According to World Water Council‘s director-general Ger Bergkamp, Australia is ‘the metaphorical canary down the coalmine when it comes to climate change‘:
In Australia, what was projected to be here in 20 years from now, in terms of the drought, is already here as we speak.
Now where have we heard that one before? It’s not just Australia that is still clinging to its perch only because somebody has nailed it there. If climate alarmists are to be believed, there are as many ‘climate change canaries’ out there as there are canaries in the Canary Isles: penguins, migratory birds, the Antarctic, the Arctic, Tuvalu, sea turtles, Kenyan pastoralists, islands, polar bears, Australian ski resorts, US ski resorts, Australian vineyards, Napa Valley vineyards, Canada’s Inuit, Alaska, mountain ecosystems, tropical ice-caps, Greenland, pika, naturists, the Bering Sea, intertidal zones, coral reefs, to name but a few.
‘Climate canary’ is the perfect metaphor in the age of the precautionary principle. Especially when it can apply to anything you want it to. Because, when you’re watching everything for signs of catastrophe, it follows that you can’t do anything without at least one of your canaries karking it.
Trouble is, it doesn’t quite work. While actual canaries were once very useful for alerting miners to the presence of deadly gases – first they stopped singing, then they keeled over – there is little reason to believe that any of our climate canaries serve their putative purpose. Despite the ‘fact’ that ‘climate change is real and is happening’, none of them seem to have actually popped their clogs yet, or even to have stopped singing. All a climate canary has to do to justify an alarmist newspaper headline is hop metaphorically from one side of its cage to the other, or look at us in a funny way. Like that other favourite metaphor of the risk-averse, the ‘ticking time-bomb’, the climate canary is predicated on the idea that nothing terrible has happened yet, but you can’t rule it out.
The metaphor also fails on the basis that while canaries were used to make mining safer, the climate variety are deployed to encourage us to stop mining completely – and stop doing everything else for that matter – because it might possibly be harmful to canaries.
Its ubiquity means that even the likes of Gristmill have recognised that the climate canary is a dead parrot – that we need something bigger and scarier. We suggest that, next time, Ger Bergkamp might consider ‘Australia more like a climate change canary than previously thought‘.
Check out these silly lads;
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7610786.stm
It appears Climate change is the cause of too much water in Australia and has ruined the attempt a world fart power speed record which was to prove that fart power was viable in a world of climate change – er oh dear that didn’t work very well then
The story on the BBC website about the failed power speed record is a full born self-parody, and proves that environmentalists have no conception of humour or self-parody.
I’ve been following this site for a while now and it is without doubt the best sceptic blog on the web.
Keep up the good work, folks, it won’t be long until your thinking is mainstream.
Pete
I agree with the above comments; the BBC story is just laden with unintended irony. If it hadn’t rained but had been bone dry, I’m sure that would have been the effects of climate change too. Any weather that deviates slightly from expectations is due to climate change (read: man-made global warming), obviously. One point that the Greenbird team effectively proved is: you can’t rely on the wind for uninterrupted power. Something that governments around the world should take to heart, but probably won’t. I like the wording in the article – the attempt was left “high and dry”. Um, except that it wasn’t dry. The writer clearly has a complete tin ear for irony.
For anyone who’s tired of the stale clichés of global warming alarmists, I recommend the long chapter on “The Magical Control of the Weather” in Sir James Frazer’s epic anthroplogical study of magic and religion “The Golden Bough”. You will discover there that concern about climate change is as old as mankind, and primitive climate modellers had a wide range of proxy forcing agents to make the rain fall or the sun shine. For example, the Australian Dieri tribe could produce rain with the aid of human foreskins “wrapt in feathers with the fat of the wild dog and of the carpet snake”. So, as a symbol of the imminence of climate change, in place of “the canary in the mine”, what about “the foreskin in the carpet snake fat”? (Or, if that seems a bit obscure, how about “the prick in the witness box”?)
The Golden Bough is fascinating and in many ways still relevant; I read it years ago but it’s probably due for a re-read at some point. On that note, at the weekend I found this item in a book catalogue: Weather Shamanism, by Nan Moss. According to the blurb: “It is about how we can develop an expanded worldview that honors spiritual realities in order to create a working partnership with the spirits of weather and thereby help to restore well-being and harmony to Earth.” Fair enough – if you actually believe that weather spirits exist, it makes sense to work with them in order to live in harmony with the climate. What’s interesting, though, is the way that people with no literal belief in magic, spirits or deities nevertheless behave as if they did – making sacrifices, feeling guilt or absolution, sensing a connection with “the planet” which is basically mystical, but dressed up in scientific language.
Now I’m trying to dispel a mental image of Dr Hansen in a shaman’s cloak and feathers, invoking the angry spirit of Hurricane Ike…
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