They do this all the time because they don't care about facts, only narrative

So, National Geographic sent a photography team to document evidence that "climate change" -- which we used to call "global warming" before the data stopped supporting that -- was harming the Arctic. The team came up with this picture:

Yeah, that bear looks to be in pretty bad shape. Why? Who knows? National Geographic didn't care about "why." They turned the emaciated bear into a video, which appeared in the magazine's online version about a year ago, the first line of which read, "This is what climate change looks like." Unfortunately for National Geographic, there was no evidence the bear's condition had anything to do with so-called "climate change," and the people who took the video and pictures recently admitted that the magazine "went too far."

One of the members of the team wrote an article that appears in the August 2018 edition of National Geographic lamenting that the picture was misunderstood:

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 in the article. “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.

Let's take this a step at a time. Global warming/climate change/climate disruption/everything else those assholes have called it remains a theory, not a fact. The theory is poorly supported by evidence, so the proponents keep changing what it is that proves the theory. Science doesn't work that way, but, hey, whatever. Nonetheless, these people were "on a mission" to demonstrate "the urgency of climate change," which is not even proven yet. The reason "documenting its effects on wildlife" hasn't been easy is because it is not at all clear that climate change, of the man-made variety, is occurring and because animals adapt in any event. Polar bears, for instance, have been around in their current form for 100,000 years, passing through a whole bunch of natural climate change without dying out. The catastrophe isn't there, which makes it hard to document.

That didn't stop National Geographic from posting the teams footage and pictures of a starving polar bear can calling it "what climate change looks like." No wonder people took it "literally." More than 2.5 billion people saw the video, the most ever for a National Geographic video, and the team that provided the footage admits that they have no idea whether that bear's condition has anything to do with "climate change." In fact, there are a number of more likely factors affecting the bear's condition:

Some experts suggested a number of reason besides climate change that could’ve led to the animal’s condition, including age, illness or even injury.
Mittermeier admits that she couldn’t “say 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.”

So, National Geographic publishes a story and video claiming polar bears are starving because of climate change, yet has not a shred of evidence that this is true. Sounds about par for the course. Facts matter far less than the narrative.