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