ABSTRACT

In 2006, a single picture launched a thousand articles about global warming. It ran in the Sunday Telegraph, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the International Herald Tribune, The Times (London), and many other papers. It was said to have been taken by Canadian environmentalists and to show a pair of polar bears stranded on Arctic ice that was shrinking due to global warming. It made polar bears the poster animals of global warming, a status they retained even after the photograph’s evidentiary status was discredited: it turned out that the photograph wasn’t taken by environmentalists, but by a student of marine biology, who did not release the image herself and who never intended to convey that she was recording evidence of global warming. Moreover, the photo was taken in August, at the height of the Alaskan summer, when melting ice is normal. The ice oes pictured were not very far from land, and polar bears are good swimmers (Sheppard). Predictably, right-wing anti-environmentalists and global-warming deniers such as Rush Limbaugh were quick to use the episode to their own advantage, saying that this “fraud” was “a great little microcosm for the entire global warming escapade” (qt. by Zurkow).