Zoologist and polar bear expert Susan Crockford was shunned by the academy for her insistence that despite the polar bear’s status as a climate change icon, the warming planet had actually caused the species to thrive. She did not deny climate change – merely the idea that it was harming the bears.

After losing her contract as an adjunct professor at Canada’s University of Victoria, where she worked for 15 years, she has been vindicated by a report from northern Canada confirming her theory that polar bears are climate change’s beneficiaries, rather than its victims.

Footage of an emaciated polar bear, captioned “this is what climate change looks like,” yanked at the world’s heartstrings when it was posted on National Geographic in 2017. Eight months later, the publication changed the caption to “this is what starvation looks like,” admitting there was no way to tell why the bear was starving. But it wasn’t the first sick bear to be pressed into service for the environmentalist cause, and it won’t be the last. Climate change’s PR team may have made an unfortunate choice in elevating the polar bear to icon status.

The Inuit groups who actually live with the bears in northern Canada seem to agree with Crockford’s claim that bear populations are increasing, as documented in a court affidavit by the director of wildlife management for the Nunavik Marine Region Wildlife Board. Faced with cuts to their bear-hunting quota by an environment ministry concerned with population numbers, Nunavut residents have seen an “increase in the polar bear population and a particularly notable increase since the 1980s,” the director attested.

Nor are the (plentiful) bears suffering or sickly: “Nunavik Inuit report that it is rare to see a skinny bear and most bears are observed to be healthy,” the affidavit continued. Locals are, however, reportedly concerned about outside perception of declining polar bear numbers, fueled by groups like the World Wildlife Federation (WWF), which explicitly described the bears as the “poster child for the impacts of climate change on species.”

Crockford has been saying for years that bear populations are either growing or stable – even though they may go down in some habitats, they increase in others. She does say starvation is the most common cause of death for adult bears, but there are many factors that could lead them to the state captured by National Geographic – from too many bears, straining food supplies and leaving slower hunters out-competed; to broken jaws, other injuries, and disease.

But as ice cover decreases, she claims, polar bears thrive. The ringed seals that are one of their primary food sources multiply in the warmer water, and polar bear populations have been steady or on the rise since 2005, all predictions of doom aside.