By Rick Manning — ABC News’ website headlined an article in June, “Emperor Penguins Threatened By Shrinking Kingdom,” with this just being one of a series of articles crying the alarm around the globe that the loveable penguin, star of both the big and small screen is endangered by global warming.
Accompanying these claims, we read about how arctic ice flows are melting at a high level, due to climate change with gloomy predictions about what this means to ecosystems.
Of course, any third grader can tell you that penguins live in Antarctica, the continent which includes the South Pole, and not the Arctic which is the floating ice mass that covers the top of the earth.
Apparently, this distinction is lost on the penguin peril prognosticators because Antarctica is actually cooling, not warming, and ice flows on the continent are increasing. (see chart below.)
Chart by C3Headlines.com
In response to this alarming data that Antarctica is actually cooler today than it was 33 years ago with a trend toward more cooling, warming activists explain that it is the ozone hole and other phenomena causing this anomaly.
Note, the warming activists don’t deny that Antarctica is cooling, they only attempt to explain it with promises that warming is just around the corner in forty to fifty years.
So, the penguin paranoia is completely unjustified. Of course, you can’t take away the terror that has and continues to be inflicted on children who love our tuxedo feathered friends largely through viewings of “March of the Penguins” and “Happy Feet.”
But that is the way of the enviro-alarmist. Pick a loveable looking creature that makes a great plush toy, and then create alarm that it is endangered from some source in order to demonize production and manufacturing in the United States and the developed world.
After all, it is far easier to make the battle about the penguin or even the polar bear than it is to fight over a snail darter, smelt or even a Great Plains Narrowmouth frog.
In the enviro-fundraising world, mammals and birds sell, insects and reptiles don’t. In order to keep their machine well oiled in small donations of youngsters lunch money, penguins have to be part of the global warming endangerment, whether they are actually threatened or not.
Incredibly the enviros are winning this game, with the Obama Administration Interior Department adding five penguin species to the endangered list even though not a single penguin lives naturally in the U.S. or any of our territories.
To quote from an article on treehugger.com, the outcome disappointed environment extremists who had hoped to hit a grand slam instead of the solo home run with the ruling, “conservationists had hoped that the petition would force the Obama administration to confront climate change as a threat to ecology and biodiversity worldwide.”
Under the ruling, the Obama Administration did not include climate change as a rationale for the “endangerment” of penguins, temporarily denying environmentalists a legal tool to shut down U.S. domestic energy production using the impact on our waddling south pole friends as the justification.
However, getting five species penguins listed as endangered species to requests that additional penguins be included using global warming as the rationale. The recent faux uproar over Arctic ice data and what it means for penguins on the other side of the globe is just one more step in that direction.
Because it really doesn’t matter that the penguin habitat is not threatened in Antarctica.
The only thing that matters is getting money to promote policies that attack and destroy free market economies around the world on the green altar.
So pay attention to our tuxedoed feathery friend, he is likely to become the new symbol in the enviro battle to shut down coal fired electric generation plants – even as he thrives in the massive, expanding ice flows surrounding his home in Antarctica.
Because in the waning months of 2012, facts are meaningless, it is about perception and spin, and after all who wouldn’t want to protect Tennessee Tuxedo and Happy Feet?
Rick Manning (@rmanning957) is the communications director of Americans for Limited Government.
