Global warming is not pushing the robin to extinction. Au contraire: It’s expanding the robin’s range northward, into places where it's never been seen. Robins are venturing so far north that they’ve even been sighted in the Inuit territory of northern Canada, where, Sen. John McCain tells us, there isn’t even a word for the birds...
But, of course, it’s not true. Like the tale of the endangered polar bears that happen to be at or near record population levels, the robin story is yet another climate confabulation. It ranks with the death of frogs in the mountains of Colombia now shown to be caused not by global warming, but by the introduction of fatal fungus on the shoes of concerned ecotourists...
There are plenty of words in Inuit, or Eskimo, describing our red-breasted harbingers of spring. What’s a little disturbing is how the myth of the robin persists, when it is so easy to find the truth.
If man-made global warming is real, why do The Faithful have to keep lying about it? Or maybe on these topics, as on so many others (mosquitos in Harare, the hockey stick graph, the hottest year on record), they're just plain wrong.
Update, 4/17/08: Here's more for you.
3 comments:
They lie about it because they have no other way to bring about the changes they want. The more interesting question is why do supposedly sane and rational people listen to them. As the linked article points out, Stefansson wrote about robins in "My Life With the Eskimo," long before people worried about anthropogenic global warming. I might add that it is an interesting book for anyone curious about the Eskimo people although it has been 45 to 50 years since I read it. I don't remember whether it was in Stefansson's book or in another where I read that robins are considered a delicacy by some people, but I used to know an old sourdough who swore they were very tasty when fricasseed.
When it's a choice between the pleasures of moral disapproval and dreary facts I know which one I'd choose. But then I'm funny that way.
It's the mythology of the Big Lie. It's the same stuff that Alicia Keyes spouted in regards to her definitive knowledge that the federal government infected black people with AIDS and that gangsta rap was an invention of the white power lords to get black people to destroy each other. What kind of koolaid has she been drinking?
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