Patrick Moore's Polar Bear Myth Debunked

While Patrick Moore’s anti-climate change book sets out to share headlines that he deems doom and gloom, in this self-published chapter, he forgets the premise of his book and jumps in to announce that climate change threats to polar bears are, “a real candidate for the most fake news story of all. There is absolutely no truth to the claim that polar bears are endangered by anything, including climate change.”

It’s important to note that today, most of those headlines about polar bears and climate change are actually recycled narratives drummed up by low-quality, antiscience sources like Ann Coulter, The Epoch Times, The Heartland Institute, Tucker Carlson’s The Daily Caller, The Las Vegas Review-Journal and far-right conspiracy websites such as Alex Jones’ InfoWars, who love the use of the polar bear as their anti-climate science mascot. The reality, however, is that there are changes, declines and threats to countless other species, many of which represent much more significant threats to the planet than polar bears. 

While polar bears are an iconic, beautiful flagship species that symbolize the Arctic as well as the threats of sea ice loss, their extinction’s impact on the globe would be much less than that of the decline of insect populations, or the plankton and coccolithophores which are responsible for so much of the regulation of our climate and marine ecosystems. Climate change is never about polar bears; it is about polar bears and the decline of thousands of other species.

The vast majority of scientific evidence indicates that polar bears are indeed facing significant threats due to climate change. The primary concern is the loss of their sea ice habitat, which they rely on for hunting seals. As the Arctic ice melts, polar bears are forced to travel longer distances to find food, leading to increased energy expenditure and potential population decline.

Moore’s chapter runs fifteen pages (80–94) and makes the case against that evidence about a dozen different ways. Here they are, one at a time, in his own words.

Moore isn’t the only one recycling this story. I’ve traced the same population myth through Jon Miltimore’s article for the Foundation for Economic Education, where the sources behind his infographic fall apart one by one, and through Chris Dorsey’s Forbes column, which borrowed Miltimore’s numbers and was taken down within 48 hours of my rebuttal. Each makes the argument a little differently. None of them survives contact with the data. And for the larger point, that one charismatic animal can’t stand in for the health of a living planet, see Turrialba and the Infrastructure of Everything.

The Bear That Climate Change Built

Moore opens with a point he clearly thinks is a winner: “the only reason polar bears exist at all is precisely because of climate change.” A page later he says it again: “Polar bears would not exist today if it were not for the profound cooling of the climate which began 50 million years ago.”

He’s right. The polar bear is a brown bear that the cold remade: white fur for snow and ice, a body built to live on fat from seals caught off the sea ice. It is an animal made by ice, for ice. Moore has just explained, in his own words, why taking the ice away is a problem, and then spends the next fourteen pages insisting it isn’t.

Four or Five Times What, Exactly?

The heart of the chapter is the number. “In 1973 the circumpolar population of polar bears was estimated to be as low as 6,000 to about 12,000,” Moore writes (p. 83). “Today in 2020, the official estimate is between 22,000 to 31,000 but may be much higher; perhaps four to five times as many bears as 47 years ago.” Two pages later it hardens into fact: the population “has grown to four or five times what it was when the treaty was signed in 1973.” His source for both is Susan Crockford’s State of the Polar Bear Report 2019, published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

Do the arithmetic he didn’t. Take his own numbers at face value: 22,000 divided by 12,000 is less than two. Even the top of today’s range over the top of his 1973 range is about two and a half. The only way to get “four to five times” is to divide today’s count by the very bottom of the 1973 guess. And “22,000 to 31,000 but may be much higher” misreads what that range is: it’s the statistical uncertainty around a single estimate of about 26,000 bears. The range already includes “higher.” That’s what it’s for.

Where “four or five times” comes from

Moore’s 2020 figure is the scientists’ own estimate. His 1973 figure is not. Divide today’s range by the bottom of a guess, made before anyone had surveyed polar bears across the Arctic, and you get “four to five times.” Compare it with what polar bear researchers were actually estimating at the time, and the boom disappears.

