National Geographic reporter Sarah Gibben, a 24-year old "reporter", repeats a completely false story about a polar bear supposedly starving due to global warming.
This entire story line has been thoroughly debunked again and again over the years since Al Gore first pitched his emotional appeal back in the early 2000s — even NPR, of all organizations, broadcast "The Inconvenient Truth About Polar Bears" back in 2013 — but the story keeps bobbing up as each new generation of gullible, ignorant young reporters replace their former, better-paid, predecessors and hit the circuit.
The "heart-wrenching video" that captured the global warming faithful's compassion last week was in fact just another bit of propaganda, known by its perpetrators to be false, foisted on the ignorant. I keep asking, if global warming is real, why do its proponents keep lying about it? If there is factual evidence to support the claim, why supplement it with bullshit like doctored temperature records, re-jiggered graphs, phony "irreversible tipping-point deadlines" (pushed forward, just like doomsday preachers' deadlines", every time the deadline comes and goes), and, as here, the perpetual and repeating polar bear fraud?
This year, biologist Paul Nicklen published a video online of an emaciated polar bear on Baffin Island rummaging through trash cans, looking for food. The polar bear was likely at death’s door when Nicklen captured the footage in late summer.
Nicklen, who founded the environmental group Sea Legacy, said he wanted to highlight the future polar bears face because of global warming. It worked, and the video has gone viral, sparking media coverage about a polar bear that’s a victim of a warming world.
“We stood there crying—filming with tears rolling down our cheeks,” Nicklen said, National Geographic reported.
“When scientists say bears are going extinct, I want people to realize what it looks like. Bears are going to starve to death,” said Nicklen. “This is what a starving bear looks like.”
It’s certainly a sad sight, but it’s not evidence global warming drove that specific bear to starvation. In fact, experts noted that if starvation in the area was global warming-driven, carcasses would be strewn throughout the landscape.
Interestingly enough, Sea Legacy co-founder Cristina Mittermeier admitted the actual cause of death was “irrelevant” — the point of all of this, like past starving polar bear videos, is to sound the alarm on global warming.
“It is impossible to tell why he was in this state. Maybe it could’ve been because of an injury or disease,” Mittermeier told CBC News.
“The point is that it was starving,” she said, “as we lose sea ice in the Arctic, polar bears will starve.”
Polar bear experts, however, have cautioned that such photos don’t constitute evidence of global warming-induced starvation.
“In August, this bear would have been only recently off the sea ice: since most bears are at their fattest at this time of year, something unusual had to have affected his ability to hunt or feed on the kills he made when other bears around him did not starve and die,” Zoologist Susan Crockford wrote on her blog.
“It could have been something as simple as being out-competed for food in the spring by older animals,” Crockford wrote. “But if sea ice loss due to man-made global warming had been the culprit, this bear would not have been the only one starving: the landscape would have been littered with carcasses.”
