Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
Came home just a bit early to catch my fiancé watching yet another episode of hot-wisecracking-thirty-somethings-poking-and-prodding-room-temperature-dead-forty-somethings-to-solve-crimes, trying and failing to wrap it up before my key hit the lock. That didn’t annoy me nearly as much as leaving it on the station when the six o’clock news came on. Remember the six o’clock news? They’re still doing it, even though nobody’s watching it…and the reason nobody’s watching it, became clear, when Diane Sawyer proceeded to tell us about the sharks evolving to adapt to climate change.
In the waters off the eastern coast of Australia, marine scientists report a first: 57 cases in which two species of shark are interbreeding. The local Australian black-tip shark is mating with its global counterpart, the common black-tip. They’re similar, but they are distinct species.
“It’s very surprising because no one’s ever seen shark hybrids before,” said Jess Morgan of the University of Queensland, the lead researcher, as quoted by AFP. “This is not a common occurrence by any stretch of the imagination.”
Why would this happen? Why would two shark species hybridize after apparently keeping to themselves before? Morgan, whose team published its findings in the journal Conservation Genetics, said she thinks a change in climate may be part of it.
“If it [the Australian black-tip species] hybridises with the common species it can effectively shift its range further south into cooler waters, so the effect of this hybridising is a range expansion,” Morgan said. “It’s enabled a species restricted to the tropics to move into temperate waters.”
Suffice it to say that Sawyer’s report emphasized this bit about climate a bit more, using the well-known catch-phrase “climate change.” That thing you’re making happen by using toilet paper, throwing out trash, not signing the Kyoto treaty, driving to work, etc. No, all that scolding was not included in her report. But you don’t have to wait long to hear some…
So the point is, if you assemble all the pieces into a big picture, a picture of what we’re being told when we show zero skepticism about anything and just believe everything we’re told, we aren’t unplugging our cell phones when they’re done charging so this human activity is causing a heavier saturation of carbon in the atmosphere and creating new species of sharks. Nobody’s saying that, but that’s what gives the story legs. You have a defined threat to humans…how grave a threat it is, the stories do not say, but it’s easily defined because you have sharks moving in to waters where they weren’t present before.
The Yahoo story is more explicit: Climate change in the first paragraph.
Scientists said on Tuesday that they had discovered the world’s first hybrid sharks in Australian waters, a potential sign the predators were adapting to cope with climate change.
The mating of the local Australian black-tip shark with its global counterpart, the common black-tip, was an unprecedented discovery with implications for the entire shark world, said lead researcher Jess Morgan.
“It’s very surprising because no one’s ever seen shark hybrids before, this is not a common occurrence by any stretch of the imagination,” Morgan, from the University of Queensland, told AFP.
“This is evolution in action.”
Now if you read these carefully, you see this is a story about the change in what humans have perceived. To say that the sharks are breeding in this way and they haven’t been doing so before, goes well beyond what the researcher is saying. The event has to do with humans making the observation; it is an event of discovery. But such an event isn’t really of any interest to anyone who doesn’t work in shark research, except maybe for someone planning to go sailing or surfing in the waters in question. So it’s been picking up these subtle little spins, until…
…well, it seems from the comments like there have been a few drafts of this story, giving different weights to the climate change angle. Someone at some point said “Hey waitaminnit, what are we saying here?” It’s very sexy and salable to say human activity is causing a change in the atmospheric climate patterns, and this is affecting how sharks are evolving. It’s like something straight out of one of those creature-feature movies on Netflix instant that I put on, to retaliate against my lady and her hot-wisecracking-thirty-somethings-poking-and-prodding-room-temperature-dead-forty-somethings-to-solve-crimes shows. Rich guy who runs big company, who you know is a bad guy because he wears nice suits all the time even late at night…does something boneheaded, like dump toxic sludge down a drainpipe, or implant a microchip in an alligator’s brain to make it more aggressive…a bunch of stuff happens…the bad guy in the nice suit gets eaten by the monster near the end. The big sharks are coming to get us, for using our hairdryers! It’s what we’re ready to hear, we’ve all been nicely programmed.
Only problem is: It’s pure nonsense.
Someone figured out it comes off that way, and revised some drafts. But not before someone else ran off with it and put it on the air.
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I stopped wearing golf shoes during summer months, wearing flops instead while golfing. I knew something drastic was going to happen as a result, and now I find out about this inter-breeding of sharks!
The causal link that is too important to dismiss out of hand.
I will return to wearing golf shoes during the summer months for one-million dollars! Don’t think for a second that I’m fooling around here.
A million bucks, or who knows what might happen next.
- TMI | 01/04/2012 @ 11:59.
These people can’t have it both way. The evolutionary adaptation has never been observed this quickly; so, it appears that not only is global warming dooming us all, it’s also managed to accelerate evolution beyond what it has ever done before.
Or, you could take the view that both are bunk. That one sounds a little more believable to me.
- Daniel | 01/04/2012 @ 21:17Or, you could take the view that both are bunk. That one sounds a little more believable to me.
Likewise. Or more precisely – macroevolution is bunk, and man-made climate change is bunk. No one seriously disputes that species make small incremental changes over time, or that the Earth’s climate and temperature are completely static. But iguanas do not evolved into zebras, and driving an SUV does not cause more or stronger hurricanes.
But you have to remember that these two theories being true (the theory of evolution and the theory of MMGW) is something a LOT of money, credibility, and prestige are riding on. Entire careers – lots of them – would be utterly destroyed if the general public stopped buying-in to them, and, more importantly, if the government funding for “research” was cut-off.
Even if one accepts the premise that this new shark breeding A) really hasn’t happened until recently B) really is a reaction to changing climate and C) really does (somehow!) assert “evolution in action”….it still doesn’t necessarily follow that 1) this is necessarily bad or 2) it’s got anything whatever to do with human beings.
- cylarz | 01/06/2012 @ 05:01