Mick Hartley

It turns out they’re doing fine. Matt Ridley in the Spectator:

The BBC reported terrible news last week about polar bears: they are thriving. This is very annoying of them as it goes against the interests of environmental activists, polar bears being the very emblem, mascot and clickbait of climate change cataclysm. But the bears’ stubborn refusal to get the memo and starve has become too obvious to ignore.

The latest evidence comes from the Barents Sea, and the Norwegian-administered archipelago of Svalbard in particular, where bear numbers have been steadily increasing. Surprisingly, they are also getting fatter, according to measurements taken when bears are caught and weighed. This is despite a decline in sea-ice cover in the area, especially in autumn. Even more unexpectedly, the bears are fattest in or after years when the sea ice retreats farthest.

The reason for this is largely down to the increasing life to be found in the Arctic seas, as sunlight gets in: plankton booms, so more fish, so more seals, so more bears.

One study found that in 22 years to 2025, the productivity of phytoplankton shot up by 80 per cent in the Eurasian Arctic, 34 per cent in the Barents Sea, thanks to less ice and therefore more sunlight. 

Lots of evidence now suggests that the Arctic Ocean was nearly or completely ice-free in late summer and early autumn in the early millennia of the current interglacial period, around 9,000-6,000 years ago. It was probably very rich in marine life as a result, with lots of seals on the ice for polar bears to eat in spring, even if the bears had to take refuge on land and fast during the ice-free autumn months – just as they do today in Hudson Bay and much of Svalbard.

Most polar bear scientists have continued to insist the species is in imminent danger of extinction, because that way lies funding. They ostracised those who dissented, such as Mitchell Taylor and Susan Crockford, Canadian zoologists who argued that polar bears would probably survive even in a warming Arctic. ‘For the sake of polar bear conservation, views that run counter to human-induced climate change are extremely unhelpful,’ said Andrew Derocher, as he expelled Taylor from the Polar Bear Specialist Group in 2009.

When a Netflix documentary in 2017, narrated by Sir David Attenborough, filmed walrus which had fallen off a cliff in Siberia, Crockford argued that they had probably been stampeded by polar bears. The film’s producers dismissed the suggestion, but it later turned out she was right. Despite being hounded out of the University of Victoria in British Columbia in 2019 for her views on polar bears, Crockford has continued to argue that more seasonal melting of sea ice means more and fatter bears. Turns out she was right about that too.

Plus the melting of the Arctic ice has no influence on sea level, as it’s on top of water – so all good news: more animal life, plus clearing the north-west passage. Unfortunately the same can’t be said for the melting of the Greenland or the Antarctic ice-caps, which do affect sea levels…