National Geographic has acknowledged that it went 'too far' in linking a starving polar bear's condition directly to climate change in a widely circulated video. The footage, released in December 2017, showed an emaciated bear scavenging on Baffin Island, Canada, with the caption: 'This is what climate change looks like.'
The magazine now states there is no evidence to confirm the bear's starvation was caused by climate change. In a revised version, the caption reads: 'This is what a starving polar bear looks like,' and notes that the bear went missing after filming, making it impossible to determine the specific cause of its condition.
Photographer Cristina Mittermeier, who captured the image, admitted in an article that the team may have been 'naive' in assuming the bear's plight was due to climate change. She wrote: '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.'
The original video was viewed by an estimated 2.5 billion people globally. Experts have suggested that factors such as old age, sickness, or injury could also explain the bear's condition.
