My new book, Fallen Icon: Sir David Attenborough and the Walrus Deception, is now available for purchase on Amazon. This is one you won’t want to miss!
Paperback and ebook versions are available at all Amazon outlets, including USA, Canada, UK, and Australia. There should also be a hard cover version within a week or so.
What people are saying about Fallen Icon and my introductory essay are below:
Continue readingComments Off on Fallen Icon: Sir David Attenborough and the Walrus Deception is now available
Posted in Advocacy, Book promotion, walrus
Tagged Attenborough, climate change, CoP26, Crockford, new book, tragedy porn, walrus, WEF
A new video with clips of critical footage not available outside the UK shows that Sir David Attenborough and Netflix producers (who insisted earlier this year that climate change – not polar bears – were to blame for Russian walrus falling to their deaths) had deceived audiences around the world.
Falling Walrus: Attenborough Tacitly Admits Netflix Deception (Susan Crockford/GWPF).
As I explained last month, footage from the Attenborough/BBC TV series Seven Worlds, One Planet (Asia) showed conclusively that events precipitating the walrus tradegy porn sequence in the Netflix film was a deception. It means that Attenborough, director Sophie Lanfear, cameraman Jamie McPherson, WWF in Chukotaka, and scientific advisor Anatoli Kochnev all knew this to be so.
In case you missed it, another episode of the same BBC One Planet TV series falsely claimed that polar bears hunting whales from shore are unprecedented effects of climate change.
Comments Off on New video shows Attenborough & Netflix falling walrus deception as revealed by BBC
Posted in Life History, Sea ice habitat, walrus
Tagged Attenborough, BBC, cliff, deception, falling, hunting, Netflix, polar bear, sea ice, tragedy porn, walrus, WWF
Concerns I raised earlier this year – see here and here – regarding the Sir David Attenborough’s Netflix walrus tragedy porn episode have been vindicated by a new Attenborough BBC TV special called Seven Worlds, One Planet (Asia). It shows film footage of polar bears – taken by drones – driving walrus off the same Siberian cliff that was shown in the Netflix documentary film released in April.
Few of the reporters who covered this story bothered to investigate further despite the evidence provided by myself and others that polar bears and drones were the likely triggers for these deaths: they simply took Attenborough and the film crew at their word.
Netflix director Sophie Lanfear and cameraman Jamie McPherson insisted there were no polar bears in the vicinity at the time they shot their film footage but this was clearly not the case. They knew that bears were involved because they filmed them menacing the walrus!
It is now evident that McPherson filmed the 20 or so polar bears stalking walrus at the top of the Ryrkaypiy cliff and driving them over the edge for the BBC episode only a few days prior to filming a few walrus falling with no bears present on the cliff top for the Netflix film in September 2017. The bears were close enough when the Netflix sequence was filmed to converge immediately on the rookery to feed on carcasses once the walrus herd left the beach.
Fat, healthy polar bears (not desperately hungry ones) were indeed involved in these walrus deaths and so were drones. Lack of sea ice was not a significant factor.
UPDATE 6 November 2019: See Paul Homewood’s take on this here. Additional video added at the end.
Comments Off on Polar bears precipitated Netflix walrus deaths, new Attenborough TV special shows
Posted in Advocacy, Sea ice habitat, walrus
Tagged Attenborough, BBC, cliffs, deaths, drones, Lanfear, McPherson, Netflix, One Planet, polar bear, Ryrkaypi, tragedy porn, walrus
These four images of thin or emaciated polar bears falsely blamed on climate change have scared kids like Greta Thunburg to death: the four white lies that scarred a generation.
If you see kids marching with signs like the one below – from a protest earlier this year in Montreal – you know they have seen the white lies that have been spread online. Note the poster starving bear below compared to the real-life on from 2015 above.
Here I summarize the truth about all four of these starving polar bear images that have been used since 2009 to emotionally manipulate the public (especially young girls), into getting on board the climate change band wagon. Rational people have seen through the rhetoric and come to realize that climate change is virtually never the cause of starvation. However, some poor kids have been scared to death by these images and the stories of climate change catastrophe they inspired – they are very real victims of climate change messaging at its worst.
Comments Off on These starving polar bears falsely blamed on climate change have scared kids to death
Posted in Advocacy, Cannibalism, Conservation Status, Sea ice habitat, Summary
Tagged cannibalism, climate change, Greta Thunburg, National Geographic, polar bear, protest, sea ice, starving, tragedy porn, video, white lie
Despite a demand by radical protest group Extinction Rebellion that governments “tell the truth” about climate change, it’s apparent that when it comes to walrus extinction risk they prefer the contrived walrus tragedy porn compiled by David Attenborough and his Netflix cronies over scientific evidence.
For this group of radical protesters, ‘the truth‘ is a narrative that serves their traffic-disrupting purposes. Since many gullible people – young and old – were horrified by the Netflix claim that hundreds of walruses in the western Arctic had hurled themselves off a cliff because of human-caused climate change, Extinction Rebellion plan to exploit this emotional connection during upcoming protests, apparently believing that what Attenborough told them was a fact. But in accepting docu-drama content without question, they are rejecting the best available science produced in 2017 by biologists who determined that Pacific walrus are not being harmed by the effects of climate change and are not threatened with extinction.
