Attenborough’s cliff-dying walrus convinced elite Davos influencers of a global climate emergency

For the past two years, the Netflix/Attenborough ruse to blame climate change for walruses falling from a high cliff to their deaths seemed like a silly PR stunt. But it appears the film’s real purpose was to convince a far more important audience than paying Netflix customers that a global ‘climate emergency’ was going on: the elite influencers and world leaders who attended the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2019, where the dying walrus film clip was introduced and interpreted to the audience by Sir David Attenborough himself.

In the spring of 2019, Netflix released its ‘Our Planet’ documentary that included a clip of walruses falling from a high cliff in Siberia to their deaths on jagged rocks below, which Sir David Attenborough’s narration told viewers was due to lack of sea ice caused by climate change. It moved people to tears, as it was meant to do.

Of course, we now know that already-fat polar bears deliberately frightened those walrus over the edge – using a particular effective, site-specific hunting strategy that avoided fighting the dangerous beasts head-on – and it all had nothing to do with walrus struggling desperately to survive in a warming world. This explanation not only makes biological sense, it’s backed by solid evidence. Since it is now clear that the truth would eventually came out when the BBC aired its own documentary in November 2019 showing bears driving walrus to their deaths, the Netflix/Attenborough ruse seemed like a silly PR stunt.

Now I know otherwise.

Here is a quote from a blog post written by Anatoli Kochnev, the Russian on-site ‘scientific advisor’ to the Netflix producers, who helped out with filming in Ryrkaypiy on the coast of the Chukchi Sea; the post is dated 7 April 2019 [via Google Translate, my bold]:

Just in the fall of 2017, I worked as an expert and field guide with a British team of filmmakers who shot walruses and polar bears for two programs of the BBC and the Living Planet company. This year, films should appear on television and computer screens… A couple of days ago [sic, actually months], at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Sir David Attenborough and Prince William presented a preliminary version of the film, in which one of the key stories was presented with shots taken then, in 2017, in Chukotka…The most vivid and dramatic shots captured the fall of walrus from the cliffs, where they climb because of the lack of space on the beach and to avoid unpleasant smells from the nearby village. That year, only on one of the rookeries where we were shooting, about 800 walruses died, of which almost a third broke when falling from rocks…It is said that some of the important economic and political bosses could not keep tears when watching a film in Davos.

My mind has always been on science and politics one of my least-favourite topics. But government responses to the coronovirus over the last year have forced me to pay more attention to politics than I have ever done in my life. Eyes finally open, I note the following:

• • The officially released video of the ‘conversation’ between Attenborough and Prince William mentioned by Kochnev does not contain the falling walrus clip.
  • Most of the video has still shots as background; the only video clip shows a glacier calving, starting at 28:20 and running until the end of the video at 31:28. The camera doesn’t return to Sir David and the Prince after the glaciers calving and that seemed an unlikely way to end such a high-profile demonstration.
  • Obviously, they couldn’t have included the walrus-falling clip in the version of the ‘conversation’ posted online in January because Netflix was not scheduled to release the film until April: it was an embargoed private screening and Kochnev was told, as thanks for his help, moved the audience to tears.
  • Greta Thunberg also attended that 2019 meeting and said ‘Our house is on fire.‘
  • With Thunberg and Attenborough presenting human-caused climate change as a global existential emergency, hammered home with heartbreaking footage of dying walrus guaranteed to bring the audience to tears.
  • WEF plans for ‘Globalization‘ in 2019 quickly became The Great Reset in June 2020, in their own words to ‘cooperate in simultaneously managing the direct consequences of the COVID-19 crisis.’
  • Hence the new covid recovery meme, ‘Build Back Better.’

Attenborough must have known after seeing the footage he was to narrate that the walrus death sequence was a visual even better than a starving polar bear for convincing people that a human-caused climate emergency was at hand. He knew he had dynamite and wasn’t afraid to use it.

The possible significance of the video being played at the Davos meeting, as Kochnev described it, went over my head as anything of significance when I read it in April 2019. As I said, I’d never been interested in politics. Even when it was clear the film had had such a profound emotional impact on viewers yet was a blatant lie, it seemed only to be the usual sort of thing environmentalists would do to get attention. But now, watching the world’s covid responses morph into a sinister-sounding masterplan coming out of Davos, this manipulation of polar bear science has taken on new significance.

The 2021 World Economic Forum opens in Davos tomorrow (25-29 January). Eyes open.