Experts who used the American Endangered Species Act (ESA) to list polar bears as ‘threatened’ in May 2008 were mistaken: sea-ice authorities got their predictions wrong about future ice extent and polar bear specialists erroneously declared that two-thirds of polar bears would disappear if summer sea-ice declines continued unabated. [emphasis, links added]
By 2007, there was even less summer sea ice than computer models of the day had predicted (Stroeve et al. 2007, see red line on the graph below), and in 2012 it dropped to just above 3 mkm2.
Simplified Arctic sea-ice predictions vs. observations up to 2007 by Stroeve et al. 2007 (courtesy Wikimedia). Sea ice hit an even lower extent in 2012 and all years since then have been below these predicted levels.
Updated sea ice predictions published in 2014 by the Stroeve team (see below) went to the other extreme, using totally implausible RCP 8.5 scenarios to predict a virtually ice-free Arctic (< 1 mkm2 ice extent) before 2040, which seem just as likely to be just as wrong as their 2007 attempt (Hausfather and Peters 2020; Pielke and Ritchie 2021; Stroeve et al. 2007, 2014; Swart et al. 2015).
In fact, for 12 years out of the last 15, summer ice extent has been below 5.0 mkm2 (often well below), which polar bear experts had not anticipated would happen until at least 2050 (Amstrup et al. 2006).
In 2012, NOAA sea-ice experts summarized this sea-ice loss as “reduced by nearly 50%” since 1979:
Despite this dramatic decline in sea ice, polar bears are still abundant and thriving because polar bear specialists got it wrong about the bears’ need for this habitat in summer (Crockford 2017, 2019; Crockford and Geist 2018).
Polar bears turned out to be more flexible and resilient than predicted and many subpopulations are better off than before.
The Davis Strait and the Chukchi Sea bears are doing very well: the Barents Sea bears in particular are thriving despite by far the most sea-ice loss of any Arctic region (e.g. Conn et al. 2021; Frey et al. 2022; Haavik 2022; Lippold et al. 2019; Peacock et al. 2013; Regehr et al. 2018; Rode et al. 2014, 2018, 2021, 2022).
This was not what had been predicted when the bears were listed as ‘threatened’ in 2008.
Conclusion: Despite the Arctic warming four times as fast as the rest of the world with rising CO2 levels and almost 50% less summer ice than there was in 1979, polar bears are no closer to extinction than they were 15 years ago, according to the results of field studies.
There is no existential emergency for polar bears or any other Arctic sea mammals due to declining summer sea ice, despite continued messages of doom from remorseless experts.
Dr. Susan Crockford is a zoologist (former adjunct professor at the University of Victoria) specializing in Holocene mammals, including polar bears and walruses. Her latest book is Fallen Icon: Sir David Attenborough and the Walrus Deception. She also wrote the bestselling novel, The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened (Amazon).
Read rest and references at Polar Bear Science
They used Politics not science to list the Polar Bears just like when they did that with the Canadian Lynx they Cheated