Scientist’s warnings of polar bear extinction came on the same day that the Siberian town of Verkhoyansk, north of the Arctic Circle, experienced a heat wave that peaked at 38 degrees Celsius – the highest ever recorded temperature in the Arctic. Danish meteorologist Martin Stendel noted that this temperature “would be a 1 in 100,000 year event for a normal distribution of anomalies without climate change.”

Image: Land surface temperatures of the Arctic on the 20th of June 2020 compared to the 2003 -2018 average spring temperatures. Source: Handout/NASA Earth Observatory