The bigger problem is that the 1973 number was never a count. Nobody had surveyed polar bears across the Arctic in the 1960s and early ’70s. The low figures trace to a Soviet extrapolation of roughly 5,000 to 8,000 bears, which Polar Bears International notes “was never accepted by scientists,” and which Steven Amstrup, the longtime U.S. Geological Survey polar bear scientist, called “nothing more than a WAG”—a wild guess. Researchers at the time worked from a world-wide “guestimate” of 20,000 to 25,000, as polar bear biologist Thor Larsen later recalled. The Americans guessed about 18,000, the Canadians 20,000, the Soviets 5,000 (FactCheck.org). You cannot calculate a percentage increase from a starting number nobody measured. Patrick Moore’s claim that polar bears have increased four or five times—the 400 percent he has repeated on social media—has no basis in reality.

My favorite line is on the same page as the number. Moore complains that the public can’t check any of this, because “it is likewise impossible for the public to count all the polar bears around the north pole.” Then he tells you exactly how much they’ve grown.

What Moore gets right, he gets right by accident. Polar bear numbers in some regions really did recover after the 1960s and 1970s, when Canada enforced hunting quotas and the 1973 Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears ended unregulated hunting and trapping across much of the Arctic. Reports of increasing populations of polar bears in those places are a triumph of environmental laws. But unfortunately such increases will be short-lived, as polar bear populations are expected to plummet as sea ice in the Arctic continues to wane. A species protected from bullets is not a species protected from losing its habitat.

One Starving Bear, and the Study in His Own Footnote

Moore spends a page on National Geographic’s 2017 video of a starving bear, captioned “This is what climate change looks like.” He has a point, and it’s worth conceding cleanly: in 2018 the magazine admitted that it “went too far in drawing a definitive connection between climate change and a particular starving polar bear.” Nobody can know why one bear starved. Moore’s explanation—it was probably just old, because “there are no nursing homes for wild, old polar bears”—is as unprovable as the caption he’s mocking.

But look at his footnote 5. It cites a February 2018 National Geographic story titled “Polar Bears Really Are Starving Because of Global Warming, Study Shows.” That story is about a peer-reviewed study in Science that put collars and cameras on nine adult female polar bears on the Beaufort Sea ice during the spring hunting season. Their metabolic rates averaged more than 50 percent higher than earlier estimates, and five of the nine lost body mass, because they weren’t catching enough seals. These weren’t old bears in a nursing home. They were adult females on the ice in spring, the very season Moore insists is fine. He cited the study and wrote about the one bear instead.

Less Ice, More Seals?

Next comes ecology. Thick sea ice blocks sunlight, Moore argues (pp. 84–85), so less ice means more plankton, more fish, more seals and, in the end, more polar bears. “That’s how the food chain works.”

Polar bears do not eat plankton. They eat ringed and bearded seals, and they catch them from the ice—at breathing holes, at haul-outs, and at the snow lairs where ringed seals give birth on the ice. A more productive ocean does nothing for a predator that has lost the platform it hunts from. Moore actually concedes this himself eight pages later: “winter and spring ice is necessary for hunting seals.” Hold that sentence. He’s going to need it.

The Decline That “Did Not Occur”

Moore’s strongest-sounding claim is borrowed from Crockford: U.S. Geological Survey biologists “predicted a massive decline in polar bear numbers in 2007, but it did not occur” (p. 88). Summer ice shrank faster than expected, Crockford’s report says, and the bears are still here.

The 2007 USGS work was a forecast for the middle of this century, not for 2019. And in the places scientists have watched longest and most carefully, the decline is not a forecast; it’s a measurement. The Southern Beaufort Sea population, off Alaska and Canada, fell about 40 percent between 2001 and 2010, with scientists pointing to limited access to seals. Western Hudson Bay, the most-studied polar bear population on Earth, dropped 27 percent between 2016 and 2021 alone, to about 618 bears—roughly half the 1,185 counted in 1987, though that older survey used a different method. Steven Amstrup told FactCheck.org that the populations with the most consistent long-term sampling—the Beaufort Sea and western and southern Hudson Bay—are all declining (FactCheck.org debunked Patrick Moore over his claims about polar bears).

What about Crockford’s healthy bears in the Chukchi Sea and Svalbard? They’re real, and the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group lists those subpopulations as likely stable. Nobody ever predicted every population would fall at once; the high-Arctic populations have always been expected to last longest. And the global figure that seems to have gone up? Amstrup explained that, too: some “old estimates in the poorly documented areas may have been too low.” Counting bears in places nobody had counted before is not the same as the bears multiplying.

