The path to preservation has been a slippery one. There have been laws prohibiting excessive hunting since the 1970s, and concern about oil drilling began a decade later, but the case for climate change demanded sterner proof. In 2001, the WWF issued a report called Polar Bears at Risk, but it was speculative. According to Stefan Norris, "We had a little trouble getting the scientists to say, "Yes, there is a one-to-one link here" because there hadn't been long enough statistical studies to link everything together. But we're now seeing direct scientific linkages in Canada, Alaska, Norway and Russia."
Norris says the WWF has come under a lot of pressure to predict when polar bears will become extinct, but no one is prepared to be so precise, or so doom-laden. He is increasingly optimistic that an immediate cut in greenhouse gas emissions "may yet turn the ship around."
Others are less certain. Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at Cambridge, has made frequent observations of Arctic sea ice from submarines, recording more than a 40 percent loss in ice thickness in the past 25 years. He is not surprised at predictions that the Arctic summer ice will disappear much earlier than previously envisaged — "perhaps before 2040." Wadhams says he is about to leave Britain due to inadequate funding for his research, despite its influence on government reports. He is one of those scientists who has no difficulty making a direct link between climate change and the fate of the polar bear. "If the pack ice has retreated far from the coast, the bear will start swimming, thinking there is only a small shore lead, as has usually happened in the past. If the distance to the ice is too great, he may tire and drown. This has been observed in bears denning in north Alaska then trying to get out on to the Beaufort Sea pack ice."
After years of hesitancy, there is now a sense of urgency. Tomorrow night in Washington the US Fish and Wildlife Service held the second of its public hearings Thursday on whether the polar bear should be officially regarded as a threatened species. The third and final meeting took place in Alaska yesterday. But it may be too late to be squabbling over semantics. To some extent the fate of the polar bear is already fixed: unless it is able to adapt to spending far greater periods of the year on land, it may not recover from our devastating impact on its Arctic environment.
But not all polar bears are in the Arctic. This month the Horniman Museum in London has a timely display of 32 photographs of polar bears, and they make sober viewing. They are all stuffed, and their habitat is wooden packing crates and storage units: this is a collection of every taxidermists' polar bear in Britain. A chilly vision of the past and, maybe, the future too.
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