Polar bears in Finland

Since the year 2000 Finland has hosted the World championships in winter swimming and this year they will for the first time be held outside of Finland, this time in London to my great surprise.

The championships will be held in UK's largest cold-water open-air swimming pool this weekend and I guess they can cool down a pool of water as well as heat it up, the temperature is said to be at cool 3 degrees Celsius which would be about the temperatures it would have been if swimming either in a lake or the sea in the Nordic countries, even despite the mildest winter in a generation, or “a man’s memory” as it would be expressed over here in Finland.

But not in any man’s memory has there been any wild polar bears wandering free around the countryside here in Finland nor in any of the other Nordic countries, only a few species living in captivity in Zoos and guess no one will be living that day as the climate is getting warmer all the time.

I guess I am not the only one to have considered the National Geographic’s Magazine as a reliable source of information on wildlife and nature, but I just recently heard that they published information about the polar bears in Finland to soon die of extinction, because of the effects of global warming.

Curios about whether this possibly could be true, I googled it, and to my great surprise I discovered that the National Geographic’s had indeed published such a thing, but that they had since updated their information in beginning of January this year. Well, I know that the general impression has that there are walking wild polar bears in all of the Nordic countries, but I would have expected such a reputable magazine the check their facts before publishing, they normally do have people employed just to do such background research, or at lest they used to in earlier days.

Well, we all make our fair share of mistakes but you must admit this was a bad one!