If People Are Like Polar Bears, We’ll Be Fine

Gust post by Patrick Michaels & Chip Knappenberger

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) this week finalises the second part of its latest compendium on climate change.

The first part, the Working Group I report, focused on the physical science of climate change.  The main findings of that report, released late last year, have been widely panned for not telling the truth about how the latest science is stacking up in support of modest rather than alarming climate change.

The second part, making the news this week, is from the IPCC’s Working Group II and focuses on the effects of climate change.

In an interesting piece in a blog hosted by the United Kingdom’s The Telegraph, Andrew Lilico reports that if leaked drafts are to be trusted, the new report will mark a “formal moving on of the debate from the past, futile focus upon ‘mitigation’ to a new debate about resilience and adaptation.”

We can only wonder what took them so long to realise this—something that we have been saying from virtually day one of this whole global warming thing.

That is not to say that the new IPCC report doesn’t proclaim that a whole lot of bad things are going to happen as a result of climate change. It most assuredly does say that. But, as we last reported, much of that concern is overblown hype.

Here is another example:

In his story before the release of the IPCC report, Associated Press “climate-change-is-always-worse-than-we-thought” reporter Seth Borenstein starts off with this analogy:

If you think of climate change as a hazard for some far-off polar bears years from now, you’re mistaken. That’s the message from top climate scientists gathering in Japan this week to assess the impact of global warming.
    In fact, they will say, the dangers of a warming Earth are immediate and very human.
    “The polar bear is us,” says Patricia Romero Lankao of the federally financed National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, referring to the first species to be listed as threatened by global warming due to melting sea ice.

As coincidence would have it, researchers at the University of Alaska–Fairbanks recently issued a press release summing up their latest research findings on the genetic evolution of polar bears—research that has shown the animals to be a genetically distinct species from brown bears for about 1.2 million years.

Here is how Mathew Cronin, the lead researcher, described the implications of his team’s findings:

“The ramifications are that if the polar bear was an independent species for about 1 million years, it survived previous cold and warm periods,” Cronin said. “This means the polar bear has been an independent lineage a long time through glacial and interglacial and warm periods.”
    The last glacial period was at maximum extent about 22,000 years ago, and was preceded by a warm interglacial period about 130,000 years ago. Other warm and cold periods preceded that. Cronin thinks that if polar bears survived previous warm periods in which there was little or no arctic summer sea ice, this should be used in models predicting the species’ response to current climate change.
    “It seems logical that if polar bears survived previous warm, ice-free periods, they could survive another. This is of course speculation, but so is predicting they will not survive, as the proponents of the endangered species act listing of polar bears have done.”

Apologies to Borenstein, but it’s even better than this. For six millennia, around 120,000 years ago, the “eemian” period saw July temperatures some 12°F warmer than modern. Dorethe Dahl-Jensen’s work shows not only that, but that the ice thickness across Greenland was only about 1,000 feet thinner than it is now, or 11,000 feet. There’s tons of other evidence showing that the Arctic Ocean was ice-free, or nearly so, at the end of most summers back then.

And the polar bear survived (and prospered)! So it turns out that if indeed the “polar bear is us,” we should make out OK. Even if we, like the polar bear, must rely on adaptation over mitigation.

Seems like the alarmists can’t even get the scare stories right these days!

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Patrick Michaels is  director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute, past president of the American Association of State Climatologists and was program chair for the Committee on Applied Climatology of the American Meteorological Society.
    He was a research professor of Environmental Sciences at University of Virginia for thirty years. Michaels was a contributing author and is a reviewer of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. His writing has been published in the major scientific journals, including Climate Research, Climatic Change, Geophysical Research Letters, Journal of Climate, Nature, andScience, as well as in popular serials worldwide. He is the author or editor of six books on climate and its impact, and he was an author of the climate “paper of the year” awarded by the Association of American Geographers in 2004.
    Chip Knappenberger (right) is the assistant director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute, and coordinates the scientific and outreach activities for the Center. He has over 20 years of experience in climate research and public outreach, including 10 years with the Virginia State Climatology Office and 15 years as the Research Coordinator for New Hope Environmental Services, Inc.
    Chip has published numerous papers in the major atmospheric science journals on global warming, hurricanes, precipitation changes, weather and mortality, and Greenland ice melt, among many other areas, and is a very popular presenter at climate conferences worldwide. He was also the administrator and a major contributor to World Climate Report,the original (and longest-running) blog on earth on climate change.
   This post first appeared in the Cato Global Science Report, a feature from the Center for the Study of Science, in which important new items in the scientific literature or the popular media are highlighted.

References:
Cronin, M. A., et al., 2014. “Molecular Phylogeny and SNP Variation of Polar Bears (Ursus maritimus), Brown Bears (U. arctos), and Black Bears (U. americanus) Derived from Genome Sequences.” Journal of Heredity, doi:10.1093/jhered/est133
Dahl-Jensen, D., et al., 2013. “Eemian Interglacial Reconstructed from a Greenland Folded Ice Core.” Nature 489, doi: 10.1038/nature11789.