Guest essay by Jim Steele, Director emeritus Sierra Nevada Field Campus, San Francisco State University.
David Attenborough was my favorite wildlife cinematographer and each year I fed my students numerous clips to make biology and ecology come alive. Researching the plight of the polar bears, I began to worry that “my hero” had decided to use his spectacular wildlife videos to promote catastrophic climate change.
The first example that raised my suspicions was his portrayal of polar bears feeding on walruses, with a narration suggesting it was a new behavior desperately driven by climate change. But for us ecologists who know better: shame on you David Attenborough. He ignored documented wildlife history, and cherry-picked a dramatic scene to promote climate fear.
First view this older BBC video pitting polar bears against walrus. Notice how many bears are converging on the walrus herd and that they are coming from the land. Then view Attenborough’s “new and improved video” that puts a very misleading slant on polar bears and walruses.
If you want to read historical facts about walruses and polar bears, I suggest reading Francis H. Fay’s 1982 “Ecology And Biology Of The Pacific Walrus, Odobenus rosmarus, Divergens Illiger.” In the 1950s Fay was concerned that the walrus was headed for extinction due to overhunting for ivory and blubber, so Fay set out to document everything there was to know about walruses.
In his tome, Fay published early 1900 observations by Russian researchers who admired the polar bears’ varied and clever tactics for hunting walrus.
“The walruses on Peschan Island are frequently bothered by bears, which creep up to them under cover of uneven terrain and of driftwood, of which there usually is an abundance along the shore. Sometimes the bears dig pits in the sand or make a pile in front of themselves, in order to hide from the walruses. We saw a bear in a pit dug in the driftwood within 50 m of the herd, where it watched for a long time. Suddenly, it leaped from its concealment and plunged along the flat terrain toward the walruses. The animals, upon seeing the running bear, rushed into the water, and when the bear reached those on shore, only a few large males remained, and these gradually pivoted into the water, threatening with roars and swinging tusks. The bear in his misfortune was unable to decide whether or not to enter the water and only brandished his paws helplessly and growled in discontent. Not infrequently, in the confusion, the adult walruses crush some young; possibly, at the time of the attack, the bears hope to profit from such accidentally crushed or abandoned young.”
Anyone familiar with the scientific literature knows polar bears have been hunting walruses since recorded history, and most certainly before that time. More recently researchers reporting to the Polar Bear Specialist Group meeting, speculated that hunting walruses on land was likely to be a behavior that has allowed bears to survive the lack of sea ice that was far more common through out the Holocene Optimum.
For example Wrangel Island is both home of one of the largest known polar bear denning areas in the Arctic, as well as the location of several traditional walrus land haul-outs each summer. Because walruses often get trampled at these haul-outs, bears eagerly supplement their diet by feeding on the trodden carcasses. In addition polar bears will wait at these haul outs anticipating the summer wave of walrus herds that typically come ashore, and then dine on weak or young walruses. Seasoned bears know to avoid a healthy bull.
In 2007 the 2nd greatest decrease in Arctic sea ice was observed in the waters surrounding Wrangel Island. That summer researchers observed the greatest number of polar bears on the island. However contrary to the less ice-means-starving-bear theory, there were no signs of increased nutritional stress. Quite the opposite.
Anticipating the seasonal haul-out of walruses, the bears concentrated along the beaches where they were easily observed by researchers who determined that less than 5% of the Wrangel Island bears were designated skinny or very skinny. That compared very favorably to the 7 to 15% of skinny bears observed in previous years with heavier ice. Furthermore researcher determined that not only did 29% of all bears look “normal”, the remaining 66% were fat or very fat. Those polar bear experts wrote, “Under certain circumstances, such as were observed on Wrangel Island in 2007 (Ovsyanikov and Menyushina 2008, Ovsyanikov et al., 2008), resources available in coastal ecosystems may be so abundant that polar bears are able to feed on them more successfully than while hunting on the sea ice.”
With that scientific background, view Attenborough’s rendition and ask yourself if he is objectively narrating the video. He ignores the bears and walruses’ natural history to suggest polar bears have only recently attacked walruses out of desperation. Attenborough suggests the lone bear had been desperately swimming for days, trying to reach the island. However without a radio-collar on the bear, one must wonder if Attenborough is using creative license. And why is Attenborough “serendipitously “ set up in this location to film this event??? Is it a traditional walrus hunting spot, and not the rare event his video suggests?
