April 08, 2018

A climate quiz

Warmists usually just pour out abuse at skeptics but sometimes they try to be more factual.  One such effort is a "climate quiz" that came out last year. It pretends to be a factual approach to explaining why there is and will be global warming.  And it is. It does deal in facts -- or the Warmist version of facts to be precise.

I just did the first 3 or 4 questions and got them all wrong but they were very technical questions so I was not sure how well founded their answers were.  They asked, for instance, "When Glacier National Park in Montana was founded in 1910 it had 150 glaciers. How many are left?"  The answer was allegedly 25. I had no idea how many nor would most people and the answer is probably disputable anyway.

Then I came to a question: "What was likely the first mammal to lose its habitat and go extinct due to the crisis?"

Now the answer to that was really obscure. I did however happen to know the answer that they were looking for: The Bramble Cay Melomys (Melomys rubicola, also known as the mosaic-tailed rat). And I knew a bit about that story.



Bramble Cay is a 9 acre sand cay which is the Northernmost part of Australia. There is a lighthouse (now automatic) there and some grass.  A type of rat known as a Melomys was known there which in times past was used as target practice by bored visitors. In 2016 scientific visitors could not find any of them anymore.

So how does that relate to global warming?  It doesn't. We have no idea why the Melomys has died out if it has died out. It is just speculation that global warming was to blame.  Most likely it was shot out by visitors.  It is only 34 miles South of New Guinea and New Guineans would undoubtedly eat them. Melanesians are poor but are excellent sailors. They normally have very little animal protein in their diet. There are no grazing animals in New Guinea.  They were probably all hunted to extinction thousands of years ago. So now all they have is their pigs and an occasional bird. And they can't feed enough pigs to slaughter one very often. So a Melomys would be a treat.

Bramble Cay is a breeding place for green turtles so shooters could be expected

Melomys

And it is only on that cay that the Melomys is missing.  There are lots of them elswhere in that part of the world.  So it is not even a small tragedy.

So that's the quality of the "quiz".  Its facts are between dubious and wrong and they don't prove anything anyway -- JR






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