - including prominent polar bear expert Steven Amstrup and climatologist Michael E. Mann - looked at 90 blogs that write about polar bears, sea ice and climate change and claim to do so from a scientific angle.

They found that the 45 blogs which said the bears are doing fine and the threat of climate change is being exaggerated, largely ignored the peer-reviewed scientific literature on the issue. Instead, 80% of these blogs used other internet blogs as their main or only source of information, and one blog in particular: Polar Bear Science.

The headline in De Telegraaf, too, turns out to be based on an interview with the author of this blog, Canadian zoologist Susan Crockford. While Crockford has written several peer-reviewed articles, none of these have been on the subject of polar bears, sea ice and climate change.  But that hasn't stopped her from presenting herself as an expert.

When the paper by Harvey et al. was first published online in November 2017, Crockford and others immediately went on the offensive. She called the paper "shoddy and malicious" and even claimed on her blog and on social media that it amounted to "academic rape". According to Crockford, polar bears are doing much better than climate scientists had predicted, but the scientists are trying to silence all dissent.

From the 100th floor

The argument that some subpopulations seem to be doing as well as or better than 50 years ago despite the faster-than-expected decline in sea ice doesn't warrant the conclusion that summer ice isn't critical for the bears' survival, says Harvey. A hunting ban agreed by several key countries in 1973 could well be the explanation, and methods for measuring population size are more sophisticated now.

Harvey also stresses that exact predictions about when polar bears will die out are not how science works. "To me, as an ecologist, we have to look at things like tipping points and critical thresholds. We have to look at the physiological condition of the animals still alive today, the age structure of the population, and then we have to project this." Tipping points are important, as scientists now know that species are harder to rescue after such a major shift.

To climate change sceptics who would reject such projections as vague or inconclusive, Harvey says it's like falling off the top of a 100-storey building: you don't have to crash onto the pavement first to know you're in trouble. "We may have only fallen 30 or 40 floors so far, but we know that unless we act, it's going to happen!"

Overall, the negative reactions weren’t really concerned with scientific rebuttals anyway, according to Harvey. Instead, they targeted him personally, demanding he be reprimanded or sacked and even attacking the way he looks, with one commentator wondering how "a guitar-playing flower power hippie" such as Harvey could have become a professor.

Serengeti strategy

Harvey admits that the personal attacks did get to him at the beginning. But his skin soon thickened, he says. "And the support from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and from NIOO has been amazing!" As part of its mission, NIOO actively stimulates its scientists to do outreach: for effective societal discussions and policy-making, the facts from their research can be invaluable.

So if there is any lesson to be learned from his experiences and those of other scientists, says Harvey, it's that they shouldn't let themselves be stopped from speaking out against misinformation. "We’re not at a period in history when we can afford to worry about a few sleepless nights." And besides, the more people speak out, the easier it becomes.

"It's what my co-author Michael E. Mann calls the Serengeti strategy: if very few scientists stray away from the herd, like single zebras, to speak out against misinformation, it's easy for the 'lion-like' forces of anti-environmentalism, as I call them, to go after them. But through critical mass, they can overcome the small number of climate change deniers."

Photograph of polar bear: Mario Hoppmann/Flickr