Polar Bears - We Were Sold A Pup!

• Isabel Oakeshott

An inconvenient truth for climate zealots: polar bears are thriving

Ice-cap scaremongers predicted a grizzly end for the Arctic predators but they are bouncing back

Isabel Oakeshott

30 January 2026 6:56pm GMT

A polar bear walks on sea ice in the Svalbard archipelago  Credit: OLIVIER MORIN/AFP

Well, well, well. How inconvenient. Exactly 20 years after climate change was catapulted to the top of the political agenda, the poster creature of the crisis – the polar bear – appears to be doing remarkably well.

Had all the prophecies of plague and pestilence played out as the most pessimistic “experts” expected, by now these magnificent creatures would literally be on their last legs. They would be skinny and starving and stranded on ice caps as fragile as the top of a crème brûlée.

They would be so exhausted by endless swimming in search of hunting platforms they’d be too weak to reproduce. But guess what? It turns out that Charles Darwin was right. As their habitat changes, the bears are adapting, and bouncing back. How awkward for all those eco warriors who still think the world is about to end.

It is two decades since Al Gore transformed global warming from a scientific thesis into a global political crusade with the release of An Inconvenient Truth. His seminal documentary marked the beginning of the mass hysteria about climate change that reshaped the global economy and united a generation of policy makers in the quest to avoid apocalypse.

This was the start of the net zero madness that still rages to this day. According to Gore’s most alarming predictions, changing weather patterns linked to the burning of fossil fuels would displace hundreds of millions of people, scorching farmland and flooding entire cities. As for plants and animals, those on the frontline could be completely wiped out. Polar bears quickly came to symbolise the crisis. DT.