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Video Shows Starving Polar Bear on Iceless Land
31–40 of 82 posts
Re: Video Shows Starving Polar Bear on Iceless Land
#32While it's sad that the bear died it's a bit of a jump to link it to global warming.
Are you familiar with Baffin Island? Are you aware that polar bears need sea ice to hunt?
It is very easy to draw a line from warming to lack of sea ice in a place where our living record shows there should be ample amounts to polar bears in Baffin starving. This is not a jump.
Re: Video Shows Starving Polar Bear on Iceless Land
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, this is probably effective propaganda, and moreover, propaganda for a just cause. Nonetheless it is not evidence for climate change, and moreover it is not even necessarily an example of the effects of climate change - even we 100% fix climate change, there will still be plenty of starving wild animals available for sad videos. The actual way to ensure there are no starving wild animals is to exterminate them in…
Has anyone in the linked article or in these comments tried to position this video as evidence of climate change? I don't see it if so.
Sure, it's in the original article.
> By telling the story of one polar bear, Nicklen hopes to convey a larger message about how a warming climate has deadly consequences.
Re: Video Shows Starving Polar Bear on Iceless Land
#34Individual animals in the wild die cruel, slow, painful deaths all the time, regardless of whether their species as a whole is thriving or not. So while this video might evoke a strong emotional response, it is just an anecdote and not actually evidence one way or the other for human-caused climate change. Of course, human-caused climate change is obviously real, but it's not OK to use bad arguments even if your conc…
> I am merely pointing out that one could produce a video of a starving polar bear both in our world and in the world where climate change is not happening, because wild animals starve all the time. Good thing most people already know we don't live in the world where climate change is not happening, so this doesn't need to act as proof of it happening, but rather as an individual example of what is happening all over…
Being an animal is generally a terrible experience, so using an individual, terrible experience of an animal to make a political point seems disingenuous.
Re: Video Shows Starving Polar Bear on Iceless Land
#35"Heart-wrenching" doesn't convince minds in Hacker News.
Did you watch the video?
It's rough.
Re: Video Shows Starving Polar Bear on Iceless Land
#36Polar Bear populations are not declining. Also, the plural of anecdote is not data. https://polarbearscience.com/2017/02/15/baffin-bay-and-kane-...
Observed polar bear populations are not declining. However, since there is far less ice the polar bear are much easier to find these days, making the counts go up, rather than down. This has been the case in Svalbard, at least.
And there I was thinking Svalbard was only a made up island for the Bear Kingdom in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy...
Re: Video Shows Starving Polar Bear on Iceless Land
#37Individual animals in the wild die cruel, slow, painful deaths all the time, regardless of whether their species as a whole is thriving or not. So while this video might evoke a strong emotional response, it is just an anecdote and not actually evidence one way or the other for human-caused climate change. Of course, human-caused climate change is obviously real, but it's not OK to use bad arguments even if your conc…
We need to use whatever arguments are effective to steer people and governments to good policy as long as we know those arguments are supporting a cause that is scientifically backed. Some people don't get and don't want to get scientific evidence. If there is a plausible causal chain from global climate change to that suffering polar bear we should be using that polar bear to convince people climate change is real and bad. Most people don't have the patience for or interest in scientific arguments and we have to convince most people that this is a problem not just hacker news.
Re: Video Shows Starving Polar Bear on Iceless Land
#38Individual animals in the wild die cruel, slow, painful deaths all the time, regardless of whether their species as a whole is thriving or not. So while this video might evoke a strong emotional response, it is just an anecdote and not actually evidence one way or the other for human-caused climate change. Of course, human-caused climate change is obviously real, but it's not OK to use bad arguments even if your conc…
We need to use whatever arguments are effective to steer people and governments to good policy as long as we know those arguments are supporting a cause that is scientifically backed. Some people don't get and don't want to get scientific evidence. If there is a plausible causal chain from global climate change to that suffering polar bear we should be using that polar bear to convince people climate change is real a…
There is no way for the general public to distinguish between arguments presented in this way that are genuine, and ones that are pseudoscientific. It's never ok to knowingly present information which is unscientific, to achieve a political end. It can be discredited and may do more damage to the cause than good. In this particular case, polar bear populations are not observed to be in decline, so it's a poor argument to make, which can easily be discredited with real data.
Re: Video Shows Starving Polar Bear on Iceless Land
#39Individual animals in the wild die cruel, slow, painful deaths all the time, regardless of whether their species as a whole is thriving or not. So while this video might evoke a strong emotional response, it is just an anecdote and not actually evidence one way or the other for human-caused climate change. Of course, human-caused climate change is obviously real, but it's not OK to use bad arguments even if your conc…
We need to use whatever arguments are effective to steer people and governments to good policy as long as we know those arguments are supporting a cause that is scientifically backed. Some people don't get and don't want to get scientific evidence. If there is a plausible causal chain from global climate change to that suffering polar bear we should be using that polar bear to convince people climate change is real a…
That’s called propoganda. You advocate using propoganda to justify a cause you have predetermined to be scientifically backed. Why not just use the scientific backing directly?
Re: Video Shows Starving Polar Bear on Iceless Land
#40Maybe you'd prefer watching a polar bear eat a seal alive?
yea no kiddin seals are probably in favor of climate change