The Polar Bear is undoubtedly the poster child of the climate change debate. If you do a google image search for climate change, the only animal that makes it onto the front page more than twice is our fury arctic friend. I counted 20 at least. (Note: This is not PhD level research I plan on publishing in Nature). Also, The World Wildlife Fund has an excellent website dedicated to the tracking of polar bear populations, and considers their plight an "Urgent Issue". They're everywhere in our environment literature.
Really, my beef with the polar bear is that it keeps other key climate change conservation issues out of the news. There are a whole host of examples, but just to list a handful you may not have run across before: Harlequin Frogs are facing extinction, American Lobsters might soon be off the menu and the insanely cute American Pikas numbers are shrinking. Overall, The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that 20-30% of the plant and animal species evaluated so far in climate change studies are at risk of extinction if temperatures reach levels projected to occur by the end of this century.
In the marine world, ocean acidification is the major problem. The Ocean takes up around 25% of the CO2 humans emit into the atmosphere, and some of that CO2 breaks down into carbonic acid, decreasing the pH of the Ocean measurably. This is particularly bad news for Coral Reefs, which are essential for the variously disgusting looking creatures that depend on them. Personally, not being a biologist, I'm not so keen on gross fishy things, but a significant percentage of the worlds population do depend on them for fishing, tourism and the like.
I could go on and on about this, but I'd rather not bludgeon my new readership to death with my concerns. I simply wish to point out that real, measurable impacts of climate change on the animal kingdom are out there, even if they might be hidden by yet another picture of a sad looking polar bear on a tiny iceberg. If I haven't convinced you, well, here's a gif of a baby polar bear just for reading this far. D'awww.
P.S: If you aren't a terrible person like me and you do still care about Polar Bear's survival, the WWF has an excellent article about how they've been affected by Climate Change here
