Out in the cold

In a previous life, regular Insiders guest Mike Seccombe lived on Martha’s Vineyard and reported for the local rag. There he churned out much the same climate-change alarmism he now peddles (along with bitchy snipes at Quadrant and prize-winning author historian Hal G.P. Colebatch) in a Saturday curiosity some few people buy but surely none actually read, certainly not for pleasure or enlightenment.

Here is how, in 2010, the smirking presence now warming the ABC’s Sunday morning couch quoted a Massachusetts fisheries official on the disastrous impact global warming was having on Cape Cod’s lobster population:

There’s no question it’s climate change causing this. You can’t deny it. Cold-water species just are not doing well. Those people hoping to see a recovery in the lobster or winter-flounder fishery in southern New England, I’ve just got to warn them, it’s probably not going to happen.

Added Seccombe in an editorial aside:

So there’s not much future in lobster fishing around here.

In another of his exercises in catastropharian stenography, Seccombe cited the dire fate of sweaty, heat-stressed lobsters as a prime argument for wind turbines. Lobsters are a species worth fretting about, apparently; ospreys and other sea birds not so much:

…the state Division of Marine Fisheries served up a reminder of why it was so important to develop sources of renewable energy. It attributed the steep decline in lobster numbers in southern Massachusetts to warmer water, resulting from climate change.

It is fortunate that Cape Cod’s crustaceans pay less heed to Seccombe’s environmental pronouncements than does Insiders host Barrie Cassidy to his expert guest’s prognostications on the tides of Australian politics. From an April, 2014, edition of The Portland Press Herald in Maine, which is just up the coast from Seccombe’s former home:

Market prices have plunged in recent years because of a glut of lobster. The price per pound averaged $2.89 in 2013, up slightly from $2.69 in 2012 but down from as much as $4.63 a pound in 2005, according to the Department of Marine Resources.

If global warming’s effect on water temperatures was a problem, it is a problem no longer. The photo below was taken last week on one of the same Cape Cod beaches where Seccombe not so long ago was reporting on the sea’s implacable warming.

More photos of global warming’s latest icy consequences are available via the link below.

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