By the middle of the 21st century, climate scientists warn, it will be less cumbersome to cross the Arctic Ocean in summertime in a canoe than an icecutter. The warming ocean has already shed much of its summer sea ice, part of a long process that is anthropogenic—that is, caused by humans, with greenhouse gases at near-catastrophic levels.
The effects on the global climate, with these changes, are unfolding, and they appear to be deadly to plants and animals all over Earth. The effects on one animal species seem particularly clear. Polar bears are an apex predator in the Arctic, the largest of several mammals (save for whales) that hunt for smaller animals, especially, in the case of the bears, seals. With the melting ice, those polar bears have an ever-smaller window of time to make the summer hunts that will sustain them in hibernation, and fewer seals to hunt.
Skeptics observe that there are more polar bears alive today, between 22,000 and 31,000, than there were a couple of generations ago. That is true: with a 1975 international treaty restricting the number of polar bears that could be hunted, confined mostly to native peoples of the Arctic, the population was able to grow from historic lows of about 5,000. That said, the demographic models provided by the International Union for Conservation of Nature suggest that the species will lose at least half its number by 2053. Even the most optimistic suggests that extinction will come in the 22nd rather than 21st century, though it will come all the same.
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