Remember all those heart-rending photos of Polar Bears precariously perching on narrow strips of Arctic ice? Or the stories of bears frantically swimming, about to drown, due to Global Warming? We were assured the cuddly, white bears were going to be extinct as their habitat disappeared as the polar ice vanished.

Yeah. Not so much.  

Bears aren’t drowning. In fact, they’re amazingly capable swimmers

Documented evidence confirms the polar bear’s capacity for extreme aquatic endurance. In 2008, researchers tracked one adult female that swam continuously for 232 hours (over 9.6 days) through the frigid waters of the Beaufort Sea. During this marathon effort, the bear covered a straight-line distance of 687 kilometers (426 miles), demonstrating the species’ physiological reserve.

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Whoa. Wait a minute. They’re not going to be extinct? They’re still making plenty of little Polar Bears, the apex predators of the chilly regions which also aren’t melting? That’s quite a change from the hysterically confident predictions of doom that foretold their extinction. That poses a real problem for climate hysterics. How to explain their entirely wrong predictions of imminent doom?

Hilariously, they have alighted upon accelerated evolution to explain what there are so many fat and happy polar bears in 2025…with the demise of the entire species slated for 2050.

A new study from the University of East Anglia suggests that polar bears are undergoing rapid genetic changes, and scientists believe it’s due to the impacts of climate change.

“It’s kind of the first time that we believe we’ve seen a mammal system such as the polar bear, where temperature has been the lead cause, and environmental stress at increased temperature, is impacting their DNA, their genome in real time,” Alice Godden, the lead author of the study, told ABC News.

Researchers say the discovery of these genetic changes offers a glimmer of hope for the bears’ survival, as two-thirds of the world’s population could perish by 2050.

“Polar bears are undergoing rapid genetic changes?”  What the…?

Lead researcher Dr Alice Godden, from UEA’s School of Biological Sciences, asserts that her team’s findings offer some “hope” for the polar bears but efforts to limit global temperature increases must continue.

“DNA is the instruction book inside every cell, guiding how an organism grows and develops,” she said. “By comparing these bears’ active genes to local climate data, we found that rising temperatures appear to be driving a dramatic increase in the activity of jumping genes within the southeastern Greenland bears’ DNA.

“Essentially this means that different groups of bears are having different sections of their DNA changed at different rates, and this activity seems linked to their specific environment and climate.

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“Jumping genes?”  Climate Change: is there anything it can’t do?

Well, it can’t dramatically accelerate evolution in response to hastily changed climate narratives that fail because they were always politically motivated nonsense. Evolution doesn’t work that way:

As a reminder, based on current evolutionary theory, when the environment favors certain heritable traits, individuals with DNA variants that confer those traits tend to survive and leave more offspring. Over many generations, the frequency of those advantageous gene variants (alleles) increases, so the population’s genetic makeup shifts and traits become better suited to the environment.

In other words, individuals with the genetic endowment necessary to succeed tend to survive to pass on their DNA. Those not so endowed, don’t. This is not something that happens in a generation or ten, but manifests over vast stretches of geologic time. The glacially slow rate of such change is not a “jumping gene” reaction to climate hysteric’s predictions of doom in ten years, renewed every ten years or so when the last prediction of doom failed to materialize. Polar Bear habitat tends to be static over time due, among other factors, to orbital mechanics.

Oh well. I’m sure the “jumping gene” theory will, like every other Climate Change narrative, quietly go away—within ten years or so. In the meantime, Polar Bears will continue to do what Polar Bears have always done: make little Polar Bears, swim, hunt and play in the snow and ice, which despite the assurance of climate “experts,” are proving annoyingly resistant to “expert” assurances.  

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Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer and high school and college English teacher. He is a published author and blogger. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.