Researchers have documented instances of younger bears who have not mastered hunting walrus that resulted in injury, but it a matter of a younger bears evolving experience. Attenborough marries an uncommon hunting failure to climate change. Playing sad music, he suggests that bears only attack walruses as an unnatural last resort, suggesting that in essence it is a climate change driven act that is suicidal and doomed to increase.
To my increasing dismay, my former wildlife hero seems to be plunging more deeply into climate propaganda. Attenborough has a new series on Discovery called Africa but it might as well be called “Let’s Push Climate Fear“.
Take for instance his video segment shown below on Green Turtles. He accurately tells us that unlike humans who determine gender via the X and Y chromosomes, Green Turtles (as well as several other reptiles) determine the next generation’s gender based on the temperature of the developing eggs. Researchers realized this when trying to save endangered sea turtles from depredation and dug up their eggs to “safely” incubate them. Fearing that buried eggs at the bottom of the pile had not benefitted equally from the sun’s warmth, the eggs were laid out evenly on trays so all could incubate at the same temperature. The result was uni-sex baby turtles.
However turtles have been around since the dinosaurs and their temperature-gender system has been completely successful throughout monumental periods of climate change, massive extinctions, and epochs with far warmer temperatures than today. Attenborough should tell his audience that microclimates a far more critical to their success as well as informing the public that temperatures drop off dramatically with depth in the sand. Nonetheless he warns that due to global warming, female turtles will soon have great difficulty finding a male. Shameful propaganda Sir David!
Video: http://www.discovery.com/tv-shows/africa/videos/sea-turtles-face-climate-change.htm
Literature cited
Fay, F. (1982) Ecology and Biology of Odobenus rosmarus the Pacific Walrus, divergens. US. Department of the Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service, North American Fauna, No. 74.
Ovsyanikov N.G., and Menyushina I.E. (2008) Specifics of Polar Bears Surviving an Ice Free Season on Wrangel Island in 2007. Marine Mammals of the Holarctic. Odessa, pp. 407-412.
Segments of this essay are adapted from Jim Steele’s Landscapes & Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism
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Jeesh – I guess they didn’t expect people to see the original video, like out of sight out of mind?
Yes. Next questions?
I’m sad about him also. Could it be the diesel particulate pollution in greater London causing changes in the brains of its notable inhabitants? Don’t ask the EU regulators that ordered it.
Attenborough has been a Believer for decades. He is widely believed to be responsible for the blanking out from the BBC of naturalists who don’t buy the Thermageddonite Narrative. A popular naturalist, David Bellamy, some years ago had the temerity to mention that increased atmospheric CO2 made plants grow better. Bellamy hasn’t been seen on the BBC since.
The old adage “follow the money” was never more appropriate. Hey DA have you tried Crowd Funding?
If they really love what you do or say, they will pay – or not.
And there’s this, from Feb last year:-
“The BBC has backed down over Sir David Attenborough’s widely contested claim that parts of the world have warmed by 3.5C over the last two decades.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/9861908/BBC-backs-down-on-David-Attenboroughs-climate-change-statistics.html
Agreed – can’t even watch his old docos without blood pressure rising so have given up entirely.
He’s just a [trimmed] old duffer, one of the useful idiots.
“Has David Attenborough Become A Propaganda Mouthpiece Promoting Climate Fear?”
Sadly yes
Sir David made the assertion that ‘some parts of Africa have become 3.5C hotter in the past 20 years’.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2276888/BBC-climbdown-climate-change-claims-David-Attenboroughs-Africa.html#ixzz338scSOyu
The television presenter describes wind turbines as “elegant structures in harmony with nature”.
A legendary broadcaster….. but not a scientist.
“I guess they didn’t expect people to see the original video,”
And that is exactly what the alarmists and global warming propagandists rely on.
Older inconvenient truths are buried and replaced with newer not so inconvenient “truths” to indoctrinate the young.
Attenborough would have his documentary tone dictated to him by the global warming bent of the BBC.
All documentaries are basically fiction. Nature documentaries especially so. There is no way that the film makers managed to film whatever set piece you see in a film. It’s all done with smoke and mirrors – or in modern words “editing”. Producers will typically come up with a plot and find the film to match or put snippets of film together and build an emotional sob story around it.
The BBC has been caught out twice recently for not telling viewers that documentaries had some extra “dramatisation” added for effect.
I wonder how much money Big Oil has spent funding Attenborough’s exploits over the years. My guess is he’s earned a fortune from Exxon and BP sponsorships.
