A Polar bear is seen on Alexandra Land, an island of the Franz Joseph Land archipelago, in the Arctic Ocean during the Umka 2021 expedition organised by the Russian Geographical Society. (Credit: Gavriil GrigorovTASS via Getty Images) United Nations Environment Program head Inger Andersen used to lead the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, which monitors and classifies species in trouble.
She asks: "Do we really want to be the generation that saw the end of the ability of something as majestic as the polar bear to survive?"Arctic sea ice — frozen ocean water — shrinks during the summer as it gets warmer, then forms again in the long winter.
How much it shrinks is where global warming kicks in, scientists say. The more the sea ice shrinks in the summer, the thinner the ice is overall, because the ice is weaker first-year ice.Julienne Stroeve, a University of Manitoba researcher, says summers without sea ice are inevitable.
Many other experts agree with her.Former NASA chief scientist Waleed Abdalati, now a top University of Colorado environmental researcher, is one of them.Researchers note how greenhouse gas emissions are impacting sea-ice and polar bear subpopulations."That’s something human civilization has never known," Abdalati said. "That’s like taking a sledgehammer to the climate system and doing something huge about it."The warming already in the oceans and in the air is committed — like a freight train in motion.