Why Aren’t Polar Bears Going Extinct Like the “Experts” Said They Would?
Climate cultists are blaming accelerated evolution, which is possibly the most laughable explanation they could have offered.
Back in 2019. I covered a book entitled “The Polar Bear Catastrophe that Never Happened” by Dr. Susan Crockford. The University of Victoria professor analyzed the latest data and reviewed the questionable values in official estimates, concluding that polar bears are thriving.
Subsequently, she was fired from her position at the university.
However, it didn’t stop what she wrote from being true, as I demonstrated again in 2024.
Polar bear population increasing
But doesn’t fit climate narrative, so info cancelled
Reality:
Polar bears were intensely hunted
1976 world banned much hunting
Polar bear population recovered and now at its highest in 6 decades
🧵 + refs below pic.twitter.com/8HWj3P0GJf
— Bjorn Lomborg (@BjornLomborg) November 27, 2022
Climate cultists are scrambling for explanations to explain the increasing numbers.
Hilariously, they have alighted upon accelerated evolution to explain what there are so many fat and happy polar bears in 2025…with the demise of the entire species slated for 2050.
A new study from the University of East Anglia suggests that polar bears are undergoing rapid genetic changes, and scientists believe it’s due to the impacts of climate change.
“It’s kind of the first time that we believe we’ve seen a mammal system such as the polar bear, where temperature has been the lead cause, and environmental stress at increased temperature, is impacting their DNA, their genome in real time,” Alice Godden, the lead author of the study, told ABC News.
Researchers say the discovery of these genetic changes offers a glimmer of hope for the bears’ survival, as two-thirds of the world’s population could perish by 2050.
The University of East Anglia (UEA) is one of the core global hubs for climate nonsense and is perhaps best known for its Climatic Research Unit (CRU). According to their report, the researchers compared blood samples from polar bears in northeastern and southeastern Greenland and examined gene activity using RNA sequencing, focusing on “jumping genes” (transposons) that can alter how other genes function.
Lead researcher Dr Alice Godden, from UEA’s School of Biological Sciences, asserts that her team’s findings offer some “hope” for the polar bears but efforts to limit global temperature increases must continue.
“DNA is the instruction book inside every cell, guiding how an organism grows and develops,” she said. “By comparing these bears’ active genes to local climate data, we found that rising temperatures appear to be driving a dramatic increase in the activity of jumping genes within the southeastern Greenland bears’ DNA.
“Essentially this means that different groups of bears are having different sections of their DNA changed at different rates, and this activity seems linked to their specific environment and climate.
“This finding is important because it shows, for the first time, that a unique group of polar bears in the warmest part of Greenland are using ‘jumping genes’ to rapidly rewrite their own DNA, which might be a desperate survival mechanism against melting sea ice.”
You know what else is accelerating? The level of skepticism at climate cult research.
Pathetic.
This still won’t convince me to give any money to whatever invented crisis you people dream up.
Knock it off! pic.twitter.com/Rt4nWaL1ki
— Suzie-Q Cthulu Kitty (@sioxielegend) December 12, 2025
University of East Anglia says polar bear DNA is changing due to “a climate change event.” 25 years ago, the University of East Anglia’s Dr David Viner stupidly said “our children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” thus ruining the University’s climate credibility
— Lembit Öpik (@lembitopik) December 12, 2025
They adapted to survive the Arctic in the first place.
— Eaten by Cannibals (@DavidKr81911782) December 12, 2025
Beyond the skepticism, there is an underlying assumption in the report that polar bear populations adapting to warmer weather is a bad thing. I disagree with that premise.
Furthermore, this study also shows that genetics and evolution continue to work as they have always done.
As a reminder, based on current evolutionary theory, when the environment favors certain heritable traits, individuals with DNA variants that confer those traits tend to survive and leave more offspring. Over many generations, the frequency of those advantageous gene variants (alleles) increases, so the population’s genetic makeup shifts and traits become better suited to the environment.