To be fair (and answer your question about “becoming a mouthpiece”) consider that people like Attenborough are not climate scientists. They are told — by a large fraction of the reputable climate community — that by 2100 temperatures will rise by some 4 to 5 F worldwide, that this will melt polar land ice and cause the seas to rise by anywhere from half a meter to five meters (the latter thanks to James Hansen, ex-head of NASA GISS himself, as a presumably reputable scientist spouting nonsense on TED talks), that this will be accompanied by violent storms, horrific droughts, incredible floods, more tornadoes and hurricanes and pretty much any “bad” sort of weather one can imagine and no “good” weather at all, and what else can they do but extrapolate the effect of all of this catastrophe on their personal favorite scientific or ecological niches? They are neither capable nor inclined to look at the details of the origin of the pronouncements of doom. If they realized the extent to which those predictions relied on unproven, probably erroneous climate models trying to solve a grand-challenge mathematical problem at an absurdly inadequate resolution and with missing and broken basic science galore in the middle, they might — become skeptical, and even be shocked. But they don’t realize this, because it is a carefully kept secret.
Kept by the best possible method — the Purloined Letter, left in plain sight (so nobody can ever say it was hidden) but in a single place and couched in the esoteric terms of statistics-speak so that it will only rarely be read and even more rarely understood. It’s right there, in AR5, in plain English. But nobody notes the contradiction between what it says in plain English in chapter 9 and what they assert in the Summary for Policy Makers, which is the only thing anybody like Attenborough would ever read, if even that. The same problem permeates the literature — the research all publishes conditional extrapolation — “If the temperature rise is thus and such, then the following horrors will occur in the population of white-footed mice in Western Colorado”. They do not consider the rise in temperature to be something known only as a probability, and haven’t the foggiest idea how to assess the probability that it will be X, or Y, or Z, except to read the assertions in something like AR5, and they will never, ever read the lines in Chapter 9 that basically say “there is no foundation in the theory of statistics for any of our assertions of results or degree of confidence in our assertions of results, anywhere else in this Assessment Report where results conditional on the correctness of the climate models are presented or discussed”.
rgb
I’m sad also; I had a huge amount of respect for Mr Attenborough, which has now all but vanished.
Change the last name to Suzuki, you have same BS
He is a Global Warming alarmist for at least 7 years (see video).
I no longer watch his documentaries ever since I saw it.
Too bad, because I liked his work. But not anymore.
‘
He has admitted to cheating in an exam when he was a 17-year-old pupil at Wyggeston Grammar School. This is just one step away to making stuff up.
Sometimes Warmists will tell you that polar bears are becoming cannibals due to global warming. Oh yeah! How hot was it in 1985?
Sir David Attenborough confesses: ‘I cheated on my biology exam’
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/sir-david-attenborough-confesses-i-cheated-on-my-biology-exam-9320554.html
Think about it. Wait for ages for a sea to pop up for air or charge a large group of walruses. The charge reveals weak, young or injured animals who the bears can pile on.
Polar bears don’t only eat seals and walruses.
Thanks, Jim, for another wonderful post. Attenborough’s older specials are still available to be enjoyed on YouTube.
Unfortunately, all wildlife documentaries are now tainted with politics…which is not and has never been based on reality.
Desperate? Swimming for days? Well here is a polar bear that wore a radio-collar and swam continuously for NINE DAYS. LOL.
“The result was uni-sex baby turtles.”
That scene in Jurassic Park makes sense to me now.
Thirty seconds in and Attenborough stands on a graph derived from climate models which convinces him the planet is doomed and we are responsible.
The man is smug, superficial, and unable to come to terms with the rest of humanity aspiring to even the most fleeting glimpse of his own, privileged lifestyle.
still watching old attenborough docus online – they will have repeat value forever…not so David’s recent work, which is a shame.
a different Jim taking on another media icon, NYT:
29 May: Forbes: James Taylor: Global Cooling, Not Global Warming, Doomed the Ancients
Global cooling rather than global warming or “climate change” doomed ancient societies, despite the New York Times’ latest efforts to invent a new global warming alarm. The Times published an article Tuesday claiming “climate change” doomed ancient societies to famine and collapse, but those societies thrived while temperatures were significantly warmer than today. It was only when temperatures cooled that shorter growing seasons and less favorable climate conditions doomed crop production and the food supplies of ancient civilizations…
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2014/05/29/global-cooling-not-global-warming-doomed-the-ancients/
Watch the Ninja Polar bear video to appreciate just how at ease polar bears are in the water.