Being cute could be bad for your health

First they brought you cute but deadly polar bears: confoundingly, their numbers increased in direct proportion to the number of stories telling us that they were all going to die.

Then they brought you the cute but cuddly koala not-a-bear, allegedly disappearing fast because ‘carbon pollution’ has been poisoning their main food source, eucalyptus leaves. This wee porkie fell at the first hurdle because we all knew that carbon (dioxide) ‘pollution’ is actually very good for plant-life; eucalyptus trees are no exception. Sadly though,  carbon dioxide is of absolutely no use to eucalyptus trees after they’ve been cut down. And that’s what’s been happening..

Next came the cute but obliging llama. So far, they’ve been immune to greenie alarm syndrome but to improve their cute credentials in the climate headline-grabbing  stakes, they assisted the UK’s insane Environment Agency to llama-lift some dull but helpless vendace to ‘cooler’ waters. The llamas thought they were doing their bit for global warming but the greenies lied to them – the problem for the vendace was actually a long-standing pollution issue..

And now, in desperation, the eco-worriers are putting the cute but weird duck-billed platypus on the front line;


The animals, considered some of the most intriguing on Earth, have evolved a watertight fur that enables it to feed for up to 10 hours a day in water that is close to freezing. However, as Australia’s waterways warm up, the thick pelt could spell disaster for the platypus.

So, no hope of evolving a thinner pelt, then?

Using weather and platypus habitat data stretching back more than 100 years, researchers were able to map declines in particular populations in connection with droughts and heat events.

You mean we had droughts and heat events before the climate ‘changed’? Who’d have thunk it? And how stupid of those platypussies, to have evolved a pelt that could cope with a temperature range of 43.1ºC between winter low and summer high but unable to cope with the 0.7ºC change in global average temperature over the last 150 years.

“Compared with 50 years ago some places have become too warm for them, their habitat is shrinking,” Prof Davis said.

Oh, pur-lease. Even the alarmists only give about 0.5ºC rise in the last 50 years. Ken’s Kingdom suggests that even this derisory figure may be too high, exaggerated by the urban heat island effect implicit in the inclusion of city temperatures.

In a worst-case scenario the researchers predicted that the animals, which are already difficult to spot in the wild, would become extinct on the Australian mainland and confined to Tasmania, King and Kangaroo islands, three of the coolest parts of the country.

“This is just another piece of evidence that climate change is a real factor affecting our native biodiversity now,” said Dr Ross Thompson, Deputy Director of the Australian Centre for Biodiversity.

Such is the nature of science nowadays. A lot of ‘ifs’, ‘coulds’ and ‘maybes’ enable another environmental rent-seeker to proclaim a scare story as “another piece of evidence”. And the Daily Telegraph’s journalistic rent-seekers play along.

Strangely, the cute but dim penguins won’t figure any time soon because they are voting with their flippers and leaving Antarctica to head for warmer climes.

Perhaps they know what is really happening?


This entry was posted in Adventures in Time Travel, Big Brother, Credulous journalism, Environment, Over-regulation, Politics, Uncategorized and tagged , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

4 Responses to Being cute could be bad for your health

  1. A K Haart says:

    You become attuned to phrases such as “could become”, “worst-case scenario”, “a real factor”, “could spell disaster” and this sentence is the giveaway:-


    So it’s yet another computer model which as we all should know, reflect the assumptions behind the model. Where do they get the funding?

  2. kenskingdom says:

    Actually the temperatures the Bureau of Meteorology use only include15 urban areas; the exaggeration is due to the adjustments applied to the raw temperatures. If the bureau included urban areas (there are another 34 “High Quality” urban stations) the temperature trend would be even less: showing that despite the UHI effect there is less warming than expected. It really is “worse than we thought” (for the alarmists).


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