{"id":367834,"date":"2025-02-27T07:19:03","date_gmt":"2025-02-27T06:19:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=367834"},"modified":"2025-02-27T07:19:05","modified_gmt":"2025-02-27T06:19:05","slug":"no-news-is-good-news-on-polar-bear-day-celebrate-with-35-off-polar-bear-evolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=367834","title":{"rendered":"No News is Good News on Polar Bear Day: Celebrate With 35% Off Polar Bear\u00a0Evolution"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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From polarbearscience<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In honour of\u00a0International Polar Bear Day<\/a>\u00a0coming up on\u00a0Thursday February 27<\/a>, I\u2019ve discounted the price of my\u00a0Polar Bear Evolution<\/a><\/em>\u00a0book by 40% for the next month in order to encourage evolutionary thinking about polar bears (in all markets: see links at the end of this post). Instead of asking whether polar bears will survive a bit of warming over the next few decades, ask yourself how they survived more than 100,000 years of unimaginable changes in Arctic climate (both much warmer\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0colder) before now?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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No News is Good News<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Aside from the usual rhetoric we\u2019ve been accustomed to hearing from polar bear specialists\u2014Hudson Bay bears on the\u00a0verge of extinction<\/a>! A\u00a0new model predicts catastrophe<\/a>\u00a0for polar bears due to climate change! Vanishing sea ice\u00a0threatens polar bear food chain<\/a>! Polar bears suffering painful ice balls on their paws\u00a0due to climate change<\/a>! \u2014nothing much new has happened since my\u00a0State of the Polar Bear Report\u00a0<\/em>last year<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Conveniently, no new subpopulation survey results have been published, so polar bear specialists would still have you believe there have been no changes in global population numbers<\/a> over the last 10 years. No reports of starving bears<\/a> (or their new-age equivalent, wandering bears<\/a>); no invasions of small Arctic towns<\/a> or fatal attacks on people<\/a>, both of which have been routinely blamed on lack of sea ice and so we\u2019ve been told to expect increases<\/a> due to declines in summer sea ice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Presumably, then, polar bears are just getting on with their lives, dealing with small-scale changes in sea ice as they did during earlier parts of the Holocene<\/a> and other warm interglacial periods (some lasting over 10,000 years) over the entire 100,000 years or so of their existence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Getting on with life in East Greenland<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which brings me to this incident in East Greenland, in June 2024: more than 68 polar bears<\/a> gathered to feed at a whale carcass embedded in the sea ice, including a sow with three cubs of the year, and were photographed by rich eco-tourists on a cruise (lots more photos than these two are available at the link).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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As the photos show, the sow with cubs appears to be in good condition but some others are quite thin. That\u2019s usual for this time of year: most polar bears are in the worst shape of the year in late winter, which is why the boom of baby seals in spring<\/a> is so important to their survival. Some young bears, who are not yet very good hunters and aren\u2019t big enough to compete for scarce winter resources, routinely die of starvation:<\/a> that the life of polar bears.1<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

See my video from 2018<\/a> on starving polar bears.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Apparently, the sea ice was so thick<\/a> (up to 11m) off East Greenland in June 2024 that the ice-breaker the ecotourists were on couldn\u2019t make it through to the little village in Scoresby Sound (Ittoqqortoormiit) the group had planned to visit:<\/p>\n\n\n

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Sea ice conditions in East Greenland at mid-June 2024 don\u2019t look so bad but apparently the ice was far thicker than expected:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Polar Bear Evolution on Sale!<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can quote me: \u201cModern polar bears are essentially pre-adapted to survive extended periods with ice-free summers because they lived through at least two of these events since they became a unique species. One of these, the Eemian, lasted at least 10 thousand years<\/em>.\u201d [Susan Crockford, 11 June 2023, author of Polar Bear Evolution: A Model for How New Species Arise<\/a><\/em>]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This comprehensive look at polar bear evolution provides critical insight into why we should expect Ursus maritimus<\/em> to survive in a warmer world. Polar bear physiology and behavior have been fine-tuned by natural selection to adapt the species to the highly dynamic Arctic environment of the late Pleistocene<\/a>, including interglacial periods when sea ice was much scarcer than it is today and lasted thousands of years at a time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Highlights<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n