One of the ways in which we think it fair to refer to a “climate cult” is that to those who are in it, anything that happens is the result of climate change, a dreadful causal force unleashed by humans, no matter how obvious it is to any dispassionate observer that there are other far more important causes. Thus from the “climate ate my clam” file, a widely-reprinted AFP story about releasing octopodes to fight blue crabs in the Adriatic says “Native to the North American Atlantic coast, blue crabs arrived in the Mediterranean decades ago, likely transported via ballast water from ships. But their numbers have ballooned in recent years, with the government and fishing groups linking the boom to warming waters and climate change.” Now the obvious interpretation is that after small numbers of crabs reached a new and favourable habitat, they ate and mated and mated and ate and now there are a lot. But no. It’s “warming waters and climate change” although, to nitpick, some might say warming waters were climate change.
They don’t, of course, because to them climate change is not a statistical description of, oh, say, changing climate, it’s a thing that changes climate. And always in bad ways. (As Radio-Canada recently attempted to explain, climate is key to all the hot issues in Quebec politics from health to housing to the cost of living… though oddly the story was about why nobody was talking about it in the provincial election. Maybe because nobody has anything new to say, or useful.) So to revenir à nos crabes, never mind that:
“With sharp, blue-tinted claws that are particularly apt at prying open shells, they have wreaked havoc in Italy’s northeast – one of Europe’s top clam producing regions.”
Gosh. Sounds like if they somehow reached a place rich in clams they’d go nuts and spread. Especially since:
“Excellent swimmers and weighing up to one kilogramme (2.2 pounds), the crabs have few natural predators – something the researchers are hoping to change.”
So if you believed in Darwin and them eevolutions and such like, you might plausibly hold the view that exploiting new habitats is the kind of thing species do who win the grim struggle to survive. But just as climate change distorts thinking in all kinds of ways, it suddenly seems to turn biologists non-Darwinian. Including with the octopodes since:
“The common octopus is not prone to live in the sandy, warm waters typical of the lagoon areas where the blue crab is making the most damage, making its potential impact there negligible – something the researchers are well aware of.”
Meaning they’re trying to oust something from a good niche by introducing something into a bad niche. Yup. What could go wrong?
Well, the thing in a happy place could flourish and the thing in a sad place could dwindle. Or, against the odds, the octopodes could flourish and start eating native stuff. In which case, stand by for them to blame climate change not the fact that people brought them there or that they turned out to be well-adapted to their new home.
They always do.
