The work of University of Victoria zoologist Susan Crockford is at the centre of a survey conducted on blogs that focus on climate change.
The report, released Wednesday by the journal BioScience, says 80 per cent of publications from climate deniers cite Crockford as a source of their arguments.
The study added “Notably, as of this writing, Crockford has neither conducted any original research nor published any articles in the peer-reviewed literature on polar bears.”
The report says the blogs of climate change deniers virtually ignore all science related to the threat of climate change to polar bears and their arctic ice habitat.
Crockford says on her blog, Polar Bear Science, that the evolution of polar bears is one of her professional interests.
In a post Wednesday morning, Crockford said, “The polar bear experts who predicted tens of thousands of polar bears would be dead by now (given the ice conditions since 2007) have found my well-documented criticisms of their failed prophesies have caused them to loose face and credibility with the public.”
The analysis looked at 90 different blogs split between those that support climate change and those that do not.
It reports science-based blogs provided convincing evidence that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) poses a threat to polar bears and sea ice, but those written by deniers did not.
With files from CBC and the Canadian Press.
Bekwnn on November 30th, 2017 at 08:20 UTC »
Not the way I hoped to see UVic show up on /r/all...
Especially surprising because it's a decently well ranked University that does especially well in the earth and ocean sciences category. This article makes it sound like it's about some graduate or grad student.
It's worth pointing out (since people on reddit don't read the article) that her research or whatever she wrote sounds like it sums to "people said polar bears would be nearly wiped out by now, but the reality isn't so severe."
monkeybreath on November 30th, 2017 at 07:03 UTC »
That article was rather annoying. It quotes her blog saying how she’s making researchers lose face and making them upset, but didn’t bother to talk to any actual researchers who could confirm or deny her claims.
Edit before I get beat up: yes, they did quote the paper noting her notoriety, but they also give her the last word, which will stick with readers.
satanicpuppy on November 30th, 2017 at 02:23 UTC »
Citations can be weird. I wrote a program for a friend of mine that did some cute little bioinformatics trick with a specific kind of collected data. I did it for a case of beer.
The program was useful, it circulated, and the people cited me, because they're building on my "work". Some other people used the program and cited me, but some other people just cited all the people who were cited in the research that they based part of their work on, just because there were like 20 people involved, and they couldn't be sure who did what.
Long story short, I was hanging out with a professor friend who was looking up how many times some of her stuff had been cited by other people, and I asked her to look me up, and I had like four times as many citations as she did. Oh man, she was pissed.
I've no relevant skills (besides being a computer guy and knowing basic biology), no real credentials, but boy do I got citations!