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Complete total bollocks and crap

This spring is proving to be spectacular when it comes to its quota of sea monsters. As if reports of a sea serpent in the Thames and the Loch Ness monster being “found” weren’t enough, reality bites back with some true-life beasts beyond all expectation.

A bizarre beaked whale washes up on an Australian beach like a primeval message from prehistory. A narwhal, complete with spiralling tusk out of some medieval bestiary, turns up in a Dutch estuary. And last Sunday a bowhead whale – an animal that may reach 300 years in age, and which surpasses all description with its huge, arching mouth filled with plates of fibrous baleen four metres long – surfaced off Cornwall, 1,000 miles and an ocean away from its designated domain.

What’s going on? What summons these weird deputations from the deep? They appear to be advance warning of something we already know – acidifying, warming seas, and irrefutable climate change.

We spent many centuries hunting such beasties. Then we developed the technology to do so efficiently and damn near wiped them out. That there’s more of them about these days is evidence of how much better the environment and biodiversity are getting.

Because, you know, we’re not killing and eating these beasties?

27 thoughts on “Complete total bollocks and crap”

  1. If I remember my basic chemistry, water gasses out as it heats? Therefore acidifying and warming would require large increases in the acidifying gas, and trivial warming, or enormous increases in the gas levels and barely noticeable to moderate warming?

  2. “..and which surpasses all description with its huge, arching mouth filled with plates of fibrous baleen four metres long…”

    So…you managed to describe it after all?

  3. Its a SIGN!!!! Quick! Sacrifice our economies. And a virgin, just to be on the safe side.

  4. “A narwhal, complete with spiralling tusk out of some medieval bestiary, turns up in a Dutch estuary. ……….What summons these weird deputations from the deep?”

    Maybe they should have slit it open, examined its entrails.
    Surely, they would have revealed something of enormous import to climate science.

  5. What HC, abacab and bis said.

    At least the enviros are now pretty much open about their anti-reason, anti-enlightenment outlook.

    God help us all if they ever get more power than they have already.

  6. It’s true though. What was at first thought to be a whale – but later thought more likely to have been a Risso’s Dolphin – was found in Curbridge Creek in Hampshire, miles up the river Hamble.

    Quite a talking point at the local Horse & Jockey pub (well worth a visit).

    Mind you that was in August 1932 which absolutely proves that global warming has already killed us all.

  7. Philip Scott Thomas

    What’s going on? What summons these weird deputations from the deep? They appear to be advance warning of something we already know,,,

    Yes, the rising of the Deep Ones, obviously.

  8. Actually, the article, apart from a reference to carbon dating stone, is quite sensible.

  9. When I saw the picture of the whale with the graffiti on it, I was not immediately outraged that someone had defiled the sacred remains of a dead animal, but at the absence of an apostrophe.

  10. ‘Actually, the article, apart from a reference to carbon dating stone, is quite sensible.’

    Only the head of the harpoon would be stone, Sherlock.

    ‘Acidifying’ is ignorant of basic chemistry.

  11. ‘We seek these reassurances of our empathy, of our humanity, when truly, wild animals would rather be left alone.’

    Bottle nose dolphins like interaction with humans. They seek out humans.

  12. It’s a curious thing. Whales were hunted, virtually to extinction, for whale oil. Whale oil was burned in lamps because it burned clean and without soot. Whale oil for lighting was displaced by cheaper coal gas and kerosene. The coal and oil industries saved the whales.

  13. Fen Tiger

    As the peerless SMFS has said:

    ‘ISIS will come, and be greeted as the lesser of two evils’ –

    Given the choice between the Greens and ISIS who here would definitely plump for the former?

  14. I’d always watched the Jon Pertwee Doctor Who Serial ‘The Sea Devils’ assuming it was fiction – apparently it was portending this back in 1972…..

  15. ‘The coal and oil industries saved the whales.’

    And cars saved our cities from glaciers of horse poop.

  16. @ Van Patten
    Some of the Treens might grow up – I have been informed by a British Green that they no longer support replacing nuclear power stations with ones burning lignite.

  17. Given the choice between the Greens and ISIS who here would definitely plump for the former?

    Two sides of the same coin. They both want to force us back to a 7th century golden age of pure virtue that never actually existed.

  18. A narwhal, a bowhead whale and a (for-the-time-being) unrecognised beaked whale?

    What of it?

    The first two are rare and exciting to see, to be sure, but there are plenty of them in the oceans if you know where to look.

    As for beaked whales, there are many species, some so rare that they’ve only been recorded once or twice; to find an unknown one would be interesting and wonderful, but hardly unprecedented. In any case, all it means really is that no competent and knowledgeable specialist has seen this specimen, and in all likeliehood it’s one that was already known to science.

    So yes, Tim’s headline is right on the money.

  19. Bloke in Costa Rica

    If you read something like this in an old Almanac, you’d have a little chuckle at how credulous and superstitious our ancestors were, and move on. It must be weird to be a Lefty. They’re basically animists. The pathetic fallacy is their mode of being. They live in what Carl Sagan called the ‘demon-haunted world’.

  20. Nothing “Green” makes a profit. Are we challenging the Murphmonster now?

    Okay, round them and their families to the fifth generation up and slaughter them, but taxation on profits they don’t make? Unforgivable!

    (Some sarcasm may have been expended in this post.)

  21. “It’s true though. What was at first thought to be a whale – but later thought more likely to have been a Risso’s Dolphin – was found in Curbridge Creek in Hampshire, miles up the river Hamble.

    Quite a talking point at the local Horse & Jockey pub (well worth a visit).

    Mind you that was in August 1932 which absolutely proves that global warming has already killed us all.”

    Well, fuck my old boots- this is just down the road from me, and I drive past it every day on my way to my new (not public sector, and actually very interesting) job in shipping.

    I hadn’t heard a thing about it, but now have a very interesting anecdote to share with my new colleagues.

    Cheers, Mr C

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