Nazzo fast, Guido.
This aerial shot of six fat polar bears lolling around on a sand beach on the coast of the Southern Beaufort Sea, Alaska, was taken by NOAA employees in July 2019. It exemplifies the reality that bears in this subpopulation are currently abundant and healthy, negating the suggestion that numbers have continued to drop since 2006 because bears are starving.
The above picture of polar bear health is not an exception but the rule
for all 31 bears recorded onshore last July, as the photos below from
other locations testify. Those who would blame this abundance of bears
on lack of sea ice in 2019 should note that ice retreated as early and
as extensively in 2017 yet only 3 bears were spotted onshore. Results of
a recent (2017-2018) population survey, which have not yet been made
public, will of course not reflect conditions seen in 2019.
And, last I saw, the overall population is doing quite well.
On the "Without ice they'll STARVE!" that's been pushed(as if all the ice were gone forever), I have to wonder: Let's say the climate went through the equivalent of the Medieval Warm Period for a couple of centuries. The polar bears survived it before, do these people actually think they couldn't survive it again?
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