There are about 26,000 polar bears alive today, in 20 recognized subpopulations. According to the Polar Bear Specialist Group’s 2023 status report, three—Western Hudson Bay, Southern Hudson Bay and the Southern Beaufort Sea—are likely declining, several are likely stable, and several more don’t have enough data to say. Additionally, polar bear populations are challenging to study accurately due to their remote habitat, but available data suggests that many subpopulations are experiencing declines or are vulnerable. This is why the IUCN lists polar bears as ‘vulnerable’ due to “decline in area of occupancy, extent of occurrence and/or quality of habitat.”

A Map With No Room for Bad News

To prove the bears are “robust and are continuing to grow in numbers,” Moore reprints a map of the subpopulations (Fig. 44, p. 87). Read its legend. The trend categories are “Increasing or likely increasing,” “Stable or likely stable,” and “Presumed stable or increasing.” There is no category for declining. You cannot find a shrinking population on a map that doesn’t allow one.

The caption is better still: “Finally, the scientists who have been predicting the early demise of polar bears have recognized that they are not endangered. Dr. Susan Crockford can take the credit for this for tirelessly speaking and writing the truth.” The scientists have recognized nothing of the kind. The IUCN still lists the species as vulnerable, and the Polar Bear Specialist Group still lists three populations as likely declining.

The ice map on the page before (Fig. 43) is the same trick. It’s a single week of satellite imagery, April 16 to 22, 2019, showing the Arctic covered in winter ice, offered as proof that “there is no indication that winter ice will disappear in the Arctic in the foreseeable future.” Nobody said winter ice would disappear. The problem is how long it’s gone each summer and fall, and that is the one question this chapter never honestly takes on.

There’s No Such Thing as a PhD in Polar Bears

Several of Moore’s fifteen pages are about Susan Crockford: the 2018 BioScience paper by Jeffrey Harvey and thirteen co-authors that criticized her blog, and the University of Victoria’s decision in 2019 not to renew her adjunct appointment. Moore calls it “a vicious smear job.” He also tells us the Polar Bear Specialist Group “operates by ‘consensus,’ meaning you either agree with the group or you get the boot,” and offers no evidence for that at all.

The BioScience authors said Crockford “has neither conducted any original research nor published any articles in the peer-reviewed literature on the effects of sea ice on the population dynamics of polar bears.” Moore prints her reply as if it were a rebuttal. Read it. After listing her papers on dog domestication, thyroid hormones, ringed seals and Bering Sea ice history, she writes: “While it is true that these peer-reviewed papers are not the result of field or laboratory research on polar bears and most do not focus exclusively on polar bears…” That’s the charge, confirmed by the accused.

Then Moore adds a footnote of his own (fn. 18): “there is no such thing as a ‘PhD in polar bears,’” because PhD stands for Doctor of Philosophy, “or in plain English ‘lover of wisdom.’” Nobody asked for a PhD in polar bears. The question was whether she had ever studied them. By Moore’s standard, any doctorate in any subject makes you an authority on everything, which is convenient for a book whose author holds a PhD in ecology and writes chapters on coral, carbon dioxide, nuclear power and walruses.

The double standard is the tell. On page 92 Moore approvingly quotes a Nunavut hunter, from Maclean’s, sneering at scientists who “come here for a week or two and are back down again.” His own star witness, by her own account, has published no peer-reviewed field or laboratory research on polar bears at all.

Too Many Bears in Nunavut

Moore then turns to the Inuit, and to Nunavut’s 2018 draft management plan, which said there were too many bears near some communities (pp. 90–91). Inuit knowledge of polar bears is real and deserves weight; the people who live with these animals see things a survey plane never will. But Moore isn’t honoring that knowledge. He’s using it.

His own exhibit makes the point. The headline he reprints reads: “Scientists say only one population of bears is growing; Inuit say there are nine. Environment Canada says four populations are shrinking; Inuit say none are.” Moore presents the disagreement as if it settles the question in his favor. It doesn’t. More bears around a village is not the same thing as more bears. It is also what you’d expect if longer ice-free seasons are stranding bears on land, near people, for longer each year.

