The Ottawa Citizen’s Andrew Cohen waxes lyrical about successful efforts to save the American bald eagle at his summer island roost off the coast of Maine. But alas, climate change has forced the lobsters to flee, along with mussels (except the ones with red tide), clams, starfish, haddock, pollock, cod and the ground beneath the feet of locals. And of course nasty jellyfish are moving in as the Gulf of Maine “is warming faster than 99 percent of the world’s oceans, indeed four times as fast.” It’s the end!
Or not. For one thing, everywhere always seems to be warming faster than average. But just as half of people have to be below average, including in their awareness of the requirements of logic, so half the places on Earth must be warming more slowly than the other half. If only we could find one.
Another problem is that by Cohen’s own account the lobster have been marching northward to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia for decades. So when does he think the effects of climate change really kicked in? Normally the argument is that man-made CO2 wasn’t really beginning to drive temperature until at least 1950 and probably 1970. (Why the rate of warming didn’t change with this ominous new development has never been adequately explained, perhaps because it hasn’t been addressed.) But never mind. The debate is over… again.
“This is the front line in the war on climate change. Out here, global warming is not a threat, prospect or fantasy; it is a reality unfolding before our eyes.” Including winter storm seawater in the streets of Vinalhaven which, according to Wikipedia, is 12 metres above sea level. “In a country that has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement and is led by climate-change deniers,” Cohen declares, “the failure of leadership in Washington is exasperating.”
Also exasperating is the way writers like Cohen seem unaware of the fact that by the alarmists’ own models, meeting Paris targets wouldn’t change the outcome, despite being the sine qua non of 21st-century virtue. As for flooding on low-lying craggy islands off the coast of Maine, well, we never had that until climate change. Obviously.
Except in 1987. And 1936. And other times as well. Perhaps because a good deal of the state is in a coastal floodplain including around Vinalhaven and the local sea level has been rising at about 2.2mm/year since 1930 just as global sea levels seem to have been going up at a steady pace since 1880.
No lobsters were available for comment.
