Lomborg, Polar bear

One of the iconic images of the coming climate apocalypse is the starving polar bear sitting mournfully atop a melting ice floe. Polar bears are adorable, and no one wants them to die. And what better symbol of global warming than endangered polar bears? In his 2006 hit climate change documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore showed a sad, animated polar bear floating away on a melting ice floe, presumably to its death. A campaign by environmentalists successfully convinced the US government to declare the polar bear “endangered” in 2008. However, on a global level, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which decides which animals and plants are endangered, was only willing to call the bear “vulnerable”; this had been the outcome of every evaluation except one since 1982. The prediction that the polar bear would suffer immensely because of a lack of summer ice was always somewhat odd. Polar bears survived through the last interglacial period 130,000 to 115,000 years ago, when it was significantly warmer than it is now. They also survived the first thousands of years of the current interglacial period, when arctic sea ice cover was strongly reduced and there were even long periods of ice-free summers in the central Arctic Ocean. When Polar Bear Specialist Group conservationists began studying the polar bear population in the 1960s, they clearly found that the biggest threat was indiscriminate hunting. At that time, it was thought that the global population of polar bears was around 5,000 to 19,000. Hunting was regulated, and by 1981 the official estimate had increased to almost 23,000. Since then their numbers have been growing overall. The group’s latest official estimate comes from 2019, and is the biggest yet at 26,500. Clearly, this is a conservation success that we should celebrate. Yet, given that the polar bear has been used for so long as an icon of climate change doom, this finding is actually quite embarrassing for campaigners. The result? Polar bears have been quietly dropped from the climate change narrative. The Guardian, a British newspaper that sees its mission as responding to the “climate crisis,” decided in 2019 that it would no longer illustrate as many climate stories with polar bears. Similarly, the federal government’s Arctic Report Card heavily chronicled the decline of polar bears in its 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2014 reports, but now, with official estimates showing that their population is not declining, polar bears no longer get a mention. Nor did Al Gore’s follow-up 2017 film, An Inconvenient Sequel, find room to share the good news about the bear’s survival. The real threat to polar bears isn’t climate change, it’s people. Every year around the Arctic, hunters kill almost nine hundred of them. That’s more than three polar bears out of every one hundred that exist, every year. If we want to protect them, rather than dramatically reducing carbon emissions to try to tweak temperatures over many decades with a clearly uncertain impact on polar bear populations, our first step should be to stop shooting them. In fact, when it comes to species extinction, of both fauna and flora, human behavior is a much larger factor than climate change. The World Wildlife Fund Living Planet Report, published in 2018, finds that exploitation (e.g., overfishing) and habitat loss (converting nature into farms and cities) are responsible for about 70 to 80 percent of all threats to species. When we look at what influences species extinction, climate change is one of the smallest factors: 5 to 12 percent. A 2016 study published in Nature similarly suggests that overexploitation, agriculture, and urban development are the most prevalent threats to species, with climate change the least important of seven factors. This means that prosaic actions would be most helpful: things like regulating fisheries and ensuring more space for nature. So, yes, if we want to save our plants and animals, we need to change our behavior. But not in the ways that climate activists will tell you.