Global Warming fake news: Nat Geo photographer admits polar bear images, video were not connected to climate change

A National Geographic photographer is confessing that the a viral photo and video showing heart-wrenching images of a polar bear were not connected to global warming or climate change in any way.

“We had lost control of the narrative,” admitted Cristina Mittermeier, the photographer of the polar bear. Mittermeier explained the climate change deception in a piece titled “Starving-Polar-Bear Photographer Recalls What Went Wrong” for the magazine’s August issue.

Mittermeier conceded that the images of the bony, emaciated polar bear were meant to sound an alarm about climate change, though she complains that people took the image “literally.”

“Photographer Paul Nicklen and I are on a mission to capture images that communicate the urgency of climate change. Documenting its effects on wildlife hasn’t been easy,” she wrote. “With this image, we thought we had found a way to help people imagine what the future of climate change might look like. We were, perhaps, naive. The picture went viral — and people took it literally.”

Why was this taken literally?

Likely due to Nat Geo’s first line of the video, which was, “This is what climate change looks like,” emphasizing the words “climate change” in the magazine’s signature yellow.

“In retrospect, National Geographic went too far with the caption,” says Mittermeier.

The “fake news” narrative was viewed by over 2.5 billion sets of eyes, becoming the magazine’s most viral video in their history.

Mittermeier admitted that she could not say for sure “that this bear was starving because of climate change.”

“Perhaps we made a mistake in not telling the full story — that we were looking for a picture that foretold the future and that we didn’t know what had happened to this particular polar bear,” she wrote.