As you know, there is nothing climate change cannot do except, possibly, prompt journalists to do fact checks. Certainly our #HaveItBothWays series has shown, and is showing, that it can make places and things wetter and drier at once, saltier and fresher, bigger and smaller, nearer and farther, and of course it can make it colder as well as warmer. But it can also reach in and fiddle in the minutest ways. Not a sparrow falls but some zealot blames climate. No, really; it’s endless fun to Google anything you think of and immediately get, say, “Sparrows’ storm stress a harbinger of climate-change impact.” But how about “South Korea’s fishermen keep dying. Is climate change to blame?” Yup. You bet it is. If you ignore everything else including the evidence.

If journalists had any kind of real education, the first question they would ask themselves is whether ocean fishing has traditionally been safe and now something has gone wrong. And then they would recall some history professor telling them of the Hanseatic League and the once-famous motto inscribed over the old shipping house in Bremen in the once-studied Latin: “Navigare necesse est, viviere non est necesse” (“seafaring is necessary, living is not necessary”).

Or some English professor making them read The Tempest or Typhoon or Moby Dick (“It’s about this whale.”) Or a book at all, come to think of it.

Meanwhile, back to South Korea. Or not, because the story features Hong Suk-hui, who owned a boat but it sank:

“Last year, 164 people were killed or went missing in accidents in the seas around South Korea – a 75% jump from the year before. Most were fishermen whose boats sunk or capsized. ‘The weather has changed, it’s getting windier every year,’ said Mr Hong, who also chairs the Jeju Fishing Boat Owners Association. ‘Whirlwinds pop up suddenly. We fisherman are convinced it is down to climate change.’”

Some reporters would recall a statistics professor saying it’s not immediately clear that a 75% jump in one year can reasonably be ascribed to a process of climate change operating over decades. Or that you can blame the dreaded global heating when “Over the past 10 years, the amount of squid caught in South Korean waters each year has plummeted 92%, while anchovy catches have fallen by 46%” without noting that one of them took one year and one took ten while, again, climate change takes decades. And then they’d look for other causes. Which this one almost does:

“This year, the head of the taskforce pinpointed climate change as one of the major causes, as well as highlighting other problems – the country’s aging fishing workforce, a growing reliance on migrant workers, and poor safety training.”

Now, among those various causes, how much emphasis would you put on a fraction of a degree increase in global temperature in the last few decades as opposed, say, to an industry whose safety standards are so egregious that those put on boats to check on it have a mysterious tendency to vanish over the railing.

And of course a claim that climate change is at fault is never complete without the obligatory warming-faster-than-average claim:

“The seas around Korea are warming more rapidly than the global average, in part because they tend to be shallower. Between 1968 and 2024, the average surface temperature of the country’s seas increased by 1.58C, more than double the global rise of 0.74C. Warming waters are contributing to extreme weather at sea, creating the conditions for tropical storms, like typhoons, to become more intense. They are also causing some fish species around South Korea to migrate, according to the country’s National Institute of Fisheries Science, forcing fisherman to travel further and take greater risks to catch enough to make a living. Environmental campaigners say urgent action is needed to ‘stop the tragedy occurring in Korean waters’.”

They would, wouldn’t they? We say urgent action is needed to see whether typhoons are becoming more intense, because if not, your story isn’t even propaganda despite that ritualistic assertion that whatever place is being described is warming faster than the global average. It’s just rubbish. Including failing to take into account that a “tragedy of the commons” in high-seas fishing, especially predatory “ghost fleets” from the usual pariah nations, is devastating all kinds of species.

OK, to be fair, the writer does eventually say her article was a waste of your time and a drain on your credulity:

“Professor Kim Baek-min, a climate scientist at South Korea's Pukyong National University, said that although climate change was creating the conditions to make strong, sudden wind gusts more likely, a clear trend had not yet been established – for that, more research and long-term data is needed.”

Research funding is necessary; knowledge is not necessary.

To some extent looking up and then cutting up such stories is like shooting fish in a barrel. Though frankly we’ve thought that simile sounded as disgusting as it did unnecessary since if they’re in a barrel they’re not about to escape, except as bloody fragments if some fool shoots into it. But is probably safer than chasing them in a typhoon.

It’s not just South Korean squid, of course. A correspondent sent us a list of things climate change has caused, or at least that the sort of people who think climate change causes everything has caused, which we hope at some point to set to music and have our own Broadway smash it. (Pending which, please do send money.) And predictably it includes everything including the Attack of the Giant Oysters.

Alas, it also causes the Attack of the Guffawing Skeptics, because once it becomes obvious that they’ll say just anything, with the sketchiest of rationales, you start looking behind the hype and find a load of old fishheads.