Apparently, our furry friends in the Arctic are becoming ingenious chemists to fight the climate boogeyman, didn’t you know! At least, that’s the kooky notion a number of lefty outlets are pushing in their latest batch of climate change codswallop. [some emphasis, links added]
ABC News, NBC News, Daily Beast, BBC, The Guardian, The Independent, and EuroNews all did the eco-scare dance over a new study and claimed polar bears were “rewriting their DNA” to fight climate change. No, you didn’t misread that.
Amidst the repeatedly debunked notion that polar bears are destined to go extinct in the next few decades or so, the Daily Beast in particular expressed “hopes that with these new findings we are able to reduce our carbon emissions to buy the bears enough time to adapt to their changing environment.”
In essence, curb your carbon-emitting lifestyles or the bears are going to die!
Climate Depot founder Marc Morano blasted the media outlets perpetuating this nonsense in comments to MRC Business.
“Scientists and scientific data have known for decades that ‘climate change’ was not threatening polar bears in the Arctic. The number of polar bears in the Arctic has increased dramatically in recent decades, particularly since a hunting ban was imposed.”
Specifically, said Morano:
“The polar bear population exploded from an estimated 5,000 in the 1960s to 30,000 or more today.”
Reading the headlines from the liberal media made it seem like polar bears were forced to take matters into their own hands.
The Daily Beast Breaking News Intern Tamilore Oshikanlu was adamant on December 15 that “Climate Change Is Forcing Polar Bears to Rewrite Their DNA.” Gee, we never expected these mammals to be such experts in gene editing.
As global temperatures rise, claimed Oshikanlu,
“Arctic sea ice is shrinking, leaving bears without the frozen platforms they rely on to hunt seals … prolonged food scarcity appears to be driving biological shifts that allow some bears to better process plant-based and lower-fat diets when prey is unavailable.”
Makes sense why the Beast’s full-time reporters didn’t want to attach their name to such stupidity, so they kicked it down to the intern. Our sympathies, Oshikanlu.
Apparently, the Beast wasn’t the only one to pass the story down the food chain in their staff. NBC News London-based intern Elmira Aliieva was one of the first to break the story on the polar bear superpowers. “Polar bears are rewiring their own genetics to survive a warming climate,” read her headline.
It’s as if these media types are just copying off the same movie script. She propagandized that climate change was “the icy habitat essential to [polar bears’]” existence. As such, wrote Aliieva, “new research suggests polar bears are rapidly rewiring their own genetics in a bid to survive.”
ABC News reporter Brianna Alvarado’s story on the matter wasn’t much better: “Polar bears are ‘rewriting their DNA’ to survive warming Arctic, study suggests.”
In the piece, Alvarado doom-mongered,
“Researchers say the discovery of these genetic changes offers a glimmer of hope for the bears’ survival, as two-thirds of the world’s population could perish by 2050.”
But this is a load of bunk, as Morano joked to MRC. “It is safe to say that polar bears are disappearing, but only from Al Gore’s books and movies!” He joked that “In Gore’s 2006 film, he made the polar bear a poster child for global warming, but fast forward to his 2017 film and book sequel, and Gore did not even mention them.”
Scientists have testified before Congress that “polar bears have survived several historic episodes of much warmer temperatures over the last 10,000 years, and they have adapted,” Morano noted. In essence, polar bear adaptation to a changing climate isn’t even a new thing.
Morano argued that what the new study does, if anything, is reveal “some insight into one of the many ways these bears have adapted.”
The BBC also exploited the study to push for an eco-regulatory state:
“But despite the signs of adaption [sic] to a changing environment, [Lead researcher Dr Alice Godden] said efforts to limit global temperature increases must continue.”
A blogger for the British leftist agitprop-pushing publication The Guardian, Martin Belam, teed up the study like a movie trailer in his December 16 newsletter:
“Amid the constant drumbeat of bleak news about the planet’s environment and the accelerating climate emergency, the occasional bright spot still emerges.”
He then attacked humanity outright:
“But is it really good news that human activity – the burning of fossil fuels and the destruction of habitats – is forcing animals to alter their genetic makeup? The picture, as ever, is complicated.”
Darn those pesky humans, right, Belam?
The Independent’s Asia Climate Correspondent Stuti Mishra took it a step further than her media compatriots in her eco-alarmism by stipulating that full polar bear extinction was possible because of humanity, regardless of their newly discovered, er, gene-editing capabilities:
“More than two-thirds of polar bears are expected to vanish by 2050, with full extinction possible by the end of the century if global emissions continue on their current trajectory.”
Euro News reporter Liam Gilliver made polar bear “jumping genes” the main hook in his headline, before taking Mishra’s route and decreeing Bear-Mageddon in his lede sentence.
“Polar bears face ‘total extinction’ by the end of this century, but scientists have found a small beacon of ‘hope,’ ” Gilliver sensationalized.
But the seemingly nuttier bits of climate change tomfoolery continuously oozing out of the media eco-sphere shouldn’t be expected to fade away, Morano said. “When current reality fails to alarm, the climate activist will continue to make scarier and scarier (unfounded) predictions of the future.”
Top photo by Hans-Jurgen Mager on Unsplash
Read more at NewsBusters
Polar bears live in the Arctic despite all the snow and ice, not because of it.
We must remember that polar bears evolved from grizzly bears so they have the genetics to survive in warmer environments. The study reported in The Daily Beast is nothing more than junk science for the purpose of political advocacy.