News fairly unbalanced. We report. You decipher.
House-straddling tarantulas, mosquitoes the size of German shepherds, ants with the speed and mass of a diesel locomotive — all of these threats and more face humanity unless delegates to the Copenhagen Climate Conference agree on the wording of a treaty that would put an end to greenhouse gases once and for all, according to two well-known climate scientists.
Phil Jones, currently on involuntary sabbatical from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, as well as Penn State professor Michael Mann, agreed that global citizens “face near-certain doom — crushed in the massive, venomous mandibles of insects and arachnids the likes of which we haven’t seen outside of science fiction movies.”
Jones and Mann recently came under scrutiny in the scientific community when e-mails surfaced suggesting they, and other leading climatologists, had attempted to distort, hide and even dump data that could challenge their theory of anthropogenic (man-made) global warming.
In a surprise public appearance, with Powerpoint presentation, on the streets of Copenhagen, the duo said the absence of raw temperature data to back their previous global warming claims pales in comparison with the “sheer terror” that their new data should inspire.
“If you go back some 107 billion years, as the molten surface of the Earth began to cool, insects were much bigger than they are now,” said Jones. “They went through several cycles of shrinking and expanding until the start of the Industrial Revolution.”
Professor Mann added that since factories and vehicles began to spew carbon into the atmosphere the average size of an ant has increased at an alarming rate — roughly .0002 percent per century.
“If you look at a chart tracking the average leg length of tarantulas,” Mann said, “it just shoots up in the mid-1970s. The graph looks like a hockey stick. And they’re on every continent. No one will escape their wrath.”
Jones and Mann said they arrived at their new theory of global giant bug warming “as an alternative explanation for the data that we no longer have to support our first theory.” This particular interpretation of the data was chosen, they said, “mostly because it’s really scary to little children.”
Examiner columnist Scott Ott is editor in chief of ScrappleFace.com, the world’s leading family-friendly news satire source.
