A backbencher in Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party government is under fire from some of Canada’s scientific community for a letter he wrote denying that polar bears are an endangered species.
In a letter to a constituent in February, Yukon MP Ryan Leef said the polar bear population had “quadrupled over the past 40 years.”
Mr. Leef went on to say that that many pessimistic studies” about polar bears had been judged “unscientific and inconsequential to decision makers.”
He cited a report by Scott Armstrong, a marketing expert at the University of Pennsylvania, Kesten , Green, a business and economic forecaster at Monash University in Australia, and Willie Soon, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Canadian scientists called the US studies to which Mr. Leef referred “bogus” and said they were the work of well-known climate skeptics.
A University of Alberta expert on polar bears, Ian Stirling, said he was “absolutely appalled” that a Canadian MP would make such a statement.
The chief scientist at Polar Bears International, a conservation group, Stephen Amstrup, said Mr. Leef’s assertion that the population had quadrupled is “completely bogus.”
Said Mr. Amstrup: “Polar bears are in jeopardy. To suggest that they are ‘just fine’ is like living on another planet.”
An international polar bear specialist group says that the bears’ habitat has been shrinking along with Arctic Ice. The group estimates that eight of 19 sub-population of the bears around the Arctic are in decline.
Environment Canada estimates that Canada is home to about two-thirds of the 20,000 to 25,000 polar bears believed to be living in the Arctic.
The department lists the bears as a species of “special concern.”
Mr. Leef defended his letter on Monday. He said there is “contradictory and different” information about what is happening to polar bears.
Environment Canada and Environment Minister Peter Kent have not commented on Mr. Leef’s letter.
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