In the climate change episode of his 2011 BBC Frozen Planet series ‘On Thin Ice’, Sir David Attenborough told viewers that polar bear mothers and cubs across the Arctic were starving because climate change was melting the sea ice, even as he sat beside a fat, healthy Barents Sea female (see below). [some emphasis, links added]
I wonder how Sir David Attenborough feels now?
Has anyone bothered to tell him that Norwegian biologists have finally admitted that Barents Sea polar bears were actually fat and healthy in 2010 when they assisted filming his BBC documentary?
Or, did Attenborough know even then that this population of polar bears was thriving despite the large loss of sea ice – but let his viewers think otherwise?
The image above is from an expedition Attenborough took to Svalbard (in the western Barents Sea, likely in the spring of 2010), where he sat with a sedated fat sow while discussing starving polar bears and declining population numbers due to the loss of sea ice.
This sequence was filmed in the same area where researchers have recently shown that, by 2005 at least, bears were in much better condition than in 1995, even though local sea ice had declined dramatically (Aars et al. 2026).
What this also means is that the bears were being handled and measured, so the biologists must have known that the bears in 2010 were not dying of starvation but were actually doing better than they had been in 1995 – even though the sea ice had markedly deteriorated.
Below is a graph from the Norwegian monitoring site that posts its Svalbard polar bear data every year. It shows the body condition of adult male bears right up to 2025 – seven years beyond the cut-off date for the 2026 Aars study.
The statement below about the population trend vs. sea ice is from the same site:
Fat bears mean the population is healthy and thriving, not struggling to exist.
I suggest one of two options: either Norwegian researchers lied to Attenborough about the status of the Barents Sea bears or they went along with his lie that these bears were starving just like “most of the bears” across the Arctic – because they were all invested in the narrative that sea ice loss blamed on human-caused climate change would eventually drive polar bears to near extinction (Crockford 2019).
I guess we won’t know unless someone asks him.
I’ve written about Attenborough’s Arctic Betrayal before, of course, which reached egregious levels in 2019 when he falsely told the world that Russian walrus had hurled themselves off tall cliffs because of climate change – when it was actually because bears were stalking them.
There was a video (below), and then a book (Fallen Icon: Sir David Attenborough and the Walrus Deception).
Attenborough’s Arctic Betrayal video:
Top photo by Hans-Jurgen Mager on Unsplash.
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 the action thriller Don’t Run. She also wrote Polar Bear Evolution: A Model for How New Species Arise and the bestselling novel The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened, as well as Fallen Icon: Sir David Attenborough and the Walrus Deception (Amazon).
Read more at Polar Bear Science
