Skinny polar bears (John Eidson) USofA

Information Worth Sharing John Eidson | April 14, 2019

The Chloe girl schools the Climate Kids about global warming Lesson 2: Skinny polar bears?

Hi, Climate Kids. The Chloe girl here. I’m back! This time I’m with my friend, Bailey the poodle.

Bailey’s ticked off, reason being some other dogs accused her of having white privilege.

She told them so do polar bears.

Anyway, me and Bailey care about the fate of polar bears, so we’ve done some checking about a frightening thing we heard, that global warming is causing polar bears to starve.

We found a picture on the Internet of this really skinny polar bear that looks like it’s dying. You can see that picture here.

Pretty sad, right?

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The people who try to scare kids about global warming say that picture shows that polar bears are starving due to melting Arctic ice that’s driving away seals, their primary food source.

Me and Bailey got to wondering what makes the people who use that picture to scare kids think that skinny bear was starving because it couldn’t find enough food?

Let me tell you about Mr. Eidson. I’m his rescue dog.

Many times in his life, Mr. Eidson was in the same emaciated condition as the poor bear in that picture, and not once was the cause a lack of food.

Mr. Eidson has a bad digestive disease that makes it hard to keep his weight up.

He’s been hospitalized many times, reason being intestinal obstructions. The last time he was in the hospital, he didn’t have anything but IV fluids for 6 days, and his weight dropped like a rock.

When he was sick, he looked as pathetic as that skinny polar bear, who might have been suffering from a digestive disease of its own. Or cancer. Or a broken jaw. Or intestinal parasites.

Maybe the bear was so old that it could no longer hunt. Maybe its mother died before she could teach it how to find other prey when the local seal population migrates.

Or maybe the people who took that picture went to the Arctic on a mission to find a skinny polar bear to photograph no matter how long it took.

Alternate possibilities for that bear’s condition are never mentioned by the people who lead kids to think that a picture of a skinny polar bear is proof that global warming is destroying the planet.

Here’s something else me and Bailey learned.

Have you Climate Kids ever heard of Nigel Marven? He’s a world-famous zoologist & wildlife documentary maker in the UK. Here’s a picture from his website. It shows him on an ice floe beside two fat and dirty polar bears with buck teeth. Oh, wait. Sorry. Bailey says they’re walruses.

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Anyway, Mr. Marven obviously has been to the Arctic, and he’s spent a lot of time there studying and filming polar bears. Here’s what he said in the UK Daily Mail about skinny polar bears: “I think climate change is happening, but as far as polar bears disappearing is concerned, I have never been more convinced that this is just scaremongering. People are deliberately seeking out skinny bears and filming them to [make people think] they’re dying out. That’s not right.”

Mr. Marven knows what he’s talking about—polar bears aren’t dying out. Me and Bailey read that the world polar bear population has steadily increased over recent decades.

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service reported that as of March 2017, there were an estimated 22,000-25,000 polar bears in the world. Some estimates say there were as many as 31,000 bears around the same time. That’s up from around 10,000 thirty years earlier.

Me and Bailey aren’t scientists, but it doesn’t look like polar bears are being wiped out by anything.

Anyway, that’s today’s global warming report from the Chloe girl. Stay tuned, Climate Kids. More to come!

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