Won’t You Do Your Part to Save the Hummingbird?Recently by Vin Suprynowicz: Save the Habitat, Kill the Turtles
Our hummingbird has returned. She’s a black-chinned, I believe, not the world’s most colorful model. But she has a distinctive habit of hovering down to look us right in the face, one at a time, as we sit out in the back yard to watch the sunset. “Checking in,” we call it. Perhaps she, too, wants to make sure we’re still the same strange creatures who always maintain the feeder full of sugar water. (Never use honey.) Last year she raised a couple of pipsqueaks in the cherry tree, in a nest perilously low given the area’s cat population. So far as we know the nestlings prospered and didn’t become cat snacks; we wonder if they survived the winter trip south. Which brings me to my point. This year, the hummingbird was late. I’ve never actually marked the calendar when she shows up, but I’d swear it used to be late May. This year, we didn’t see her until early July. Since it’s the warm weather that brings them back north of the border, it doesn’t seem far-fetched to imagine the coolest, dampest June I can remember in my 19 years in Las Vegas may have slowed her return. What if her visits were to grow briefer and briefer, until she never returned at all? Couldn’t that qualify the Black-chinned Hummingbird for listing as a threatened or endangered species in Nevada? Yes, I know when the Endangered Species Act was first proposed there was a lot of talk about losing “unique genetic codes. What if the genetic code of some species that just went extinct had contained the secret to curing cancer?” … that sort of thing. If that was still the accepted approach, we could console ourselves that at least our energetic little friend and her offspring could still live out their days in balmy Mexico, or Honduras, or wherever they winter. But in fact, that’s NOT the way the Endangered Species Act is interpreted today. Many a lawsuit has required the federal Environmental Protection Agency to act to protect and preserve viable populations of a given animal IN ITS TRADITIONAL AND HISTORIC RANGE. It’s no longer enough to say “Don’t worry, there are plenty of these things down in Texas.” So what I wonder is: Aren’t there enough public-spirited individuals and corporations here in the Southwest to fund a lawsuit, demanding that the EPA take action to protect the Nevada Black-chinned Hummingbird from the devastating effects of Global Cooling? Yes, yes, I can hear you saying, “But Vin, Global Cooling is by no means universally accepted.” Well, of course there are Global Cooling Deniers, just as there are those who deny the Nazis killed millions of Jews and Slavs, who deny that the Temple of Solomon was ever in Jerusalem, etc. But just last week, The Associated Press reported “Cool weather has broken a previous low temperature for July 21 in Nashville that was set when Rutherford B. Hayes was president. …” “It was delightfully appropriate that, as large parts of Argentina were swept by severe blizzards last week, on a scale never experienced before, the city of Nashville, Tennessee, should have enjoyed the coolest July 21 in its history, breaking a record established in 1877,” commented the folks at Right Side News, on the other side of the pond. “Appropriate, because Nashville is the home of Al Gore, the man who for 20 years has been predicting that we should all by now be in the grip of runaway global warming. “His predictions have proved so wildly wrong … that the propaganda machine has had to work overtime to maintain what is threatening to become the most expensive fiction in history,” our British friends report. “The two official sources of satellite data on global temperatures, for instance, lately announced that June temperatures had again fallen, to their (lowest) average level for the month over the 30 years since satellite data began. By contrast, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, run by Mr. Gore’s closest ally and scientific adviser, James Hansen – one of the two official sources of global temperature data from surface – announced that in that single month the world had warmed by a staggering 0.63 degrees C, more than its net warming for the entire 20th century. “In the past few years, Dr. Hansen’s temperature record has become ever more eccentric, often wildly at odds with the other three officially recognised data sources, all of which showed a dramatic drop in temperatures in 2007 leading to markedly cooler summers and two of the coldest and snowiest winters the world has known for decades. All this has equally made nonsense of the predictions of the computer models that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change relies on, which are programmed to assume that temperatures should soar in line with rising levels of greenhouse gases. … “This has not prevented the propaganda machine’s media groupies continuing to peddle a daily stream of stories about how in all directions global warming is already affecting the world for the worse. … The tiny Pacific nation of Tuvalu, we are yet again told, is pleading for international aid, as it sinks below the rising ocean – even though an expert study in 2001 showed that sea levels around Tuvalu have in fact been falling for 50 years. … “None of this is proving of much assistance to the politicians still desperately hoping to reach agreement on a new climate treaty in Copenhagen in December. With the still-developing countries, led by China, India, Russia and Brazil, all saying that they will only co-operate if rich governments such as the US and the EU compensate them to the tune of trillions of dollars a year, the chances of any meaningful successor to the Kyoto Protocol look like zero. …” No, make no mistake, Global Cooling is here, as announced by Professor Don J. Easterbrook, Department of Geology, Western Washington University, in his paper “Global Cooling is Here – Evidence for Predicting Global Cooling for the Next Three Decades.” Rather, the question is whether there is anything the EPA can order the American people to do about it. And here is where we really owe an enormous debt of thanks to the Democratic politicians in Washington, and to their opposite numbers on the international scene, the dashiki-clad kleptocrats of the United Nations. For, if we were to listen to the mere scientists, all we’d hear is a depressing litany of negativity, of assurances that global temperatures have been moving up and down in an inexorable rhythm of ice ages and warming periods, in cycles of 15,000 or 30,000 years, for as long as the geographic evidence can be read, all driven by solar activity and the resulting behavior of the oceans. In short, that nothing can be done. But why would you believe mere scientists, when the politicians of Washington City and 46th Street in New York assure us there IS something that individual Americans can do to fight global cooling? Despite our small numbers when compared to the energy-using population of the world, despite the fact that mankind as a whole contributes only 5 percent of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – and the fact that carbon dioxide isn’t the leading greenhouse gas, anyway – the politicians assure us that we CAN bring back the hummingbirds, that we CAN warm the globe by the requisite several degrees per century. It may require some slight individual sacrifice. But after all, isn’t this all about thinking globally, acting locally? If all that’s required to Save the Hummingbirds is for each American energy company to switch back to coal-fired power plants – the kind that generate as much carbon dioxide as possible – and for each American family to “size up” and buy the largest and “global-warmingest” truck or SUV available, is that really too much to ask? Are you really going to refuse to do your part? To Save The Hummingbird? August 6, 2009 Vin Suprynowicz [send him mail] is assistant editorial page editor of the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal and author of The Black Arrow. Visit his blog. Copyright © 2009 Vin Suprynowicz
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