Outlandish ‘tipping point’ rhetoric is about to be regurgitated once again during the promotion of the latest IPCC report, due today.
Tipping points are those theoretical climate thresholds that, when breached, cause widespread catastrophe; they are mathematical model outputs that depend on many assumptions that may not be plausible or even possible.
Polar bears often get caught up in motivational tales of sea ice tipping points.
Tipping points are not facts: they are scary stories made to sound like science.
This is why Sir David Attenborough has totally embraced the tipping points narrative. He even made a movie fully devoted to them, called, Breaking Boundaries – The Science of Our Planet.
Tipping points are the animal tragedy porn of mathematical models and Attenborough has adopted them both.
Attenborough and his cronies want you to be afraid of climate change instead of thinking about what they actually mean by ‘action’, ‘climate-neutral’, and ‘net zero’.
They want free reign to rid the world of fossil fuels and the more frightened you are by their implausible narratives, the more likely they are to succeed.
Remember the original scary polar bear story: the ice is melting faster than we thought and 2/3 of the bears are going to die!
But contrary to those predictions, polar bears have survived a loss of summer sea ice of more than 40% since 1979 without any decline in global population size (Amstrup et al. 2007; Crockford 2017, 2019, 2021).
We’ve had 14 years of sea ice coverage in summer that polar bear specialists insisted would devastate the species and yet studies on the bears in Arctic areas most drastically affected by ice loss (the Barents Sea and the Chukchi Sea) show they are thriving, not struggling to survive (Aars 2018; Crockford 2021; Regehr et al. 2016, 2018; Rode et al. 2014, 2018).
The newest polar bear model (Molnár et al. 2020) is no more believable than the first one and is no more likely to present an accurate picture of the future for polar bears.
Mathematical models are not facts (Curry 2017; Hausfather and Peters 2020).
Future climate is not any more likely to be accurately predicted by models than future polar bear survival.
Think, don’t feel. Don’t allow Attenboroughesque narratives of doom prevent you from recognizing the difference between facts and rhetoric when it comes to climate change.
Read rest at Polar Bear Science
Listing Polar Bears under the Endangered Spieces Act was pure Politics not Science just like the rest of them all