Question: I’m not sure who’s specialty this is: Can we reverse global warming enough so the polar animals don’t become extinct or can we just slow global warming?

David Walker-Sünderhauf answered on 9 Mar 2019:

Even under the more optimistic estimations of combating climate change to keep global warming under +2°C compared to pre-industrial levels (which require immediate, drastic, society changes), there will be an “overshoot” period where the climate is actually warmer than that – I don’t really know what this will specifically mean for arctic life, but polar animals are definitely amongst the most vulnerable from changes like this. I can imagine it all depends on how big this overshoot will be and how long we’ll be in an overshoot for, but I don’t really know more details than that – I think it’s very difficult to predict this from different climate researchers’ models. I hope it can be done!