Polar bears, climate change, and the right to be cold

Today, February 27, is International Polar Bear Day, and since polar bears are my very favourite wild animals (along with tigers, whose special day is in July), celebrate them I will! (I acknowledge that today is also National Cupcake Day, but I’ll leave that celebration to others.)

My husband and I (and my brother and SIL) were privileged beyond all measure to have been able to spend some quality time with polar bears in their natural habitat back in August 2015. We were on a National Geographic ship in the Canadian High Arctic, having spent hours at the ship railings with our binoculars, trying to spot just one elusive polar bear on the expanse of sea ice off in the distance. It’s the Arctic version of looking for elusive wildlife in the savannahs in Africa. Patience is indeed a virtue.  We had given up for the afternoon and were heading for the dining hall when a voice came over the ship’s intercom, “Dinner will be postponed for the time being.  Polar bears have been spotted in the distance and we’re going to try to drift closer to the edge of the sea ice to get a better glimpse.”

Needless to say, everyone immediately tore back to the ship’s railings, staying impressively quiet in the process so as not to spook any possible bears.

Any of you who have seen pretty well any animal in its own habitat, even close to home, will know how magical it is.  We all stood there at the railings completely mesmerized by the awesomeness of this mother bear with her two big cubs and another bear in the distance, all on the sea ice whose edge our ship had nestled up to. We stood and watched them, enchanted, for nearly 30 minutes.

Yet, as we all know, man-made climate change is imperilling their habitat. They feed off the sea ice, hunting for seals. In fact, although few of us think of polar bears as marine animals, that is precisely how they are categorized. Polar bears are marine mammals, just like whales. But without sufficient sea ice for a sufficient period of time each year, polar bear populations are already struggling. The marginally good news for polar bears is that they have some capacity to adapt to new food sources. Of course, this will mean increasingly crossing the paths of humans, and this will not make either the bears or the humans happy. Also, not all Arctic animals will be able to adapt at all.

Let’s take a look at what man-made climate change means for the Arctic region of Planet Earth. First of all, let’s remind ourselves that the people and animals who live in the Arctic did not contribute to the climate change that has been affecting them more severely than anywhere else. The rotation of the earth creates wind patterns that send our polluted air to the poles. Pollution transported from the “south” (from our fossil-fuel-based way of life) has caused significant warming in the Arctic region over the past 40+ years.

Dark particles of pollution from many hundreds of kms away fall to the snow and ice below. These dark particles in the Arctic snow and ice absorb sunlight whereas the pre-pollution pristine white snow and ice that defined the Arctic environment for millennia reflected sunlight. As the atmosphere warms and the sea ice (and Greenland ice sheet) recedes and doesn’t return to its previous extents, the larger expanse of open sea likewise absorbs increasing amounts of heat from the sun’s radiation, radiation that used to be reflected by a reliable cover of ice.

The result we face now is that the Arctic region has been warming nearly 4 times faster than the rest of the world for the past 40+ years. Of course this has been out of sight, out of mind for almost all of us – until recently – but not for the people and animals who live there. Aside from polar bears, walruses, narwals, muskox, and other mammals, birds and marine wildlife, 4 million people live in the Arctic, including 400,000 Indigenous Peoples who have lived there for millennia. Some people still live on the land, but most live in towns and cities right across the Arctic, in Canada, Alaska, Russia, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, and Greenland (Denmark).

Aside from warming oceans and increased melting of sea ice, icebergs, and the Greenland icesheet, the warming of the Arctic has had a dramatic impact on permafrost. Permafrost is frozen soil, soil that has been frozen for as long as people can remember.  Houses are built on permafrost, roads are built on permafrost, pipelines are laid on permafrost, and it all worked fine.  Until now, now it’s melting … after thousands of years. Houses and roads are sinking. Pipelines and other infrastructure are at risk. The entire environment in which people live has become unstable. Additionally, and frightening for the entire planet, when permafrost melts, it releases trapped gases like methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, gases that add significantly more to the warming of our planet. A vicious cycle. Talk about having created a monster.

When we were in the Arctic in 2015 I purchased a book that had just been published, entitled The Right to be Cold. Written by Sheila Watt-Cloutier, a Canadian Inuk human rights and environmental activist and former international chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, this book provides a compelling story of the loss of culture and way of life for Indigenous and non-Indigenous northerners around the world, all because of fossil-fuel-based industrialization far south of their homeland.

Perhaps the most powerful question for us all to consider is the one written on the book’s back cover: If we can’t save the frozen Arctic, how can we save the rest of the world?

On International Polar Bear Day, the polar bears are asking the same question.

(Photo by World Wildlife Federation)

The polar bear has become something of a poster child for the impacts of climate change. On this, International Polar Bear Day, let’s commit to changing the plans of achieving net zero from talk to action.

If we don’t, we’re failing the polar bears. If we don’t, we’re failing all the people and animals who call the Arctic region home. If we don’t, we’re failing the only planet we have

And in doing so, we are dooming all of us to increasing climate catastrophes, food and water shortages for millions, and significant parts of heavily-populated land becoming permanently under water.

Save the polars bear. Save our planet!