ACTIVISTS HAVE TARGETED CROCKFORD BECAUSE HER RESEARCH FINDS BEARS ARE NOT AT RISK.

policy are wacky conspiracy theorists who would also tend to believe the 1969 moon landing was faked.

In their new paper published November 29th, in the journal BioScience, Mann, Lewandowsky, Amstrup and a dozen other authors, headed by Jeffrey Harvey of the Netherlands Institute of Ecology, attack Crockford as an unqualified climate “denier.”

Crockford is fighting back. On Wednesday, she demanded that BioScience retract the paper. She describes it, in part, as “simply malicious, and an egregious breach of professional ethics” and filled with “untrue statements.”

The sole personal target of the BioScience paper is Crockford. Crockford has written books on polar bears for children and adults (such as Polar Bears: Outstanding Survivors of Climate Change) and runs Polar Bear Science, a blog site that for years has drilled holes in many of the claims and predictions of mainstream climate scientists. One recent post showed that polar bear populations around Churchill, Man. were in good shape, amid lots of sea ice. Another recent item said Amstrup’s claims of sea-ice loss were inaccurate.

Climate scientists in the Amstrup/Mann/Lewandowsky camp have apparently had enough of Crockford’s steady debunking of many of their polar bear alarmist claims and have set out to destroy her and her reputation via what can only be called a vicious personal attack.

The BioScience paper claimed to have conducted a rigorous analysis of blog sites that have, over time, mentioned polar bears, Arctic ice and climate change.

Polar bears, the authors say, have become the “poster species” of the official “consensus” on the threat of man-made global warming. As a result, however, polar bears have also become the poster species target of climate change “deniers.” Those deniers, the paper claims, have succeeded in creating a “consensus gap” between official science and public opinion, a gap that the paper says has now reached the proportion of a “chasm.”

To get to the bottom of the chasm, Amstrup and associates claim to have analyzed 90 polar-bear-related blog sites, half of them described as “science-based blogs” and half described as “denier blogs.” At first, BioScience did not release the research data, but as the data began to leak out this week, it became clear it was warped to nail Crockford.

Of the 45 “science-based” blogs many are … well, not exactly what one would expect. There’s Discovery Kids and Gizmodo, along with such deeply academic sites as The David Suzuki Foundation and World Wildlife Fund Canada. Also listed as “science-based” sites are news blogs such as grist.org and a company that sells photo services.

For “denier” blogs, the paper tapped into two news services, Breitbart and The Daily Caller. Also listed are the blogs of Danish author Bjorn Lomborg and Calgary’s Friends of Science. The “analysis” apparently shows that 80 per cent of the 45 denier blogs had “referenced” Crockford’s polar bear research.

So here’s the summary of this so-called science paper: We compare the blogs that agree with us on polar bears with blogs that don’t. We label those that don’t agree with us “deniers” and smear one of the scientists whose work is cited on those denier sites.

If this is science, we are all doomed. Out on the ice, the polar bears seem to be safe for now. But it’s us humans who are at risk of succumbing to the malicious catechism of the high priests of climate change.