“The ice-free period is about three to four weeks longer than it used to be in the 1980s already. And what this translates to is less time hunting for polar bears and less nutrition for them,” Polar Bears International staff scientist Alysa McCall told Earther in 2022. “The worst-case scenario, of course, is that a human gets injured or killed by a polar bear. And while that’s rare, it does happen.”