Climate change exists, always has existed. So, what is the difference? the difference is that to justify something that is well known and in many ways unpredictable the corporate and NGO media are communicating incorrect information, even lies

What else is a lie?

You’ve been lied to: Walrus suicide NOT caused by climate change as Attenborough story quietly revised

Footage of walruses driven to suicide by climate change broke the world’s heart last year, only for the story to be quietly revised. But if media lied about walrus suicides, what else are they lying about?

Renowned nature documentarian David Attenborough probably converted a few climate skeptics with his heartrending footage of walruses, their habitat decimated by climate change, throwing themselves off cliffs in despair in the 2018 Netflix documentary Our Planet.

Unfortunately, the story was untrue. Walruses regularly take to the water as part of their seasonal migration, and some plummet to their doom in their hurry to escape predators like polar bears, which sometimes hunt their prey by triggering a stampede off a precipice. 

Some eagle-eyed viewers noted that the placement of Attenborough’s camera crew might have also left his walruses with no choice but to jump off the cliff, since humans were blocking the beach. With polar bears menacing them inland, the walruses could have been caught between the proverbial rock and hard place.

Other sleuths found the filmmakers had engaged in some editing trickery to make it seem that the ‘desperate’ walruses going ashore to the dangerous cliffs were just around the corner from the packed 100,000-strong colony showcased in the documentary. In fact, the two locations were 400 hundred kilometers apart in Russia’s Far East.

The persistence of a handful of climate change skeptics seems to have shamed Attenborough into revising his explanation of the pinniped tragedy. In a more recent BBC documentary Seven Worlds, One Planet, he explains the walrus mass suicide as a consequence of marauding polar bears – another species supposedly on the edge of extinction because of climate change but apparently doing quite well.

Attenborough wasn’t the first to depict the walruses’ death dive as the tragic result of manmade global warming – the group Climate Progress was using the tale to tug at heartstrings as early as 2014, calling the yearly walrus retreats to the land a “real change.” That sob story, too, was debunked – walrus “haul-outs” are actually a sign of healthy population growth, their numbers having rebounded since the outlawing of large-scale hunting, though that didn’t stop the climate change contingent from trying to claim that the makeup of the walrus population was unusual this time, with more females and calves, and maybe thatwas because of climate change. 

Environmental activists tearing their hair out about “climate change deniers” fail to take into account the frequency with which the media gets climate change wrong. Attenborough’s walruses are just the latest flub in a long history of green fables that have evaporated on closer examination. Former vice president turned environmental crusader Al Gore famously predicted New York would be underwater in the near future due to a 20-foot rise in sea levels, declaring in 2008 that the North Pole would go completely ice-free within five years. Gore has become a very rich man off his holdings in solar energy, which ballooned in value following the release of his film An Inconvenient Truth – a film so full of errors a UK judge would only allow it to be showed in schools with “guidance notes to prevent political indoctrination.” 

The familiar “hockey stick” graph, used by climate change alarmists to claim that global temperatures have been rising rapidly since the industrial revolution, was dealt a near-fatal blow in 2009 with the release of internal emails from the University of East Anglia’s climate research division. The emails revealed the scientists had ‘edited’ the Earth’s historical temperature record to fit their theories, a scandal that has come to be known as ClimateGate. These scientists worked with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the group whose recent report warned humanity we have 12 years to act before irreversible climate change dooms us all to temperature increases incompatible with life.

Sure, one could believe the IPCC has cut out the misbehaving climate superstars and restricted itself to reliable science this time. Certainly mainstream media has all but forgotten about the ClimateGate emails, eager to lure in more viewers with climate catastrophe and theatrical Extinction Rebellion protests, but “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me,” as they say…

Mainstream media has been caught lying about seemingly everything – from labeling a Kentucky weapons demonstration as Turkish shelling of helpless Kurds, to flogging the “Russian collusion” hoax long past its sell-by date, to blaming hurricanes on climate change. Trust in the media is at historic lows; a poll conducted by the Columbia Journalism Review earlier this year found less confidence in the press than any other institution, including Congress. 

So while scientists have been adamant climate change is a real phenomenon, and it’s entirely possible the humans are contributing to it to some extent, it is difficult for many who’ve been lied to by the media for their entire lives to believe that this timeand this time only, they’re telling the truth.

Under these conditions, it’s surprising anyone believes in climate change at all.

Helen Buyniski, RT, 6 Nov, 2019

References:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/472795-walrus-suicide-climate-change-lies/

Walruses and polar bears, a dramatic and cinematographic hoax

Now that polar bears have failed to die off in response to a sea-ice decline as promised, climate alarmists are looking hard for a new icon. They think they’ve found it in the walrus. And for their purpose, walruses are more useful dead than alive, and best of all splattered against sharp rocks from a great height.

For instance, a now-famous episode of Netflix’s “Our Planet” documentary series, released this month and narrated by veteran BBC broadcaster David Attenborough, features walruses falling from atop a high cliff and bouncing helplessly over rocks to their deaths. The incident occurs after what’s called a “land haulout,” which is when large herds of walrus females and calves emerge from the water to gather and rest on a beach. The show blames the land haulouts — and the deaths caused by falling from cliffs — squarely on lack of sea ice due to human-caused climate change. “They’d be on the ice if they could be, but there’s no option but to come to land,” the episode’s producer says. The claim isn’t true. In fact, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service determined in October 2017 that Pacific walrus have not been harmed by recent sea-ice loss and are not expected to be harmed in the foreseeable future.

Still, the brutal death scenes horrified sensitive viewers (while some others shook their heads at the questionable claims). Film producer Sophie Lanfear has defended her inclusion of the sequence as an essential “truth,” although Netflix eventually issued a warning to “animal lovers” that they might want to skip the death sequence.                         But animal lovers and sensitive viewers are the target audience. The sole intention of the footage of walruses falling to a splattery death is to spark outrage, to shock viewers into taking climate change seriously. Lanfear admits as much. “I would like people to think about their lives and the fossil fuels they use in their lives and be inspired to support renewable energies and to try and find solutions to this problem,” she told People magazine. And the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), which partnered with Netflix for the series, isnow busily promoting walruses as the “new symbol of climate change.”

The tactic is reminiscent of the infamous 2017 stunt when National Geographic magazine publicized a video of an emaciated polar bear, which it falsely blamed on global warming. This kind of disturbing nature film footage has become known as “tragedy porn.” It’s infused with a narrative that misrepresents or glosses over important facts for the sole purpose of manipulating emotionally immature viewers into feeling distressed and angry. And both the starving polar bear and the plummeting walruses count on viewers who are  well connected vent their dismay and spread the climate-change alarm.

Reproduced from:

https://business.financialpost.com/opinion/netflix-is-lying-about-those-falling-walruses-its-another-tragedy-porn-climate-hoax