For polar bears, the end is near.

last updated 8 January 2015

Canada

Editorial

Polar bears have about 25 years left before they disappear from the planet, says the Ontario Sault Star in an editorial. According to leading scientists, the Arctic ice cap is shrinking by 8 percent a year. This has caused serious stress to bears, which instead of giving birth to triplets, the norm, now typically have just one cub. Plus, it now takes mama bears 18 months to wean their cubs, instead of the usual 12. The tragedy is that no one seems to care. Our new Conservative prime minister, Stephen Harper, is trying. He wants countries to sign up to even higher carbon-emissions restrictions than were agreed under the Kyoto Treaty. But what’s the point if we can’t even meet the present ones? The sad truth is that it may already be too late to halt global warming and prevent one of the glories of Canadian wildlife from becoming extinct. If people think it couldn’t happen, they should recall the fate of the passenger pigeon, whose flocks once blackened the skies over North America but by 1900 had been hunted to extinction. Attempts were made to save the species by breeding surviving captive birds, but that failed, and they all died. The last known passenger pigeon, named Martha, died at the Cincinnati Zoological Garden on Sept. 1, 1914, at the age of 29. People around the world wept. “Will we weep when polar bears no longer roam the Arctic?”