The point of no return is no longer over the horizon.
We've lost 50 percent of the Arctic ice in the last 40 years.
This is a global crisis.
We are now the number one energy producer in the world.
And I'm not going to lose that wealth on dreams, on windmills.
They lied to us.
They gave us false hope.
Polar bears are a prime example of what human caused global warming is doing.
This population here in Hudson Bay has declined by about 25 percent in the last 30 years.
It's doing the same things to other species around the world.
But sometimes that's not so obvious.
And polar bears give us this flag, this early warning.
If we don't
take care of the polar bears, it's gonna be us that we're worried about next.
We're just chit chatting here right now while the polar bear cam is live.
What you're looking at right now is a very beautiful adult male bear.
It's not mating season so they're are no mates to fight over, and there's no food to fight
over either.
Just lying down, protected from the wind by the willows, and just waiting for the sea ice
to come back.
My name is Thea Bechshoft.
I am a staff scientist with Polar Bears International.
I've been working with
polar bears all around the Arctic for the past 15 years.
We collect a lot of information about the bear, and we also collect biological samples
and learn more about the health of the bear.
Here in western Hudson Bay, we put satellite collars on the bears and these collars send
out GPS positions.
We can download those and we can learn how the bears are behaving and how they're responding
to the changes in sea ice.
We have a roaming studio and we invite specialists that work with polar bears, with climate change,
with sea ice.
And one of those people is Dr. Steven Amstrup.
I'm the chief scientist at Polar Bears International.
Prior to that, I was in charge of polar bear research for the US federal government in
Alaska for 30 years.
I was watching polar bears and studying them at a time that the world was literally changing.
The ice was literally melting under their feet.
Some people say polar bears are only a threatened species.
If I were to push you off the roof of a 100 story building, are you threatened until you
pass by the 10th floor or are you endangered all the way down?
A lot of people have heard the polar bears need sea ice, but oftentimes they're missing
the second part of the sentence.
Polar bears need sea ice in order to be able to catch seals.
That's a crisis if you're a polar bear because your dinner plate is literally going away.
And we know that since we've had satellite records, being able to document how the sea
ice has changed, that it's been declining at almost 13 percent per decade for the last
40 years.
They are a prime example of what human caused global warming is doing.
The health of the sea ice affects the lives of everyone around the globe.
The sea ice that is the habitat of the polar bear is also kind of the world's refrigerator.
It makes this nice white cover, and that reflects the warmth from the sun's rays back into space.
Some of that heat stays for a while near the earth's crust because greenhouse gases capture it.
The more of that in the atmosphere, the slower the transition of that heat back up into space.
Now that we're burning all these fossil fuels, we are releasing a rampant amount of CO2 into
the atmosphere.
And that thickens this blanket that we have around the world, trapping the heat and warming
up our planet.
We went from documenting recovery of polar bears in Alaska from excessive harvests that
had occurred decades before, to seeing their
habitat literally disappear.
Our mission is to preserve polar bears and their sea ice habitat.
We're very focused on doing research on polar bears so that this information can be used
by the decision makers going forward.
I saw my first polar bear off of the coast of north western Alaska, about 40 miles off
shore from Cape Lisburne.
We're flying along over this rugged sea ice environment with these big blocks of ice sticking up,
and suddenly there's a polar bear in front of us and it was like, "Holy s**t, there's
a real wild polar bear."
I was agog.
I'm often asked, "How do you maintain a positive attitude?
How come you're not frustrated?"
And I am frustrated.
I'm frustrated every single day.
We have known enough about global warming and about the causes of global warming
since the late 70s.
We've known enough to do something about it, but many of our leaders have simply been in denial.
Our policy leaders, our business leaders have either intentionally misled us or have been
in denial about the truth.
And so we haven't done anything.
If we had started to act to halt warming, to reduce emissions, to stop our reliance
on fossil fuels
for transportation, for power generation.
If we had started to take care of those things in the 1980s, we wouldn't be facing a crisis now.
We're beyond the point where people who are self-motivated can save the world.
What we need is policy action.
Vote for people who actually care about climate change and hold them accountable.
Make your purchases with climate in mind.
Invest in the businesses that are the most environmentally aware and the least wasteful.
Discuss it with your friends, your family, your colleagues.
I still have hope that we will get on top of this.
And we've got a whole new generation of people coming in who are really excited about working
on this because they know it's their future.
It's your future.