In response to:
I always found the polar bear stories and photos to be incredibly dumb. “Oh, look at this poor polar bear ‘stranded’ on this little iceberg. Won’t you please do something before it melts and he drowns in the ocean?” I would think to myself “Um, aren’t polar bears really good swimmers?” They might as well show a picture of an eagle and say “Look at this poor eagle ‘stranded’ at the top of this tree. Won’t you please do something to stop the logging industry before they cut it down and he falls to his death?”
In a better world, debates about science -- and nearly everything else -- would be conducted without resort to demagoguery, sentimentality, cynical manipulation, or hysteria. In the world we inhabit, those tactics are dismayingly routine. Still, the great weakness of overwrought predictions of doom is that they can be checked.
The past year has not been kind to the most potent symbols of climate change hysteria. Consider the polar bears. Among the most moving images of the warmists' warnings was the solitary polar bear, supposedly marooned on an ice floe. The image became iconic after it was published in Science Magazine....
Probably just line their pockets courtesy of those rubes that donated!!!