Tuesday, April 03, 2007

The poor polar bears!



As Andrew Bolt points out:

Monica Attard recently told the truth behind the above picture.

Said Attard:


Those stranded polar bears on the shrinking Arctic ice - victims of global warming - certainly tugged at the heart-strings…

All used it as evidence of global warming and the imminent demise of the polar bear.


Except that the picture, snapped by Australian marine biology student Amanda Byrd two and a half years ago, was in fact taken during:


Summer, when every year the fringes of the Arctic ice cap melt regardless of the wider effects of global warming.

And, as experts told Attard, this was neither unusual nor evidence that the bears were in danger.

But that hadn’t stopped one notoriously inaccurate scaremonger from seizing on them for his own mischievous purposes:

"Their habitat is melting… beautiful animals, literally being forced off the planet,” Mr. Gore said, with the photo on the screen behind him. “They’re in trouble, got nowhere else to go.”

Audience members let out gasps of sympathy.

I don’t know whether this is an aberration or signals a desperately needed change in direction for Media Watch under its new executive producer, but I’m both astonished and grateful.

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