It didn’t take long for the world to notice, and soon the research was embraced by the media, conservation groups and climate deniers, he said, turning the polar bear into an icon of a warming world, for better or worse. “Polar bears were just an early harbinger of change,” Derocher said. This situation was understandable. Polar bears are the kind of furry mammal we love to love — from a distance. In the 1990s, scientists published peer-reviewed science that demonstrated the link between polar bear health and climate change. (Submitted by Andrew Derocher) But as a symbol in the fight against climate change, there are downsides, such as, as Derocher notes, the problem being characterized as “distant and remote” for Canadians living outside the Arctic. Inuit hunters have been vilified and those who want to challenge climate science have taken aim at the often simplistic messages of endangered polar bears. Now, with extreme weather occurring across the country — in more frequent and severe wildfires, droughts and floods — Derocher said climate change is becoming a more immediate issue for many people, sometimes literally in their own backyards, that doesn’t need to be to make it distant. mascot. What on Earth26:26 How polar bears became a climate icon, for better or worse. Producer Molly Segal’s feature-length documentary about how polar bears shaped the climate debate and how climate change is shaping them.
The rise of the polar bear to fame
For Derocher, how polar bears became an “accidental image of climate change” goes back a few decades. It started by tracking the animal to support the polar bear hunt – looking at their numbers, health and survival. Meanwhile, other scientists were collecting data on sea ice, but no one had put the two together. In 1993, Derocher and another scientist, Ian Stirling, authored a paper titled “Potential Effects of Climate Warming on Polar Bears.” WATCHES | Covering 1999 Polar Bears on Disappearing Ice:
Climate change threatens polar bears
The disappearance of the ice in Hudson Bay in 1999 means that polar bears cannot build up their fat reserves and feed their cubs. In the Arctic, the oceans freeze at the surface, forming sea ice, which plays a role in keeping the climate cool by reflecting sunlight away. Ice is also part of the ecosystem, holding nutrients and contributing to the entire food web when it melts, from phytoplankton to large animals like seals, which polar bears eat. Some sea ice melts in the summer and reforms in the winter, but data has begun to show that the trend in sea ice is shifting, and with it, polar bear habitats are based. When Derocher and his colleagues reassessed the link between polar bears and climate change in 2004, that paper “sparked interest” in the media, Derocher said. Biologist Andrew Derocher captures polar bears in Hudson Bay, monitoring the health of the population. (Submitted by Andrew Derocher) The news media were not alone. In 2006, former Vice President Al Gore featured an animated vignette of a polar bear drowning in his documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Conservation groups and climate deniers had also taken note. “It became kind of bad for people and those interest groups that didn’t want to see climate action, which is to control greenhouse gas emissions,” DeRosser said. “There are some pros and cons to polar bears as a symbol of climate change.”
