Anyone watching a little TV these days will see the adverts. The starving polar bear, the heartfelt pleas for money to stop this happening. Then the larger insistence that climate change is threatening the very survival of that species.

Which it might even do but it isn’t as yet:

Too many polar bears are roaming the Canadian Arctic, and the growing population is posing an increasing threat to Inuit communities, according to a controversial new government report which has been bitterly contested by environmental scientists.

The bitterly contested is that climate change is changing hunting grounds thus pushing those bears extant closer to humans. The alternative explanation is simply that there are more bears.

This should be easy enough to work out, count the bears as best we can and see whether there are more of them now than there used to be. The answer being yes.

Thus we should view this insistence on the damage climate change is already doing to polar bears as disinformation.

Do note what we generally say about the larger subject around here - let’s have a carbon tax as that’s the solution to the basic problem. What irks in this instance is the claim which turns out not to have substance.

As with the pictures of polar bears swimming far from land - yes, that’s what polar bears do. Similarly the images of starving such. Yes, that’s how apex predators die. Unlike everything else in the food chain they don’t become lunch as soon as the rheumatics kick in, they die sans teeth sans everything. There are no hospice beds, no Liverpool Pathway, to ease the passing. There’s the inability to hunt then starvation.

It’s the demonstrably untrue claims about climate change that annoy. The propaganda. As they should annoy those who desire greater action - if you base your justifications upon things that can be proven wrong then when they are people are going to more than wonder about the underlying claim you’re making, aren’t they?