As a demonstration of the power of evolution and the history of species extinction events, I would like to introduce you to Arctotherium angustidens, the largest prehistoric bear which lived in South America between 2 million and 500,000 years ago. It was a veritable giant when compared with polar bears today.
Based on measurements of the fossil’s leg bones and equations used to estimate body mass, the researchers say the bear would have stood at least 11 feet tall (3.3 meters) on its hind legs and would have weighed between 3,500 and 3,855 pounds (1,588 and 1,749 kilograms). In comparison, “the largest record for a living bear is a male polar bear that obtained the weight of about 2,200 pounds (1,000 kg),” said researcher Leopoldo Soibelzon, a paleontologist at the La Plata Museum.
“During its time, this bear was the largest and most powerful land predator in the world,” researcher Blaine Schubert, a paleontologist at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, told LiveScience. “It’s always extremely exciting to find something that’s the largest of its class — and not just a little bit larger, but quite a bit larger.”
Let me introduce you to my little friend….Arctotherium angustidens, a South American mega-bear that went extinct long before SUVs were invented. pic.twitter.com/bVRujtNA12
— Leslie Eastman ☥ (@Mutnodjmet) December 12, 2025
It became extinct due to increasing competition from other large carnivores (such as big cats and canids) as the South American carnivore population became more diverse after the Great American Biotic Interchange (when the land bridge between the 2 Americans arose during the late Cenozoic around 3–2.5 million years ago).
In other words, cats and dogs evolved to out-compete these bears. So, in using “evolution” to explain what climate change is doing to polar bear genetics, the climate cultists have reached for the most laughable explanation they could give.
Additionally, I predict that there will be even more polar bears in 2050.
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Comments
I’m highly skeptical of this “gene jumping” nonsense.
It’s much, much, MUCH more likely that polar bears with a higher temperature tolerance are breeding more successfully than other sub-populations and thus the gene pool is changing generationally through typically selection, not through mutagenicity.
And yet, I’d like to see proof that the average temperature in Greenland is actually increasing.
The evidence for significant local warming in Greenland seems unmistakable. I don’t think anyone disputes it. The ice loss alone, over the last 30 years, is hard to account for without it. But it’s not evidence of a global phenomenon.
As the ice recedes in areas, previous human locations… mining and such are uncovered. It was warmer in the past without industrialization. I am looking at a few pics sent to me of two polar bears on the coast of the North Slope taken by a guy I know who works on the Slope. Maybe we can convince a few global warming advocates to go pet them. (spoiler alert: polar bears are the only bear that will actively hunt humans.)
Indeed. When Greenland was settled, it was green, almost as advertised. That was during the Medieval Warm Period, before the Little Ice Age set in.
Milhouse, while I have no doubt Greenland at some point was more green than currently, thats not the way Ive read it got that moniker.
I’ve heard it described as “marketing”.
Supposedly, despite Iceland being greener than Greenland, they were named that way because settlers at Iceland wanted to discourage more settlers – while settlers at Greenland wanted to encourage more settlers to come.
Bob, there was some marketing involved, but it wasn’t completely marketing . As I wrote, it was almost as green as advertised.
Loss of the ice sheet mass is being driven by periodic influxes of warmer water from the south. This works it’s way under the edges of the sheet and causes ice berg calving and accelerated movement of sea terminated glaciers. The ice sheet away from the shore appears stable. It’s unknown at this time if the water currents will increase, decrease or remain steady.
There is a reason the Viking’s names it Greenland. It was a semi-temperate climate zone. Similar to Scandinavia. The colony was wiped out/abandoned after it reverted to a cold climate that produced more snow and glacial accumulations.
“Gene Jumping” is a thing and has been known for 50 years. The problem is that it occurs in all mammals including humans. In most cases it causes either disease or the “jumping genes” remain silent through various methods and do nothing. That polar bears have them is not news and there could be multiple reasons they have an elevated propensity such as species bias. The authors are throwing out a theory with zero evidence and non science people/ non biologists including climate cultists are seizing on it without any understanding of the underlying science.
