Starving Polar Bear Video Makes Climate Alarmists Even Nuttier

Starving Polar Bear Video Makes Climate Alarmists Even Nuttier

The Cult of Climastrology long agon made the polar bear, a massive animal that has no problem killing other animals and humans, the face of climate change doom. They’re having apoplexy over one in particular, and, among the news fables on it, this is possibly the nuttiest

Video of starving polar bear fuels fears of climate-linked extinction
Studies warn that polar bears could be extinct by 2050.

The world’s tragedies often have images that end up defining them: A 5-year old screaming in Iraq after her parents were killed by U.S. soldiers. A starving child being stalked by a vulture during a ruthless famine in Sudan.

A video released this week of an extremely emaciated polar bear has served a similar purpose: as a rallying cry and stand-in for a largely unmitigated environmental disaster.

The video was shot by Paul Nicklen, a nature photographer and contributor to the National Geographic magazine for the last 17 years. He is also a biologist by training and the co-founder of Sea Legacy, a nonprofit that uses storytelling and images to advocate for the environment.

Nicklen’s video, which he shot on a trip for Sea Legacy, depicts an emaciated polar bear, its coat patchy, seemingly near death on an island in a Canadian territory inside the Arctic Circle. It searches for food in a rusted garbage can and chews what Nicklen said was an old snowmobile seat.

Nicklen told National Geographic “We stood there crying – filming with tears rolling down our cheeks.” Here’s what it looked like

Really, it’s no surprise that the Cult of Climastrology would take this one polar bear and run with it to the extreme. It’s what they do. They’ve made these predictions many times, and then populations of polar bears grew too big to actually sustain, and have fallen off.

The hysteria was so bad that even uber-Warmists (and nice guy) Eric Holthaus chimed in

You can read the whole thread Eric links at Twitchy. Jeff Higdon suspects that it is a different problem, most likely cancers which go through populations. And the population the PB is from is considered stable. And “What the Sea Legacy crew should have done was contact the GN Conservation Officer in the nearest community and had this bear put down. And necropsied. The narrative of the story might have turned out quite different if they had.”

Cristina Mittermeier, co-founder of SeaLegacy, told CBC Radio why they filmed the incident and released the video

“While Mittermeier said the bear had no obvious injuries and she believes it was too young to die of old age, she contends that’s irrelevant. ‘The point is that it was starving, and …as we lose sea ice in the Arctic, polar bears will starve.’”

In other words, it was a prop. Animals get sick. That’s nature. Fabius Maximus points out

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. This was one bear dying a gruesome death as happens in the wild all the time (there is no suggestion that a necropsy was done to determine cause of death, just as with Stirling’s bear that supposedly died of climate change.)

In fact, research done by polar bear specialists that work in the field shows that the most common natural cause of death for polar bears is starvation, resulting from one cause or another (too young, too old, injured, sick). From Amstrup in Wild Mammals of North America: Biology, Management, and Conservation

Warmists keep trotting out a tiny number of polar bears starving as PROOF!!!!! of global warming doom. It’s interesting that they throw Darwinism out the window in order to push their cult.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

Share this!

Enjoy reading? Share it with your friends!