New footage revealed that polar bears, not climate change, caused the deaths of walruses shown in the 2019 Netflix documentary Our Planet. The British lobby group Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) released a video Nov. 19 showing polar bears driving walruses to their deaths. The walruses bounced off sharp rocks as they fell to their deaths – which Russian photographer Yevgeny Basov captured back in September 2017.
Netflix used Basov’s footage in its 2019 documentary Our Planet, with narrator David Attenborough remarking that the summer sea ice melting due to climate change triggered the walruses’ deaths. However, the same footage was used in the later British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) documentary Seven Worlds, One Planet – this time showing the polar bears driving the walruses to the edge of the cliff. A statement by the GWPF called the walrus deaths in the Netflix film “damning evidence” that the documentary constructed “a false narrative … to elicit an emotional response from the public.”
The anti-climate alarmism lobby group explained that the scene, filmed in Cape Schmidt in northeast Russia, was “a raw but natural encounter between predator and prey.” Walruses hauling out on land during the summer is a natural event that happens when sea ice is available. Polar bears are known to stalk such herds until they stampede, leaving weakened or unwary walruses crushed in their wake. Albeit the tactic is especially efficient, running down walruses toward cliffs is not an essential hunting strategy for polar bears.
The GWPF further remarked that the brutal footage did not serve as evidence of either climate change or animal species about to be extinct. Rather, it only proved that Attenborough’s claim that walruses throwing themselves off cliffs due to climate change “is a manipulative sham with no resemblance to reality.”
GWPF previously flagged BBC documentary for promoting climate alarmism
This instance was not the first time the GWPF pointed out inaccuracies in an environmental documentary. In April 2019, the group sent an open letter to the BBC regarding misleading information in its documentary Climate Change: The Facts.
The open letter signed by GWPF Director Dr. Benny Peiser said the program highlighted “that storms, floods, heat waves and sea level rise are all rapidly getting worse” as a result of climate change. However, “the best available data … contradicts the BBC’s alarmist exaggeration of empirical evidence. Peiser also remarked that the documentary did not lean toward “accurately describing the impact of climate change, but instead in promoting a political agenda.” (Related: The very same climate change lunatics who told us we would all be dead by now are demanding we surrender to authoritarianism to save the world.)
The GWPF director ended his letter by saying that Climate Change: The Facts “should be considered as a whole to be unbalanced and misleading, giving its insistence on ignoring the nuances of climate science in favor of presenting a wholly alarmist narrative.”
Netflix used to push climate alarmism
Other programs on the streaming platform have promoted talking points regarding climate alarmism. One such program is The Magic School Bus Rides Again, a reboot of the 1990s cartoon series The Magic School Bus.
The tenth episode of the reboot, titled “The Tales Glaciers Tell,” features the teacher Ms. Frizzle taking her class to a glacier and telling them that man’s inventions are causing pollution that threatens to destroy the planet. She continues that Earth will spiral into a slow, miserable death – unless people do something about it by using their bicycles instead of riding their cars and reducing the amount of electricity they use daily.
Bill Nye Saves The World is another Netflix program espousing climate alarmism. Hosted by the eponymous television personality, it is a reboot of Nye’s earlier show Bill Nye The Science Guy. Soon enough, the first episode of the reboot warned viewers about the dangers of climate change – even using pandas to bring his point forward.
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Sources include:
TheGWPF.org [PDF]
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