Back in early February this year, National Geographic used their “this is what climate change looks like” video to promote a newly-published polar bear study and endorse conservation activist Steven Amstrup’s debunked and abandoned prediction of polar bear catastrophe due to global warming.
Even with this revelation, the starving polar bear video fiasco is not yet over.
Polar Bears Really Are Starving Because of Global Warming, Study Shows (National Geographic, 1 February 2018).
The initial focus of the February 2018 National Geographic article was a study published that week by Anthony Pagano and colleagues (Pagano et al. 2018; Whiteman 2018), suggesting that a few polar bears in the Southern Beaufort Sea were not getting enough to eat in early spring from 2014-2016 (with no reference to sea ice conditions; see my critique of that study here).
Then, Steven Amstrup, spokesman for activist organization Polar Bears International, is quoted as saying (my bold):
“If these results hold up [from Pagano’s study], then it shows that the loss of sea ice may have a bigger impact on the bears than previously thought, said Amstrup, a former USGS polar bear expert. Amstrup’s own 2010 study projected that continued decline in sea ice would reduce the global population of bears by two thirds, to less than 10,000 by 2050.“
Seriously, no one except Amstrup and his Polar Bears International fanbase is citing his outlandish 2010 prediction, which is just a rehash of his 2007 USGS internal report and its 2008 journal version (Amstrup 2007, 2008, 2010).
Amstrup’s prediction is not only a failure (Crockford 2017, 2018; Crockford and Geist 2018) but it’s been abandoned by his colleagues for vaguer or more moderate predictions of population decline (e.g. Atwood et al. 2015, 2016; Regehr et al. 2016).
National Geographic has now apologized for saying that the emaciated bear in the SeaLegacy video they so heavily promoted was “what climate change looks like” (and replaced the caption with “this is what starvation looks like,” even though there is no evidence the bear was starving from lack of food rather than from severe illness).
But the damage is done. By endorsing the discredited polar bear survival predictions of Amstrup along with the video, National Geographic degraded itself even further in the eyes of rational and informed readers.
I’ll have more to say on the SeaLegacy video exploited by National Geographic and its message that starving polar bears are victims of climate change in a subsequent post: we haven’t yet reached the end of this debacle.
Read rest at Polar Bear Science
https://www.canadiangeographic.ca/article/truth-about-polar-bears
“Depending on whom you ask, the North’s sentinel species is either on the edge of extinction or an environmental success story.”
Or none of the above. Hard to tell when real science has been so polluted over the years by activists LYING to further their political agenda.
“The current scientific consensus places the worldwide polar bear population between 20,000 and 25,000 animals. Prior to the 1973 worldwide restriction on commerical polar bear hunting, that number was dramatically lower, so low that a meeting of polar bear specialists in 1965 concluded that extinction was a real possibility. Some reports even estimated the number of bears as low as 5,000 worldwide. Yet by 1990, Ian Stirling — at the time, the senior research scientist for the Canadian Wildlife Service and a professor of zoology at the University of Alberta; basically, one of the most respected polar bear scientists on the planet — felt comfortable answering the question as to whether polar bears are an endangered species by stating flatly: “They are not.” He went on to say that “the world population of polar bears is certainly greater than 20,000 and could be as high as 40,000 … I am inclined toward the upper end of that range.” Although old studies are sketchy, clearly more polar bears are alive today than there were 50 years ago, an essentially heartening fact that has not managed to pierce the public consciousness.”
Thanks Dr. Crockford.
Keep up your great work.
You have many, many followers and admirers, of which I am one.
Rational and informed readers don’t read the trash that has been put out by Nation Geographic for years now.
Just like back in a 1999 National Geographic produced to so called missing link between Birds and Dinosours it was later proven to be a total fake just like the Fiji Mermaid and TIME magazine has also did FAKE NEWS about climate change so has Newsweek, and Rolling Stone as well as Popular Science and countless kids magazines like 3.2.1 CONTACT as well as Time For Kids and the EDF has used kids in the false and misleading TV commercials