James Raffan is a geographer, international speaker and the author of numerous books, including the forthcoming Ice Walker: A Polar Bear’s Journey Through the Fragile Arctic. He is an international fellow of the Explorers Club, a past chair of the Arctic Institute of North America, and a fellow and past governor of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, service for which he was awarded the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal.

In 2020, a massive controversy today is often a blip tomorrow. But in 2006, 27 seconds of animation in Saint Al of Gore’s Oscar-winning film about climate change, An Inconvenient Truth, was enough to be an enduring fit of pique.

It showed a polar bear swimming around in a warming ocean, struggling to get to an ever-shrinking ice floe. That clip spawned its own cottage industry of…