From Climate Realism

By Linnea Lueken

A recent article at Mother Jones, “Something Unexpected Is Happening With Norway’s Polar Bears,” expresses surprise that polar bear populations in Norway are actually getting healthier amid declining sea ice. This is true, though it is not truly “news,” in the sense of something newly discovered, and should not have been unexpected. Previous research, including annual polar bear counts, show that polar bear populations as a whole have increased amid modest global warming.

Mother Jones says the message that polar bears would soon die out due to climate change “infiltrated the public psyche, perhaps more than any other about the scourge of global warming.” This is certainly true, polar bears became the poster children in many advertisements about climate change and were featured prominently in former Vice-President Al Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth.”

The polar bear extinction theory, however, is another one of the claims from that film that have long since been debunked, as Mother Jones admits, “the reality for these iconic bears is more complicated.”

Mother Jones references two studies showing that polar bears in multiple locations are doing very well. A 2022 study looking at southeastern Greenland and a recent study in Scientific Reports looking at Norway’s polar bear populations, show bears in those locations have actually become healthier, with their population “stable or growing.”

They do emphasize that Hudson Bay bears are struggling, claiming that “researchers have tied melting ice to lower bear survival and a shortage of food, finding that the population has roughly halved since the 1980s.” But overall, “there are 20 distinct polar bear populations around the world, and they all behave slightly differently. Warming is not uniformly killing them.”

Again, this is not new, despite what Mother Jones implies.

In 2021, polar bear scientist Susan Crockford published a State of the Polar Bear report, summarizing the findings of previous polar bear counts and research. Her survey of the literature found that of 19 polar bear subpopulations, three are “increasing” or “likely increasing,” four are “stable” or “likely stable,” and 11 are “presumed stable or increasing.”

Previous reports going back to 2017 came to similar conclusions that most polar bear regional subpopulations were stable if not increasing, and there is no doubt that the total number of polar bears has increased since the 1960s. The same studies also suggested the polar bears were healthy and producing multiple cubs that survive to adulthood.

Concerning the Hudson Bay bear population, there is significant doubt about whether or not bear counts that claim lower numbers are being accurately portrayed by activist scientists and the media. The change in the number of polar bears there since the early 2000s is not statistically significant, and many of the catastrophic projections about Hudson Bay bears are based not on actual counts but on computer model projections of bear mortality. Recent counts do not consider the fact that bears migrate between regions. It is also notable that the West Hudson Bay and Southern Beaufort bear populations are the only places where potentially negative trends associated with ice loss have been found. Despite the same sea ice trends, other bear populations are doing very well. This should suggest that if those populations are in decline, there is more at play than ice trends.

The new Scientific Reports study is especially interesting, as it found that bears where sea ice is thicker actually have worse body condition than those where it is warmer, which should cast even more doubts on any theory where sea ice extent or thickness is directly associated with polar bear health. In her studies, Crockford also noted thick ice could hinder Polar bear flourishing rather than benefitting them.

Mother Jones is one of the premier climate alarmist websites, so it is refreshing, even somewhat surprising, to see it publish any good news at all, even if the good news is framed as surprising with readers directed towards additional alarmist projections with little connection to reality. Any species’ relationship with its environment is going to be complex and dependent on a variety of factors, especially when it comes to intelligent animals like polar bears. They can easily migrate and adapt to changing conditions, substituting other food stocks for seals. The truth is that they are doing much better now than they were decades ago and Mother Jones serves their readers well by reporting this fact.