From polarbearscience

Positive news on the Arctic front as far as polar bears are concerned so far this year, with no reports of dead or dying bears, or of horrific attacks on humans that I’ve heard about. Not much to talk about but here’s what I’ve found.

Sea ice in Hudson Bay is forming rapidly while according to NSIDC, the Arctic Basin is filled with ice. Ice has also moved well into the Bering Sea, the Barents and Kara Seas, and Davis Strait. NSIDC say they have discontinued their monthly sea ice reports due to lack of funding, although under the current federal government administration, such budget cuts were likely tied to their inability to consistently produce these reports without pushing a human-caused climate change narrative of impending catastrophe.

We’ve heard nothing at all from the town of Churchill this year about how their season with polar bears went: they have not posted a single problem bear report on their website for the first time in years. Too busy to bother with keeping people informed for their safety or so few issues it would be embarassing to report?

Literally the only mention I found of how Western Hudson Bay polar bears are doing relative to sea ice formation this fall came from a Facebook post by a tour company on 30 November 2025:

The photo of a cub mentioned in the post was this one:

In Norway, biologists in charge of monitoring polar bear health finally updated their webpage at the end of September 2025, where they stated [my bold]:

“The population probably increased considerably during the years after hunting was banned in 1973, and new knowledge indicates that the population has not been reduced the last 10-15 years, in spite of a large reduction in available sea ice in the same period.“

Below is the data they provided for the body condition (i.e. fatness) of adult males 1993-2025, which for some reason they don’t reveal for adult females, even though we know that data is collected, as explained here (with references) – perhaps because instead of no trend, the trend for female fatness increased and that this is why the prognosis for the population is positive.

Over in the Chukchi Sea, a similar admission that bears are doing well despite summer sea ice declines came in the form of a paper published in 2024 by Karyn Rode and colleagues [my highlights], pdf here, “Identifying indicators of polar bear population status”: