Al Gore’s “drowned polar bear” AIT source under investigation
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"ursus bogus" fake image used in a Science magazine article - click for story
According to AP/Anchorage Daily News, he’s on leave pending results of investigation. It seems everywhere you look, there’s some sort of fakery going on with the polar bear issue. For example, the image at left, where Science magazine used this fake image to hype the issue. And of course, everyone remembers the scene from the 2005 Al Gore science fiction movie An Inconvenient Truth, where Gore had an animated clip of the polar bear in danger of drowning, trying to get onto a tiny ice flow made smaller, presumably by global warming. Gore cited this study about drowned polar bears.
(AP) JUNEAU, Alaska — A federal wildlife biologist whose observation in 2004 of presumably drowned polar bears in the Arctic helped to galvanize the global warming movement has been placed on administrative leave and is being investigated for scientific misconduct, possibly over the veracity of that article.
Full story:
http://www.adn.com/2011/07/28/1989382/arctic-scientist-under-investigation.html
This 2008 World Climate Report essay shows why an investigation is needed:
Where Are All The Drowning Polar Bears?
The Interior Department just announced its decision to list the polar bear as “threatened” under the U.S Endangered Species Act (ESA). The justification behind the decision is that polar bears are highly dependent on sea ice in the Arctic for their livelihood—hunting, mating, birthing, family rearing, etc.—and thus if sea ice declines, so will the overall health of the species.
While this may, in fact, be true in some sense, it also gives short-shrift to the bears adaptive abilities, which must be large, given that they survived the previous interglacial warm period as well as an extended period of warmer-than-present conditions in the Arctic (which undoubtedly were associated with reduced sea ice levels) about 5,000 to 7,000 years ago (give or take a thousand years) (see here fore example). If the bears fare worse this time around, it will mostly likely be because their natural adaptive response may run up against a human roadblock in the form of habitat disruption or other types of difficulties that an increased human presence may pose to the adapting bears. It seems that this is what the intent of the ESA is aimed at tempering, not trying to alter the climate—precisely how the Act should have be applied, despite all the criticism surrounding the decision.
All this renewed attention to polar bears has piqued our interest in just how the bears have been faring recently. Al Gore made movie stars out of drowning bears in his 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth with an animation sequence depicting a small patch of floating ice disintegrating under a struggling polar bear until it was left swimming alone in a vast expanse of open ocean. One couldn’t help to get a little teary-eyed at the notion.
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more at the WUWT website
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