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Comment by badmadrad | Hacker News Reader

Stop using polar bears for climate change propaganda. Most data shows that polars bears have adapted to melting ice with some populations even increasing. Some polar bears whose populations are in decline are actually thought to be effected by overhunting. Overall, polar bear populations are stable to increasing. The starving polar is thought to have been old or suffering from cancer.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...

If you use lies and mistruths to bolster your point then you scuttle your entire argument.

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Hi! Until quite recently most scientists I know agreed that we did not have conclusive evidence that climate change was directly harming polar bear populations. However, a recent study provided the first empirical evidence of that happening [0]. I hope you read and maybe change your mind about it!

[0] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6375/568

I don't have access to article but the keyword is "likely" in the abstract. And doesn't take away from the fact this article used a misleading video to bolster it's argument. Climate Change is real but understanding the impact is something that is still uncertain.

What's uncertain is how apocalyptically bad it's going to be on a scale of "society collapses" to "everyone dies", plus when that's going to happen on a time scale of "ten years" to "two hundred years".

Every year they adjust their estimates things get worse.

This is not propaganda, it's science. Anthropogenic climate change is a factual reality.

The polar bear is mentioned in the article as a simple example of species whose habitats are changing because of human actions. It's a bad faith argument to suggest that the article is invalidated by this reference.

They way I read it is that the changing habitat will hurt the polar bear (now click here to see polar bear starving because it can't find food due to ice melting).

The data does not YET bear(no pun intended) this out and alluding to a viral video is a sympathy play and not anything backed in reality but rather speculation and prognostication.

So by its very nature its propaganda since it's using misleading information to put forward a point of view as absolute truth.

Misleading tactics will always hurt your argument in the long run.

Climate change is real, but that it is anthropogenic? There is no clarity on that at all. I have seen various evidence that has been presented as being "clear evidence of anthropogenic causes" and if you look at it at through specially designed glasses, you might be able to say that.

Climate change covers a vast set of conditions and has a vast set of causes. To claim that anthropogenic causes are the major or only significant causes is "pulling the wool over everyone's eyes".

Since we have essentially no understanding of the causes or interactions in how or why climate changes, the "anthropogenic climate change" leads us to conclusions and solutions that will be ineffective and more than likely be more destructive than stopping and actually doing proper investigations.

All "catastrophic" scenarios so far given by "climate scientists" do not answer where the energy comes from for their scenarios. The energy requirements are so large that this planet would be long dead before their scenarios would play out.

Since even school children can study up on polar bears (and have done so) and see that the "polar bear" story is just propaganda, so can you.

Another thread here on hn was talking about "fake news" and what could/should be done. In that I commented that it is up to people to investigate for themselves the information in question. There are various researchers who are doing interesting research in related fields and showing results that do not fit in the "anthropogenic climate change" mindset.

There are questions being asked and are actively being ignored by climate scientists. Why?

When proponents of climate change stray from facts to "appeal to emotion" falsehoods, it really does a tremendous disservice to the discussion. But what do we expect from something like vox?

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