Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
When environmentalists first claimed that polar bears would be extinct by 2050, it seemed like a fairly safe bet. The claim made in 2007 was pegged to 43 years away. Practically an eternity. By 2050, we’d have flying cars, colonies on Mars and Martian environmentalists protesting them.
Media headlines blared “Most Polar Bears Extinct by 2050.” Public school kids were barraged with crying polar bear propaganda and told to recycle or all the cute white bears would die.
But nearly twenty years later, global warming has a major problem. The bears are still here.
With another 25 years on the clock, you would think that there would be signs that a major species is disappearing. Instead the 22,000 polar bear population from 2007 is now estimated at 26,000. The numbers for polar bear extinction, like Gaza genocide, are going the wrong way.
Population numbers for those facing extinction or genocide are generally supposed to go down.
‘Climate experts’, a class of people whose accuracy rate is up there with fortune tellers, psychics and the mainstream media, have responded to the persistent refusal of the polar bears to die by either urging people to stop paying attention to the polar bears or to the Eskimos who claim that they’re seeing a lot of polar bears because the polar bears really are disappearing.
“This creates a lot of confusion working with Inuit hunters in Canada who say they’re seeing lots of bears. I say, ‘Yes, because you live in an area where there are lots of bears but there are other places where they are not doing as well,” a professor explained to them.
Since trying to convince people that 26,000 is actually less than 22,000 or that it doesn’t matter how many polar bears they’re seeing because the other polar bears, somewhere else where you can’t see them, are going extinct, isn’t working, here’s the expert’s Plan B (for bear.)
“Polar bears are rewiring their own genetics to survive a warming climate,” the latest media headlines proclaim. That’s pretty incredible for a species that can’t even use microscopes. It’s also pretty incredible from a report by a lead author (She/Her) who got her PhD in 2021 and claims to have “vast expertise”. I’d believe the polar bears using microscopes first.
But according to ‘experts’ from the University of East Anglia in Britain, they found polar bears living in the ‘warmer’ parts of Greenland who are doing just fine. Because animals adapt. The entire existence of life on earth is one extended process of adapting to different environments.
However, according to the hysterical press release, polar bears ‘have been forced to “rewrite their own DNA” as “a desperate survival mechanism against melting sea ice.” Coming in 2026 from Netflix, the tale of desperate transgender polar bear geneticists working against time to rewire their DNA to enable them to survive in warmer climates so they can attend UN conferences.
Bears don’t rewrite their DNA, but ‘experts’ do rewrite their narratives all the time.
Polar bears aren’t going anywhere, but the narrative that they’re doomed to die in 25 years is facing extinction. And at some point, climate experts will have to either kill the polar bears or admit they’re not going extinct. Claiming that polar bears are desperately ‘rewriting their DNA’ in the face of global warming is a useful exit strategy to explain why the bears are still here.
Polar bears, like other animals, adapt, but there’s also not much for them to adapt to.
The ice that was supposed to melt and doom them all is also stubbornly refusing to melt. And the only actual threat to the polar bear population is perversely the perception of their extinction. Polar bear populations rose after hunting restrictions came into place. Canadian Eskimos continue to hunt polar bears while regularly arguing with environmentalists about how many of them there are (polar bears, not environmentalists, we know there are far too many of those.)
Polar bears are still allowed to hunt people and they’re among the few animals that still do.
The bears are adapting not to rising temperatures but to a different human environment. As polar bear numbers continue to increase, with less fear of hunting, they are going to do what every peak predator with a growing population does and are expanding their hunting grounds.
The constant push and pull between environmentalists, Eskimos and other ‘indigenous’ peoples who were formerly indigenous to Siberia before they crossed the Bering Strait, governments and assorted bodies set up to mediate between them over the status of the polar bears, the seals and other animals that the polar bears eat has made their environment humanly complicated.
The polar ice has remained stable, what has not remained stable is the politicisation of the polar bears and everything around them. The polar bears are as unaware of the politics of their existence as they are of their DNA, but they still react to the human environmental factors, not rising temperatures or melting ice, but whether they’re hunted and the availability of their prey.
There are more people currently employed in studying, litigating, and exploiting polar bears than there are polar bears. In a natural environment, equilibrium would be restored by having the polar bears eat them. Instead, toxic masculinity and whiteness has been put at the service of protecting experts who love polar bears from the polar bears who would love to eat them.
So the polar bears are growing and expanding to get away from them and find new prey.
The experts who insisted that polar bears were a doomed population, sitting mournfully on melting floes and watching the warm tide roll in before they drown (because climate experts, have never seen an actual polar bear and are convinced that they can’t swim) have a problem.
Like a bad 70s disco song, the polar bears are persistently staying alive. They’re not victims of global warming, another bad idea from the 70s, and they’re not going to die out by 2050.
If environmentalists want polar bears to be extinct by 2025, they’re going to have to kill them. And considering the amount of funding and grant money at stake, I wouldn’t put it past them.
The polar bears aren’t threatened by the climate, they are threatened by the climate experts.