His caption on the same page says traditional knowledge “is based on personal observation, which is the basis of science.” Agreed. So are aerial surveys, mark–recapture studies and satellite collars, which are also personal observation, done systematically over decades, and which Moore dismisses one page later as the work of “scientists seeking never-ending annual grants to perpetuate the fear of extinction.”

Bears Don’t Fast, Says a Travel Blog

The real science arrives on page 92: a 2020 paper in Nature Climate Change by Péter Molnár and colleagues (whose name Moore misspells in his text and spells correctly in his own footnote). It asks a simple question: how many days can polar bears go without eating before cubs stop surviving and adults start dying, and when will the ice-free season get that long?

Moore’s answer is that the question is wrong, because polar bears don’t fast in summer. “Polar bears come ashore in summer, but they do not ‘fast’ unless they are hibernating,” he writes. “The males eat what they can find in the summer including reindeer, small rodents, seabirds, waterfowl, fish, eggs, vegetation (including kelp), and berries.” His source for this, footnote 28, is a blog post on the website of a wildlife tour company.

Here is what happened when scientists actually checked. In 2024, a team led by Anthony Pagano fitted 20 Western Hudson Bay polar bears with GPS camera collars and followed them on land for three weeks of summer, publishing the results in Nature Communications. Some rested; some foraged on exactly the menu Moore lists—berries, birds, caribou. They lost about a kilogram a day on average either way. The land foods gave the foragers some energy, but they burned more getting it than they gained. Only one of the twenty put on weight, and that one found a dead marine mammal on the shore. Polar bears, as one of the researchers put it, “are not grizzly bears wearing white coats.”

Then Moore misstates the paper. “This paper infers that the Arctic will become completely ice-free in the winter and spring at some time between now and 2100,” he writes; only then “would it be impossible for polar bears to hunt seals.” The paper says no such thing. Its subject is the length of the ice-free season—the summer and fall stretch Moore himself says the bears spend ashore. The researchers found that the fasting thresholds for cub recruitment and survival “may already have been exceeded in some subpopulations,” and that under high emissions, declining reproduction and survival “will jeopardize the persistence of all but a few high-Arctic subpopulations by 2100.” Bears don’t need an ice-free winter to starve. They need a summer that outlasts their fat.

Moore even supplies the evidence against himself. His caption on the September 2019 ice map (Fig. 46) says the summer ice “has receded to a similar minimum every year since 2007,” and adds: “This is likely beneficial for the productivity of the Arctic ecosystem.” A dozen straight years of drastically shrunken summer ice, filed under good news.

They Survived the Eemian

Moore closes with the long view. Polar bears “have survived through three previous interglacial periods that were warmer than this one has ever been,” including the Eemian, about 120,000 years ago; the Earth has been in “a net cooling mode for about 6,000 years”; and today’s warming “is possibly just a blip.” He ends: “We know that polar bears are healthy and growing in numbers today, and that this may be due to a reduction in summer sea ice.”

Past warm periods arrived over thousands of years. This one is arriving in decades: the Arctic has warmed nearly four times faster than the rest of the planet since 1979. Surviving a slow warm spell somewhere in the Arctic says very little about surviving a fast one everywhere at once.

The chapter’s own sentences make the case Moore spent fifteen pages arguing against. The polar bear exists because of the cold. It needs ice to hunt seals. By his own caption, the summer ice has stayed far below its old average every year since 2007. And in the places where scientists have watched the bears longest, the bears are declining.

Follow the Science

In the FactCheck article, Amstrup explains, "In the long run, it doesn't really matter what the global population size is now. When sea ice is not available for long enough, polar bears will not persist."

It's essential to rely on peer-reviewed scientific studies and assessments from reputable organizations, such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Polar Bear Specialist Group, and climate science organizations, to get an accurate understanding of the status of polar bear populations and the impact of climate change on their habitat. Not a tour company’s blog, not a single week of satellite imagery, and not a map with no room for bad news.

To learn about the threats of climate change on polar bears, don’t follow Patrick Moore’s recycled narratives — start with the science. This paper is a good summary of the relationship between climate change and polar bears, and the 2020 Nature Climate Change study Moore tried to wave away is the clearest look at what comes next.