Comments Off on Fear promoted by young activists is based on false walrus & polar bear narratives
Posted in Advocacy, Conservation Status, Sea ice habitat, walrus
Tagged Attenborough, climate change, extinction, Greta Thunberg, lies, Netflix, polar bear, protest, rebellion, science, skeleton, tragedy porn, truth, walrus
The heartbreaking story of dying polar bears, told for more than a decade now, was meant to get kids on board the global warming action train. It worked a treat – except that it was never true. The lie gave sensitive children nightmares and turned others into political activists full of groundless outrage who now pointlessly rant in the streets.
As the established icon of climate change and Arctic habitats, polar bears have been given centre stage in the climate change narrative presented to young children and their teachers. But the distressing tale of polar bears on the brink of extinction – dying for our fossil fuel sins – was never true, as I show in point form below. Polar bear lies form the foundation of the baseless political activism of Greta Thunberg that other youngsters have since emulated.
Here are some of the false ‘facts’ children have been taught:
Comments Off on Stop lying to children about dying polar bears as a way to achieve action on climate change
Posted in Advocacy, Conservation Status, Sea ice habitat, Summary, walrus
Tagged abuse, children, education, emotion, facts, images, manipulation, polar bear, propaganda, science, sea ice, teachers, tragedy porn, trust
For those who missed it on Wednesday, here is the text of my essay on the walrus fiasco published in the Financial Post section of Canada’s National Post. A map of the region under discussion is here.
Susan J. Crockford April 24, 2019 9:46 AM EDT
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. Continue reading
Comments Off on In case you missed it, the text of my Financial Post essay on Netflix false walrus message
Posted in Advocacy, Sea ice habitat, Summary, walrus
Tagged Attenborough, climate change, global warming, haulout, Lanfear, National Geographic, Netflix, opinion, Our Planet, polar bear, sea ice, starving polar bear, tragedy porn, walrus, WWF
In case you missed it: The real story behind the famous starving polar-bear video reveals more manipulation (29 August 2018).
Comments Off on The politics of starving polar bears: my op-ed in the National Post last week
Posted in Advocacy, Conservation Status, Sea ice habitat
Tagged advocacy, apology, climate change, Mittermeier, National Geographic, Nicklen, opinion, polar bear, Sea Legacy, Somerset Island, starving, tragedy porn, video
Remember that video of an emaciated Baffin Island Somerset Island polar bear that went viral last December?1 In an unexpected follow-up (“Starving-Polar-Bear Photographer Recalls What Went Wrong“; National Geographic, August 2018 issue), photographer Cristina Mittermeier makes some astonishing admissions that might just make you sick.
It turns out they didn’t just come across the dying bear the day it was filmed: it was spotted at least two days earlier by Paul Nicklen. He must have had a satellite phone with him when he saw the bear but the only call he made was to his film crew — he made no attempt to find a local conservation officer to euthanize the bear, which would have been the right thing to do.
ADDED July 27 2018: Calling a conservation officer to euthanize the bear would have been the right thing to do not only out of compassion (and to know the cause of illness, because a necropsy would have been done), but because a starving bear is especially dangerous: it would have been a potential danger to any unsuspecting person who set foot on the island (he was strong enough to swim away, so was probably strong enough to kill a child, if not an adult).
The bear’s emaciated, near-death stagger2 was simply too tantalizing to pass up (video needs action: an emaciated dead bear would not been nearly as effective). Mittermeier claims they knew when they filmed the bear that he was sick or injured, but Nicklon presented it as an effect of climate change regardless. Mittermeier now says National Geographic simply “went too far” with their video caption (“This is what climate change looks like“), that she and Nicklan “lost control of the narrative.”
Actually, what they lost was their humanity.
Comments Off on The truth behind the Baffin Bay starving polar bear video is worse than we thought
Posted in Advocacy, Conservation Status
Tagged Baffin Island, climate change, Mittermeier, National Geographic, Nicklen, photographer, polar bear, sea ice, SeaLegacy, tragedy porn, video
We finally have this year’s example of the new fad of claiming every polar bear that died of starvation (or on its way to starving to death) — and caught on film — is a victim of climate change: a young bear on Somerset Island near Baffin Island, Nunavut filmed in August during its last agonizing hours by members of an activist conservation organization called SeaLegacy.
“‘I filmed with tears rolling down my cheeks’: Heart-breaking footage shows a starving polar bear on its deathbed struggling to walk on iceless land.” [actual title of article in the DailyMail Online, 8 December 2017]. CBC Radio (8 December 2017) jumped on it as well, as have others. National Geographic ran a similar story, like others, that compliantly emphasized the future man-made global warming threat the photographers were touting.
This is no different from Ian Stirling’s “bear that died of climate change” back in 2013, or several others since then: here, here, and here (one of these incidents also involved the same photographer as this incident, Paul Nicklen). I’ve called this practice of filming dead or dying bears and splashing the photos across the pages of newspapers and the internet “tragedy porn” — a kind of voyeurism that leaves people open to emotional manipulation. The internet laps it up.
UPDATE 9 December 2017: a quote from another source shows photographer Paul Nicklen’s “expertise” in polar bear biology, see below.
UPDATE 11 December 2017: an Arctic seal specialist, Jeff Higdon, has weighed in via twitter about the possible cause of death of this bear and also what the SeaLegacy team should have done when they found the bear in this condition. See below
UPDATE 12 December 2017: See my update to this post here.
Comments Off on One starving bear is not evidence of climate change, despite gruesome photos
Posted in Advocacy, Life History, Sea ice habitat
Tagged mass mortality, media hype, sea ice loss, starvation, tragedy porn
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