From Climate Scepticism

By Jit

Guess why…

The “New Tab” on Firefox offers, as well as a grid of your favourite haunts, some curated stories from around the world. I once tried to get to the bottom of who selected them, perceiving a rather left-climate bias in the selections. However, despite a polite interaction with a volunteer, I ended up none the wiser. Probably the staff picks the stories. The staff is left-climate. Hence, so are the stories.

Today [actually by the time you’re reading this, it’s two days ago], one such story had the headline of this note, saving the snark quotes. Ten animal species were facing UK extinction, thanks to surging temperatures and climate change. The two factors are seemingly divisible now. It’s rather like saying a murder victim died of a 45 calibre bullet through the heart, and a gunshot wound.

What are these ten species? I wondered. I thought I’d try to guess, but before I could action that thought, I’d already read the sub head, which as you can see gives away three of the victims: puffins, red squirrels, and hedgehogs. [The featured image might be a clue to one of the other 7 too.]

Now I only had to guess the rump. The guessing involved a certain amount of second guessing, because I had to put myself in the mindset of someone determined to find peril in the most innocuous things. Should I stick to birds and mammals? What about insects, or fish? The idea that one of our few reptiles might suffer from surging temperature was of course ludicrous. Well, here’s what I came up with for the missing 7.

• Ptarmigan
• Capercaillie
• Kittiwake
• Swallowtail butterfly
• Killer whale
• Salmon
• Char

A good spread of taxa, but who knows, might be well off the mark. Are any of them genuinely threatened by climate change? Well, the best shout is the ptarmigan, thanks to its high altitude life. When you live on the tops of the highest mountains, there’s nowhere to go if it gets any warmer. How many do I score out of 7?

Note that quite an impressive list could have been made along these lines:

• Northern right whale
• Large blue butterfly
• Large copper butterfly
• Lynx
• Brown bear
• Elk
• Reindeer
• Beaver
• Wolf
• Great auk
• Sea eagle

Whoops! That’s eleven, not ten. An astute reader will know that these are species that are or have been driven to extinction in the UK in historical times. [One or two have been re-introduced on a small scale.] Note that none, so far as I know, suffered their fate at the hands of surging temperatures, or climate change; they were either hunted out, or met their fate due to land-use change. I wonder whether the iNews author is aware of all of them?

Asterisk: the large blue went extinct after the drought of 1976 – see Dead Butterfly Blues – but it had already been reduced down to a tiny remnant population by that time. Such populations are incredibly vulnerable to the vicissitudes of chance, and almost inevitably dwindle to nothing.

So, how did I do? Here is iNews’s list:

• Turtle dove
• Cuckoo
• Red squirrel
• Scottish wildcat
• Hedgehog
• Peregrine falcon
• Short-eared owl
• Barnacle goose
• Puffin
• Manx shearwater

Well, of the 7 I didn’t already know from the headline, I guessed exactly 0 of them. Are any of the 10 actually threatened by climate change? No, I don’t think so. Ptarmigan was a much better shout.

The iNews has its climate scientist to go to for absurd quotes. His name is Dr. Jesse Abrams. Quoth he:

“As the planet continues to warm, some of Britain’s most beloved wildlife face imminent threats: the turtle dove population has declined by 98 per cent since the 1950s and may disappear entirely, while hedgehog numbers have crashed by 95 per cent since the 1950s, with almost a third of the population lost since 2000 alone. Red squirrels are already all but extinct in England and Wales and the Scottish wildcat is critically endangered,” Dr Abrams said.

Those stats may be true, but it is disgraceful to try to stamp them with “Because teh climate.” The turtle dove has declined thanks to the sterilisation of the countryside. See all those weeds in the fields of wheat as you drive by them? Thought not. That’s why there are no turtle doves. The turtle doves can’t see them either, or eat their seeds. It would actually be quite easy to go through the list and explain the real reasons for the other species’ declines too.

But I’m not going to trouble you with that. [We have already discussed puffins.] I’m just going to pick one, and no I’m not going to pretend I chose randomly. I cherry picked! How evil of me. I want to pick…

Peregrine falcon

This species, which is allegedly threatened with extinction in the UK “because teh climate” is found all around the world. Literally. Here’s a distribution map from wiki (numbers represent different subspecies):

Somehow, they manage to survive in tropical Africa, but in the UK, teh climate is gonna do for them! Nope: crass misinformation. Or probably disinformation, since the iNews is supposed to be an authoritative source. Well, it blew it. You can find peregrines in Australia, Fiji, India, Japan, South Africa, California…

But I want to draw your eye to a little * on the map. Do you see it? What might that represent? What about the green Es nearby? Well, I’ll tell you. Let me quote from an old book of mine, Leslie Brown’s Birds of Prey (1976). My bold:

In all developed countries of western Europe, Britain included, and North America it has become scarce or even – in eastern North America – extinct…

The primary cause of this decline seems absolutely clear. It is not due to persecution by gamekeepers, egg collectors, or pigeon fanciers, which the peregrines survived in a mild way until the fifties of this century. It is primarily due to pesticides used in agriculture…

And these tyros have the audacity to deliver lectures on the perils of teh climate.

Asterisk: peregrines have been re-introduced to eastern North America. That’s what the asterisk means. The Es show localised extinctions, thanks to DDT.

Here’s the EBBA 2 (European Breeding Bird Atlas) map of the peregrine’s present range in Europe:

It’s clinging to the extreme far north! Any sniff of more warmth, and it’s toast! Oh… wait… maybe we’re just talking BS to scare people into supporting pointless climate policies? [Note there is still a large gap in Eastern Europe, presumably a legacy of communist times.]

Now showing the change between the two atlases: 1980s for EBBA 1 and 2013-17 for EBBA 2. The blue shows where the bird is found in EBBA 2 but not EBBA 1 – i.e., where it has expanded from the 1980s onwards, from its nadir under the pummelling of our little friend DDT:

The lesson here is that when you stop poisoning birds, their population stops declining, and they start recolonising places where they’ve been wiped out.

Summary: Humans have laid waste to vast swathes of the Earth, but their attempts to kill things by increasing the CO₂ concentration of the atmosphere have so far come to naught. This is just rubbish by iNews and its pet climate scientist. Guys, learn some ecology. Read some history. It did not begin when you were born. Don’t make authoritative statements unless you are damn sure what you are talking about. First, identify the real problems. Then, you can help to find the real solutions.

/rant over