Polar Bear Blog - Polar Bears Doing Okay, Somewhere - September 6th, 2006

Ask and ye shall receive. A few days ago, I went on a rant about the fact that nothing but bad news is being published about polar bears and all this bad news was kind of degrading for these big white beasts.

Today is a bit gloomy so I was catching up on computer work this morning, enjoying my coffee and CBC Radio. Their morning show, The Current, featured a documentary about climate change in Nunavut. One of their subjects was polar bear biologist Mitch Taylor who is currently working on year two of a three year mark-recapture study of polar bears in Davis Strait.

During his interview, conducted during his current field research on Baffin Island, he stated that the Davis Strait polar bear population is doing quite well. And despite the best efforts of the interviewer, he managed to stay away from any reference to climate change, simply saying that it is probably a result of the decline in harp seal hunting on the east coast of Canada (another equally controversial topic). Without hunting to curb their population, harp seals are now being found in more numbers and in places where they previously did not frequent.

Wow, a polar bear population doing quite well, that's awesome! In fact, his view, which is not often heard, is that polar bears in Nunavut are generally doing okay and not in drastic decline as the media often reports. And, in fact, scientific evidence seems to support this view.

Of course, we have to be careful here, scientific research in general shows that much of the arctic is warming (more so in the western Canadian arctic and Alaska than the eastern arctic) and that if these trends continue unabated much of the ice platforms in the Canadian arctic will be substantially altered or even disappear. It would be an understatement to say that this would be bad for polar bears.

And this, of course, does not mean that the Beaufort Sea or Western Hudson Bay populations are not declining but it does mean that many of the generalizations heard about polar bears in the media tend towards the alarmist side of things.

But, why does it matter? Why is our current approach to climate change dangerous? Because we have reached the point where if you do not support a doomsday ethos regarding climate change then you become lost in the shuffle. And this shuffle is becoming so big that the real threats, such as consistent lack of corporate responsibility and loss of habitat, are being lost within the shuffle as well.

Related article from CBC interview with Dr. Mitch Taylor