by L. Lueken,  Feb 6, 2026 in WUWT

A recent article at Mother Jones, “Something Unexpected Is Happening With Norway’s Polar Bears,” expresses surprise that polar bear populations in Norway are actually getting healthier amid declining sea ice. This is true, though it is not truly “news,” in the sense of something newly discovered, and should not have been unexpected. Previous research, including annual polar bear counts, show that polar bear populations as a whole have increased amid modest global warming.

Mother Jones says the message that polar bears would soon die out due to climate change “infiltrated the public psyche, perhaps more than any other about the scourge of global warming.” This is certainly true, polar bears became the poster children in many advertisements about climate change, and were featured prominently in former Vice-President Al Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth.”

The polar bear extinction theory, however, is another one of the claims from that film that have long since been debunked, as Mother Jones admits, “the reality for these iconic bears is more complicated.”

Mother Jones references two studies showing that polar bears in multiple locations are doing very well. A 2022 study looking at southeastern Greenland and a recent study in Scientific Reports looking at Norway’s polar bear populations, show bears in those locations have actually become healthier, with their population “stable or growing.”

They do emphasize that Hudson Bay bears are struggling, claiming that “researchers have tied melting ice to lower bear survival and a shortage of food, finding that the population has roughly halved since the 1980s.” But overall, “there are 20 distinct polar bear populations around the world, and they all behave slightly differently. Warming is not uniformly killing them.”

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