The latest global warming apocalypse about to befall us is (drum roll): giant blue crabs. Yes, according to the Washington Post, “It is the dawn of the super crab.”
The April 7 Post story by Darryl Fears headlines the paper’s “Health & Science” section. It warns:
Crabs are bulking up on carbon pollution that pours out of power plants, factories and vehicles and settles in the oceans, turning the tough crustaceans into even more fearsome predators.
That presents a major problem for the Chesapeake Bay, where crabs eat oysters. In a life-isn’t-fair twist, the same carbon that crabs absorb to grow bigger stymies the development of oysters.
Over the next 75 to 100 years, ocean acidification could supersize blue crabs, which may then eat more oysters and other organisms and possibly throw the food chain of the nation’s largest estuary out of whack.
Throw the food chain out of whack? Yes, according to Fears, increased levels of man-made carbon dioxide (CO2) — a naturally occurring beneficial gas that is an essential fertilizer for our planet’s plant life, but which is increasingly referred to by enviro-activists and their media allies as “carbon pollution” — it appears, are responsible for yet another TEOFTWAWKI (“The End Of The World As We Know It”) doomsday scenario.
However, before succumbing to Fears’ fears, readers would do well to take a look at an analysis of the Post story by the always-enlightening Anthony Watts, the meteorologist whose WattsUpWithThat.com website has scored numerous takedown victories against scientific frauds in high places — especially as it relates to global warming, aka “climate change.”
In his April 8 posting, “’Carbon’ to blame for giant crabs,” Watts points out the internal inconsistencies in Fears’ story and the wild speculation that the Post writer transforms into “science” and “research” to justify the fearful TEOFTWAWKI conclusion.
Among other things, Watts notes that this is recycled news, based on a 2009 study. When the global-warming alarmists run out of new ideas, it seems, they simply pull an old story out of the file and send it through again.
But Watts also notes what many casual readers may have missed: The dreaded CO2 conditions Fears fears were created in aquariums, not the oceans. And the original 2009 research paper Fears cites says nothing about giant, super crabs. Says Anthony Watts:
But, ah, another “not in the real world, aka ocean” experiment conducted in tanks. No mention of “giant, oversized, or supersized crabs” in the paper it seems. We’ve been down this road before with “tanked” experiments where they try to extrapolate captive life experiments to the real ocean.
Watts humorously illustrates his review of Fears’ story, appropriately, with a photo of humans battling a house-sized crab, from the 1961 sci-fi movie, The Mysterious Island, based on the Jules Verne classic of the same title.
We may now add giant crabs and disappearing oysters to the burgeoning list of hundreds of disasters, plagues, social pathologies, and existential calamities supposedly caused by anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming, or AGW. There is no problem, crisis, tragedy or mishap, it seems, that is not somehow caused by AGW. Some of the more notable examples of these catastrophic results of our CO2 extravagance, as reported by “climate researchers” and their handmaidens in the media — in addition to the usual melting glaciers, rising oceans, drowning polar bears, etc. — are:
Acne,
Air France Flight 447 Crash,
Terrorism: AGW helping Al Qaeda,
Animals shrinking in size,
Declining beer quality,
Increased prostitution,
Balding hedgehogs,
Less fragrant rice,
Tectonic plate shifts,
Gravity shift and Earth’s rotation,
Super intelligent lizards,
Smaller human brains,
Deaf fish,
Women cheating on their husbands,
Slavery and human trafficking,
Suicide,
Increases in spider bites,
Increased street crime,
Civil war and genocide,
Threat to NFL football,
Mass cannibalism,
The end of human civilization,
And on and on and on ….
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Climate-change Computer Models Fail Again — and Again, and Again
Study Shows Global Warming Data Skewed by Bad Monitoring
New Report: Man-made Global Warming Is a Farce (“Extreme Weather” 2012)
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CFR Pushes End to Sovereignty at UN’s Doha Climate Summit
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UN Summit Fails to Enact “Complete Transformation” of the World
