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| Home Front: Politix |
| Save the Whales? How About Save the Russians! |
| 2004-12-21 |
| Steyn's back. Edited for length. Professor Lloyd Peck of the British Antarctic Survey is worried about — stop me if you've heard this one before — global warming. For this year's Royal Institution Christmas lecture, he'll be warning that the merest smidgeonette of an increase in temperature in the south polar seabed will lead to the loss of a zillion species. As the oceans warm, the ice shelves that extend from the polar depths into the sub-Antarctic light will shrink, and the thick mats of algae on their underside will vanish, and the billions of tiny krill that feed on them will perish, and pretty soon, up at the scenic end of the food chain, all those cute seals and penguins and whales will be gone. And all this will happen if the temperature goes up two degrees, from butt-numbingly freezing to marginally less butt-numbingly freezing. "It is going to be really unpleasant," Prof Peck tells the Guardian. "We are going to lose things — we just don't know how much." snip But, on the other hand, somebody might have invented a thing the size of the Palm Pilot you staple to the seabed that automatically lowers the temperature by two degrees and we'll have wall-to-wall algae. Who can say? What we do know for certain is that the krill's chances of survival are a lot greater than, say, those of the Italians, or the Germans, or the Japanese, Russians, Greeks and Spaniards, all of whom will be in steep population decline long before the Antarctic krill. By 2025, one in every three Japanese will be over 65, and that statistic depends on the two out of three who aren't over 65 sticking around to pay the tax bills required to support the biggest geriatric population in history. Does the impending extinction of the Japanese and Russians not distress anyone? How about the Italians? They gave us the Sistine Chapel, the Mona Lisa, Gina Lollobrigida, linguine, tagliatelle, fusilli. If you're in your scuba suit down on the ice shelf dining with the krill and you say you'd like your algae al dente in a carbonara sauce, they'll give you a blank look. Billions of years on Earth and all they've got is the same set menu they started out with. But try and rouse the progressive mind to a "Save the Italians" campaign and you'll get nowhere. Luigi isn't as important as algae, even though he, too, is a victim of profound environmental changes: globally warmed by Euro-welfare, he no longer feels the need to breed. And, if he doesn't care if he survives, why should the penguins and the krill feel any differently? Given the choice between the krill's hypothetically impending extinction and their own impending extinction already under way, Europeans would apparently rather fret about the denizens of the deep. Even Chesterton, who observed that once man has ceased to believe in God he'll believe in anything, might have marvelled at how swift the decay from post-Christian to post-evolutionary. Like the old song says: What's it all about — algae? |
| Posted by:badanov |
| #8 "Adapt or Die" -- Charles Darwin |
| Posted by: mojo 2004-12-21 5:33:03 PM |
| #7 LOL Shamu! Where's the Hose Man? |
| Posted by: Shipman 2004-12-21 3:29:06 PM |
| #6 Dopey me, I thought Greenpeace wanted to SHAVE the whales. |
| Posted by: Deacon Blues 2004-12-21 2:58:51 PM |
| #5 mmmm Michael Moore |
| Posted by: Shamu 2004-12-21 11:42:40 AM |
| #4 Bring it on. NOW! |
| Posted by: Shipman 2004-12-21 11:39:14 AM |
| #3 Tom, lol! If you can get Michael Moore to eat your Krill, you'll make a fortune....a non-profit one, of course. |
| Posted by: 2b 2004-12-21 9:57:50 AM |
| #2 Here in Philadelphia, the "normal" low for December 20 (yesterday) is 29F. Last year on December 20 it was 26F. Yesterday it was 10F. Clearly Philadelphia is entering a new Ice Age. I'm running my furnace on overtime trying to induce global warming. I'm also looking for investors in my new company, Algae of Philadelphia Enterprises (APE) -- we're going to make a fortune selling algae and krill to members of our new Feed the Whales non-profit. |
| Posted by: Tom 2004-12-21 9:51:16 AM |
| #1 In case you think this BS is so lame that no one would believe it, think again. I have a friend, she's really nice, kind, thoughtful, etc....and she just went on a trip (won't say where - the rantworld's a small place) but the temperature was unusually warm for the weekend. Weather cycles take millions of years, but, my friends, with a wink and a nod, I was to believe that "unusually warm weather" was all the evidence we need. |
| Posted by: 2b 2004-12-21 9:22:28 AM |