An image is only part of the story
In 2017, a conservation group released a video of an emaciated polar bear that went viral. In one version of the video, the text reads: “This is what climate change looks like.” Conservation group SeaLegacy has released video of an emaciated polar bear near Baffin Island in Nunavut. They said climate change drove the animal to starvation, but people in Nunavut said it looked more like a sick, old or injured animal. (SeaLegacy/Caters News) The story that emerged was more nuanced, and people in Nunavut warned that the video showed a polar bear at the end of its life, rather than the dramatic picture of global warming suggested. For Derrick Pottle, an Inuk hunter and guide in Nunatsiavut, northern Labrador, the polar bear, or nanuq in Inuktitut, paints a very different picture than an animal vulnerable to climate change. It is “perhaps the most powerful animal or mammal we have in our homelands,” he said. “We understand his strength, his intelligence … his will to live and it represents who we are.” For Pottle, the polar bear as a climate icon has had a “negative impact on the way we live here in the north”. Now in his sixties, he has collected ten polar bears in his lifetime. “You’re so happy and so proud to bring back a food and a source of meat and a chance to make a few dollars for your family or put clothes on your back,” he said. Derrick Pottle is based in Rigolet, Nunatsiavut, Northern Labrador. It has seen changes in sea ice over the decades – freezing later, thawing earlier and staying slushy. (Submitted by Derrick Pottle) Polar bear harvesters used to earn up to $20,000 for a skin, Pottle said, but now he’d be lucky to get $5,000. He said activists fighting against polar bear hunting are making things increasingly difficult. In Nunatsiavut, twelve polar bears can be legally hunted each year. In 1973, Arctic countries from around the world signed an agreement to conserve polar bears internationally, and in 2008 the United States listed the polar bear as an endangered species. Canada listed the animal as a species of special concern in 2011. For Pottle there are more urgent signs of climate change than polar bears, such as the effects on hunting and trapping. Water that used to freeze until November in the 1980s now freezes in early January and melts in April rather than May or June, he said. “Once we could read the ice and understand how it formed,” he said. “Half the time you don’t know what you’re getting into.” While melting sea ice is changing the polar bear’s environment and will continue to do so, for now, some subpopulations of the animal have recovered, and Pottle worries that his experience as a hunter and guide is not being taken seriously.
Subpopulations provide a more nuanced picture
Biologist Andrew Derocher says polar bear health is “a complex issue”. “We have more [polar] bears now than we did in 1973,” he said. “The challenge is that we also have very good information that at least three polar bear populations have declined due to sea ice loss, and we suspect that this pattern is only going to increase.” The polar bear’s habitat includes sea ice, which has changed across the Arctic due to human-caused global warming. (Submitted by Andrew Derocher) These complexities have been exploited by people who support the scientific consensus that global warming is real and caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels. “Climate change deniers have tried to get in touch with polar bears because I think if they felt they could turn the tide of public opinion on this connection between sea ice loss and polar bears, then the whole issue of climate change would play out somehow,” Derocher said. . There are 19 subpopulations of polar bears living around the world in the Arctic, with no one-size-fits-all picture of how they’re responding to climate change, Derocher said. “Every polar bear in the world has experienced a change in their access to sea ice over the last 30 years,” said Jasmine Ware, a polar bear biologist with the Government of Nunavut, which plays a role in managing more than half of the world’s polar bear population. . Biologist Jasmine Ware photographed while monitoring the subpopulation of polar bears in Davis Strait in 2018. (Markus Dyck) Ware said how these changes in sea ice affect polar bears depends on where they live in the Arctic. Churchill, Man., near where Andrew Derocher is doing his research, is the southernmost part of the polar bear’s range. As global warming continues to accelerate, “we’re seeing more and more bears going into landfills … from James Bay to high Arctic communities, and that’s a recipe for trouble,” DeRosser said.
Coexistence is the key
In July, a report authored by Derocher warned that human food is an “emerging threat” to polar bears, stressing the need to secure things like garbage to keep polar bears away and people safe. Over the decades, Churchill, Man., has taken steps to improve safety by protecting trash and creating a warning system, setting an example for other Arctic communities. WATCHES | Hungry bears cause trouble for Churchill in 1983:
Polar bear problems in 1983
The town of Churchill, Man. faces a dangerous polar bear situation when the Hudson Bay ice does not freeze until late November. Each year, when the ice melts, some polar bears go ashore and follow the western coast of Hudson Bay through the community of Arviat, Nunavut, which sees the largest number of human-polar bear interactions in the territory, Ware said. . “There is a shift,” Ware said. “A bear could be encountered at any time. [There is] a very, very strong understanding that this is a dangerous experience and it can be fatal.” In 2018, Aaron Gibbons died protecting his children from a polar bear while out hunting. Since 2010, monitors have been patrolling Arviat to keep polar bears away from the community. When Leo Ikakhik gets a call about a bear, he never knows what to expect when it shows up. “It’s always a guessing game,” he said. “I wonder if the bear will run or if the bear will just stand…
