National Post (National Edition)

Polar bear mob attack

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We take you now deep out onto the frozen floes of Arctic science and polar bears, where the most dangerous threat known to man and bear alike is lurking among the icebergs: Junk science.

As a starting point, we look to a story published December 1st on Vice News’s tech site, Motherboar­d, that included an interview with U.S. polar bear scientist/activist Stephen Amstrup. In the article, Amstrup accuses Canadian polar bear scientist Susan Crockford of filling her bear research with extreme allegation­s. Climate activists have targeted Crockford, a zoologist and adjunct professor of anthropolo­gy at the University of Victoria, because her research inconvenie­ntly finds that, despite their claims, polar bears are not at risk. “You don’t have to read far in her material to see that it is full of unsubstant­iated statements and personal attacks on scientists, using names like eco-terrorists, fraudsters, green terrorists and scammers,” Amstrup claimed.

A few days later, Motherboar­d published a slithery retraction. After Crockford complained that Amstrup’s comments about her were “a lie” and that she has never used such terms, Amstrup “clarified” his comments. He said that when he accused Crockford of calling scientists fraudsters, he really meant to accuse “climate deniers as a whole, rather than Crockford in particular.”

Ah, well, mix-ups like wrongly accusing a scientist of slanderous language are the kind of things that can happen given the context. It’s all part of an escalating epic of polar bear junk science. It begins with a paper in which Amstrup, who heads the activist group Polar Bears Internatio­nal, and other climate scientists — including famed temperatur­e hockey-stick maker Michael Mann — produce what must be one of the most pathetic scientific smear jobs in the already sorry history of climate change science smear campaigns. Also along for the hatchet job was Stephan Lewandowsk­y, an Australian psychologi­st who asserts that people who have doubts about climate

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