{"id":258529,"date":"2017-12-12T14:58:28","date_gmt":"2017-12-12T19:58:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rael.org\/?p=258529"},"modified":"2020-08-13T15:04:38","modified_gmt":"2020-08-13T19:04:38","slug":"what-everybody-got-wrong-about-that-viral-video-of-a-starving-polar-bear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rael.org\/id\/what-everybody-got-wrong-about-that-viral-video-of-a-starving-polar-bear\/","title":{"rendered":"What everybody got wrong about that viral video of a starving polar bear"},"content":{"rendered":"
RAEL\u2019S COMMENT:<\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n
When global warming hoax fanatics use propaganda to promote their ideology!<\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

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Dubbed the \u2018Face of Climate Change,\u2019 a starving polar bear photographed in Canada\u2019s Arctic might have nothing to do with climate change<\/p>\n

It is likely one of the most widely viewed images that is going to emerge from Canada all year: An emaciated polar bear digging through garbage that was quickly branded around the world as proof of the ecological horrors of climate change. Even Catherine McKenna, Canada\u2019s Minister of Environment and Climate Change, wrote in a\u00a0tweet: \u201cTHIS is what climate change looks like.\u201d<\/p>\n

But ask the people who actually spend their time around polar bears \u2014 Arctic biologists and the Inuit \u2014 and it quickly emerges that all is not what it seems.<\/p>\n

The bear might have been injured or diseased<\/p>\n

\u201cThe video shows what appears to be an old male in declining health, but clear clinical signs of starvation aren\u2019t obvious (e.g. convulsions),\u201d said longtime polar bear biologist Andrew Derocher in an email. In a\u00a0series of tweets, Arctic wildlife biologist Jeff Higdon similarly speculated that the animal could be suffering from an aggressive form of bone cancer. \u201cThat bear is starving, but (in my opinion) it\u2019s not starving because the ice suddenly disappeared and it could no longer hunt seals,\u201d he wrote, noting that bears routinely survive long stretches of ice-free water during the summer. \u201cIt\u2019s far more likely that it is starving due to health issues,\u201d he added. However, noted University of Alberta polar bear researcher Ian Stirling disputed that it was an older bear, pointing out the lack of scarring around the animal\u2019s neck. In an email, Stirling added that it\u2019s impossible to know for sure what caused the bear\u2019s emaciation, but it \u201cis what a starving bear would look like, regardless of the cause.\u201d<\/p>\n

The bear lives in an area where populations are doing well<\/p>\n

Climate change is definitely very bad for the future of polar bears. As Stirling said, \u201cmore instances of starvation will be inevitable\u201d if polar bears don\u2019t have ice to use as a hunting platform.\u00a0But for the time being, disappearing ice is\u00a0having\u00a0varied effects on Canadian polar bears. Depending on where they live, some bears are getting utterly decimated, while others are thriving. Notably, the emaciated polar bear quite likely lives in an area where polar bears are doing rather well. According to\u00a0data collected by the federal government, polar bears along the entire west coast of Baffin Island are \u201cstable.\u201d On the southeastern side of the island (around the Nunavut capital of Iqaluit) polar bears have even experienced a \u201clikely increase.\u201d It\u2019s only on the island\u2019s northeastern corner \u2014 in a management area that meets Greenland \u2014 that polar bears are suspected to be in decline.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/nationalpost.com\/news\/canada\/what-everybody-got-wrong-about-that-viral-video-of-a-starving-polar-bear<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

RAEL\u2019S COMMENT: When global warming hoax fanatics use propaganda to promote their ideology!  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":258530,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-258529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rael.org\/id\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rael.org\/id\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rael.org\/id\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rael.org\/id\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/71"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rael.org\/id\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258529"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rael.org\/id\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258529\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rael.org\/id\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rael.org\/id\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rael.org\/id\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rael.org\/id\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}