Thread by @mattwridley

My @spectator article on polar bears>

The BBC reported terrible news last week about polar bears: they are thriving. This is very annoying of them as it goes against the interests of environmental activists, polar bears being the clickbait of climate change cataclysm.

In Svalbard bear numbers have been steadily increasing. Surprisingly, they are also getting fatter, despite a decline in sea-ice cover in the area, especially in autumn. Even more unexpectedly, the bears are fattest in or after years when the sea ice retreats farthest.

The increasing numbers are caused by the fact that bears were hunted for their skins until 1973, after which they were a protected species. But this cannot explain the increase in their girth.

Bears that stick to Svalbard’s coasts may be gorging on whale and walrus carcasses, walrus numbers having rocketed from around 100 in the 1970s to about 4,000 today.

Ringed seals, the animals’ main prey in spring and early summer (when bears can eat enough to survive for months), are thriving. Ringed seals prefer thin seasonal ice to thick permanent ice through which they cannot make breathing holes.

An inconvenient truth is that we now know Arctic seas are more productive when the ice melts more. Sunlight fuels blooms of plankton, which feed fish, which feed seals, which feed bears.

Lots of evidence now suggests that the Arctic Ocean was nearly or completely ice-free in late summer and early autumn in the early millennia of the current interglacial period, around 9,000-6,000 years ago.

Polar bears had to take refuge on land and fast during the ice-free autumn months – just as they do today in Hudson Bay and much of Svalbard.

Despite being hounded out of the University of Victoria in British Columbia in 2019 for her views on polar bears, @sjc_pbs has continued to argue that more seasonal melting of sea ice means more and fatter bears. Turns out she was right.

spectator.com/article/the-in…