Here is a short version of the mechanism and what is going on https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/transposons-the-jumping-genes-518/
This is a common tactic by enviroloons and warmerers.
They often use it to prevent hunting and fishing
“This population of killer whales looks the same as all the other whales but is genetically different to ones 50 miles away , so we need to halt all fishing for a 700 mile radius”
I’m now rooting for muslims to complete their conquest of the UK so shrill scolds like Alice Godden can disappear into purdah and never be seen or heard from again,
Even supposing this to be true, so what? If anything, surely it’s a good thing, and yet another reason not to panic about glowball warmening and cripple ourselves in order to prevent it.
Assuming the entire glowball warmening theory to be true, if we don’t cripple our economies, and we let them grow as they should without interference, then by the time it becomes a genuine problem we will have both the technology and the resources to adapt to it. If the seas rise we can build dikes, or we can relocate everyone on the shore, or we can come up with other solutions that seem beyond us today. And if (as seems likely) it doesn’t happen, we’ll have all those resources to do other things with.
Whereas if we do cripple our economies now, in the long term we won’t have those resources to do anything with. If the warmening happens anyway, we lose. And if it doesn’t happen we lose even more.
Why bother? If they are magically adapting like hell to… whatever the warmenists claim they are adapting to, they’ll adapt just as well to actual globular warmening that was supposed to kill them.
Climate hysteria disposed of.
Most species that still exist are pretty resilient. At this point we’ve had multiple mass extinction events, much back and forth climate change from very warm to very cold. Polar bears showing adaptive traits should not be surprising and isn’t alarming. It demonstrates that their species, like ours, are survivors, tough to wipe out.
I don’t think anyone disputes some warming is happening it is the man made part. It happened in 10 to 20 thousand yr cycles in the past long before we even discovered fire. When they can explain how the same warming happened before humans even walked the earth but now suddenly it is all our fault then I might believe them. That said I think we should always be looking for a way to reduce pollution just because it is the right thing to do.
It’s in the fine print of the Coca-Cola commercial contract
They’re doing better than all the other bears, because…
…it’s OK to be white.
OK, fine. The Polars are evolving and doing fine.
But, what about the Mercator bears? Or, the Cartesian bears? (Poor Kim…!)
Al Gore hardest hit.
Not hard enough!!!!!
(beat me to it…!)
So the ice sheet in Greenland is melting? So what? Greenland has been completely ice free on numerous occasions in the past and will be again in the future. Think of all that new farmland and mineral extraction being created.
Climate, throughout the planet, has been changing ever since climate has existed, and there is nothing any human, or group of humans can do to make it stop, slow down and most of all make the climate change in a way that Al Gore, finds beneficial
Occam’s razor. The white bears are flourishing because there are no black bears to prey on them.
A good thing, too. They move in and the property values drop.
Incontrovertible evidence of white privilege.
Circumpolar environments are extremely challenging, necessitating constant adaptation by the species living there. This transposon nonsense has undoubtedly been going on since the first proto-polar bear evolved its reflective fur color hundreds of millennia ago.
“Climate” “scientists” have just discovered it — huzzah! — and of course they’re blaming it on 20th-century capitalism.
Climate activists claim that climate change happens in “cycles” but long term they are still supported by “science”?
Biden green new deal was trillion dollar grift.
“Experts”. Yeah, right.
You are all messed up. We know the world is a static system that never changes. So, all species are static. Even the Sun has a constant, never changing output. The ONLY variable is humans, we we must exterminate ourselves.
BTW “models” aren’t science. Especially when you jigger the data to try and get the right answer. Even when that doesn’t work very well.
We are still in recovery from the last ice-age.
I spent two weeks in the Canadian Arctic last year in a remote hospital with the Inuit, They think the concept that polar bears are endangered is ridiculous.