Will Climate Change Wipe Out the Polar Bear?

A capacity crowd jammed the Canadian Embassy's spacious auditorium in Washington on March 25, 2004, to see the US premiere of the Canadian-produced film Climate on the Edge. This 52-minute film was premiering in the 2004 DC Environmental Film Festival.

The DC Environmental Film Festival website provided a capsule summary of change underway in the Arctic, drawing on some of the best-known Canadian and French scientists. Two things riveted much of the audience: a projection that by the middle of this century we are no longer likely to have year-round Arctic sea ice and that the polar bear may some time in this century disappear from the wild. Already climate change and thinning of sea ice have reduced by a couple weeks the time mother polar bears have to feed and build the fat that enables them to sustain themselves and feed their young. It is estimated that there are about 20,000 to 25,000 polar bears in the wild today, about 60% in Canada. The rapid rate of climate change underway in the Arctic could produce many reverberating effects, many scientists believe, including possible changes in ocean and atmospheric circulation patterns. The impact on the polar bear is likely, however, to be much more immediate and appears already to be manifesting itself in a perceptible thinning of the weight of polar bears and in the birth and survival of cubs.