How are polar bears doing 15 years after the IUCN declared them ‘vulnerable’ to extinction?
May 14, 2021
By Paul Homewood
The beginning of this month was the 15th anniversary of the day the IUCN declared polar bears ‘vulnerable’ to extinction because of climate change, the first time such a designation had ever been made. It was based on the opinion of polar bear specialists who examined the vague information available at the time and decided that in 45 years the bears might be in serious trouble. This decision changed the way the IUCN assessed species risk and led to mass confusion for the general public, who falsely assumed polar bear numbers had already declined by a huge amount.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Great post. Thank you.
My 2 cents on this issue
https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/09/29/bear-hunting/
And just what did those plucky polar bears do during the Medieval Warming, not to mention the inter-glacial warmings between the glacial episodes? It is a puzzlement.
Any stats on the number of humans they eat each year?
I’m betting it is more than sharks do.
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Pesky polar bears never read the reports so had no idea what they were supposed to do. So they just carried on being polar bears.
The current sea ice is the sting in the tail of her post. It’s certainly odd to see sea ice actually increasing in May, and at levels that have not been seen for a number of years at the same date.
Polar bears of course produce polar opposite opinions on matters climate. Sea ice in any individual year is hard to predict, depending on the incidence of storms, etc. But you have to say that there is an increasing chance that we will be seeing a clear uptrend in ice cover. Be bullish, not bearish on sea ice! Not good news for Prof Wadhams. But almost certainly good news for the bears.
As far as I can tell, the Russian LNG fleet is confined to shipments to Europe – the Arctic route to the Far East remains firmly shut.
N.B. you may need to click on the chart to get the latest version.
Take a few years data and extrapolate it to 50 years.
The sad thing is avoiding this sort of thing was drilled into scientists and those using data thirty years but now is everywhere. Politicians are too feeble and too ill-educated to understand the problems.