If the world is warming, why are there more polar bears now?

Reports indicate that the number of polar bears in the Arctic is increasing, but the sea ice is melting.

Polar Bear Science is an immensely popular resource on bears and climate change.

But there is no evidence that polar bear numbers are booming anywhere other than a couple of localized hotspots.

Bear populations are decreasing on average, and global warming is still a major threat.

Blogs like Polar Bear Science exist not to educate the reader but to ferment doubt in their mind on the topic of polar bear population in the Arctic , and by association make the reader doubt the validity of conclusions of the scientific consensus on global warming.

The blogs of today are the latest iteration of a strategy that ran through the entire Cold War period and was used to fight the legislation around smoking, acid rain, the ozone layer, and now climate change.

The topic of anthropogenic global warming has been settled in all but the most minute details in the scientific community for kind of decades .

But a lack of public scientific literacy has meant that politically it's been contested far later than the time at which we could have actually done something to mitigate the worst effects of climate change.

If we're going to stand a chance of cutting our emissions and avoiding the potentially catastrophic impacts of unchecked climate change, as the science indicates that we are currently not.