Anchorage Daily News

The state's effort to enlist support from a controversial scientific study on polar bears -- and the furor that followed -- illustrates the raw sensitivities of climate science these days.

The study, by polar bear researcher M.G. Dyck and six climate scientists, was published last year as a "Viewpoint" in the journal Ecological Complexity.

It rebutted earlier work by Canada's leading polar bear experts linking declines in Hudson Bay polar bear populations to warmer temperatures and shorter sea-ice seasons.

For the State of Alaska, which quoted extensively from the study in opposing a "threatened" listing for polar bears, the conclusions were obviously on point. The Dyck study was especially important because little other science on bears took that side.

The Dyck study argued that warming around Hudson Bay had largely natural causes such as solar cycles.

"The reduced bear population in Western Hudson Bay may be more a factor of human activities and excessive handling than loss of summer sea ice," said the state's comments, citing Dyck.

Rep. Brad Miller, a North Carolina Democrat and a subcommittee chairman on the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology, raised an alarm because one of the authors, Harvard astrophysicist Willie Soon, said he had been funded in part by Exxon Mobil and the American Petroleum Institute.

Miller called a hearing in October, attacking the Dyck study as phony science and accusing Exxon of "funding challenges to the science underlying the proposed listing of polar bears."

There was a back story. Earlier in the year, Miller had held a hearing on industry efforts to "sow confusion" about climate change.

The Union of Concerned Scientists had released a report on Exxon Mobil's funding of nonprofit groups and researchers promoting climate "uncertainty," a program modeled after earlier efforts by the tobacco industry.

Soon and another of the Hudson Bay authors, Sallie Baliunas, had been featured prominently in the report as "scientific spokespeople" for Exxon. The company has denied funding studies for political purposes, calling such charges "deeply offensive."

Other authors of the report also were known for past contrarian stands on climate. Dyck himself was associated with the Nunavut territory, where village economies benefit from regulated polar-bear hunting.

While environmentalists dismissed the study, Gov. Sarah Palin sprang to its defense with a vehement three-page letter to Miller defending oil-industry funding of science.

"Instead of using scientific research to refine climate change models and create new theories," the governor's letter said, activists "attack the scientists who demonstrate model flaws and point out important variables that have not been considered."

Miller, it turned out, had gone overboard when he dismissed the article as an opinion piece masquerading as science. The editor of Ecological Complexity said this month it was a peer-reviewed science article that had, unfortunately, been misleadingly labeled.

But that wasn't quite the end. Two top polar bear biologists, whose earlier Hudson Bay work was disputed, helped draw up a response to the Dyck article. This month Ecological Complexity agreed to print the rebuttal.

One of those biologists, Andrew Derocher of the University of Alberta, said in an interview that "credible" polar bear scientists never had a chance to review or approve the article in the peer-review process.

He called it poor scholarship that misinterpreted previous studies to make a political point about climate change.

"I would venture to guess that, beyond Markus Dyck, none of them had ever seen a polar bear," Derocher said.

Find Tom Kizzia online at adn.com/contact/tkizzia or call him at 907-235-4244.

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