Ross Clark Ross Clark

Is the demise of polar bears being exaggerated?

(Photo: iStock)

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could debate climate change for five minutes without hearing about polar bears or being subjected to footage of them perched precariously on a melting ice floe? But that is a little too much to expect. Polar bears have become the pin-ups of climate change, the poor creatures who are supposed to jolt us out of thinking about abstract concepts and make us weep that our own selfishness is condemning these magnificent animals to a painful and hungry end.

Needless to say, the Guardian and BBC jumped on the opportunity for more polar bear coverage when a paper appeared in the journal Nature Climate Change, predicting that a high carbon emissions scenario ‘will jeopardise the persistence of all but a few high-Arctic subpopulations by 2100.’ The paper uses a new predictive model by Peter Molnar of the University of Toronto.

A BBC report, as usual, upgraded the claims made in the paper in order to state: ‘Polar bears will be wiped out by the end of the century unless more is done to tackle climate change, a study predicts.’ Except that the paper doesn’t quite say that. The high emissions scenario used in the study isn’t what would happen if the world continued on its current trajectory of fossil fuel use. Instead it uses a worst-case scenario called ‘RCP8.5’ dreamed up in 2014, which envisages that coal-burning will globally increase fivefold between now and 2100. This could be a challenge, because it would mean burning through more coal than, according to some estimates, exists on Earth. In fact, global coal-burning likely peaked in 2013. Even Nature Climate Changes’ mother journal Nature published a think piece in January calling for scientists and campaigners to stop using RCP8.5 as a ‘business as usual’ scenario, on the grounds that it is highly improbable.

But even if we were to jack up carbon emissions to the level envisaged by RCP8.5,

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