Polar bears


Are they really threatened?
Apparently polar bears aren't as threatened as we've been told.

Then, wealthy tourists discovered the thrill of nature-watching breaks and Churchill, home to the most easily accessible polar bear population, became a fashionable - and newly prosperous - adventure holiday destination.

Although the town is still accessible only by train or light aircraft, its guesthouses are packed during late summer and autumn, when the vast ice-sheet over the bay melts, forcing around 1,000 bears to lollop around for months on the shore.

Lately, however, it is not only polar bear watchers who come flocking.

With the clamour over global warming, it has become a magnet for an army of environmentalists and climatologists who have given Churchill an air of impending doom.

The Arctic ice-cap is shrinking fast, is their message, and as it disappears, so too will the polar bears.
Today, the polar bear population may hover healthily around 25,000 (they live in Russia, Alaska, Greenland, Norway and Canada).

Yet, we are repeatedly warned, if the planet continues to overheat at the present rate, within four decades our biggest carnivore will be extinct, starved to death as its natural hunting grounds disappear.

"Come up and see them while you still can," is the gist of their depressing refrain.

To some Churchill residents, who base their opinions on personal experience rather than fancy charts and computer models, this is so much nonsense put about by scaremongers for their own dubious ends.

When outsiders question whether anyone would be so cynical, they are reminded of that now-famous photograph of a polar bear which appears to be teetering precariously on an Arctic ice-floe, melting faster than ice-cream, in the depths of winter.

For a while, it became a powerful symbol of the perils of global warming - until it was revealed to have been taken three years ago and during the height of summer.

Yes, it's anecdotal evidence, but I have long suspected that eco-tourism and the global warming crowd may have at least exaggerated the crisis. It's rapidly getting to the point where I want to see the evidence debated before I accept anyone's word on an ecological crisis.

And if one side says that the debate is over, that is the side I will not trust.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Sat - December 8, 2007 at 12:21 PM  Tag


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