Not so long ago polar bears were a symbol of cold, but these days they are a symbol of warmth. In the past few weeks it has become difficult to open a newspaper or web page without seeing photographs of the beautiful yellowy-white animals leaping, or lying on sea ice in the Arctic, the newly helpless emblem of climate change. The traditional threats to the polar bear — hunting, toxic waste, offshore drilling — have been overshadowed by a new one: the ice around them is melting, and we are to blame.
This new threat is not new, of course — about as new as deforestation. But two things have put the polar bears on top of the vanishing ice, where they pose unwittingly as the latest poster animals in a distinguished and photogenic parade of endangered pandas, gorillas, dolphins and whales. At the end of December, the US Secretary of the Interior revealed the US Fish and Wildlife Service was considering adding the polar bear to its list of threatened species. A three-month consultation process began in January, and the world's Arctic specialists have been making appointments to deliver their expertise. This is a more significant addition to the at-risk list than a rare gazelle or panther: it is an admission, after years of denial, of the existence of global warming. The Bush administration could no longer disavow the effects of climate change if one of its departments had acknowledged such visible and dramatic effects. The polar bear had done what environmentalists could not, and opened a window on a global crisis. Three lawsuits against the White House — from Greenpeace, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Natural Resources Defense Council — were settled at a stroke.
Then, at the beginning of last month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) delivered its damning verdict on rising temperatures and disappearing sea ice, and polar bears had even more reason to feel loved. Six hundred scientists attempted to dismiss all lingering cynicism about global warming, and to pin the blame on its human perpetrators. The reality is now stark and quantifiable, they stated, and in some areas the devastation is irreversible: we are already too late, for example, to avert the effects of the recent rises in sea levels. This news is particularly bad for polar bears, for the earlier melting of spring ice and the later formation of autumn ice has an immediate impact on their ability to feed. In some areas there is evidence that sea ice breaks up three weeks earlier than it did 30 years ago.
Which seems to be good news for polar bear photographers. There is no such thing as an ugly polar bear, and even the less handsome ones appear to have learnt to conceal their claws as they leap the ice floes. Like panting labradors, they always appear to be smiling (no such fillip for the equally threatened but unglamorous walrus).
One photograph in particular has captured the imagination. In a neat piece of marketing, the Canadian Ice Service made available a stunning image to coincide with the IPCC report. Two bears, probably a mother and her cub, are pictured on a spectacular ice block off northern Alaska that might have been modeled by Henry Moore. They appear to be howling against injustice. The drama is clear: this is truly the tip of an iceberg, the bears are desperately stranded as the water swells around them. The first thought among viewers is surely one of pity and concern, but this is to misjudge the situation: polar bears are reasonable swimmers, and certainly climbed upon such sculptures centuries before we climbed into our 4x4s.
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