Climate craziness of the week: seriously “ducked up” science

It was recently reported that journalism lost a lot of jobs this year, and again in July. After looking at this piece from the UK Telegraph, where the journalist couldn’t separate fantasy from reality, taking the word of a “scientist”, there’s no need to wonder why.


I’m sorry, really I am.

110 thoughts on “Climate craziness of the week: seriously “ducked up” science

    • Gills and undoubtedly sonar like dolphins and whales! Most people in advanced countries already have the blubber necessary for insulation.

      • and a whole pile are as daft as the walrus that went over the cliffs too…similarities are there;-)

      • He went on from “Man from Atlantis” to being “Bobby Ewing”, not sure which role he was best in but he didn’t shoot JR.

  1. Somebody’s been watching Waterworld. Or is he just what the military once euphemized as a “feather merchant”?

    • That was my first thought when I read the report. Who needs science. Today if you need a new theory just go watch the movies.

  2. That’s not fair! Somebody quickly act against that climate change!
    I want to evolve to grow wings and be able to fly without my hang glider. If we act NOW, that might be possible!

  3. Yes, but the problem is, Anthony, you are a journalist yourself with this lovely site and yet you restrict discussion of the work of the scientists Nikolov and Zeller.
    Could you remove the plank from your own eye please.

  4. do you really believe he was serious!

    I think you may be seeing hyperbole (an extreme exaggeration made for emphasis or humour).

    • Given the nonsense routinely being touted by so called serious climate scientists, how can you tell the difference?

    • Given the nonsense being pushed by your average serious “climate scientist”, how can you tell the difference?

    • “do you really believe he was serious!”

      Really?? It’s in the “Science News” section. You’re really going to say it was meant as a joke? Zaphod must be so disappointed in you.

  5. In that simply wizard film LOCAL HERO there was a lovely girl, a diver, whose feet were very slightly and spookily webbed! Bring it on I say!

    • That was a little gem of a movie. Remember the Texan oil-magnate played by Burt Lancaster?

      “Good sky you’ve got here, MacIntyre. Well done.”

  6. Obviously to go with the webbed brains who concocted this nonsense…

  7. “Once serious scientists chasing grants earn mockery instead” should be the Lead Line to the story.

    Matthew is just climbing on-board the climate funding Gravy Train, and Matthew gets his 15 minutes of infamy turned into mockery. I feel sorry for the graduate students he supervises. I really do.

  8. More likely that we will evolve a weaker sense of smell to offset the stench of climate emerency bull$h!t

  9. So, his research was watching “WaterWorld” staring Nick Cage? He must have a rich fantasy life and would be more successful as a novelist.

  10. Saw a TV program recently regarding Mermaids evolving from Terrestrial Humans that moved to the water.
    This and other great science fiction

  11. OK then.

    If sea levels rise to the maximum possible, it won’t actually be that much, maybe 180 feet. The thing is that we have a huge amount of unpopulated land. We currently huddle together on a lot of arable land. If we move off that to unproductive land we will more than make up for any land we lose to inundation.

    Thing two: By the time the seas rise 180 feet, the world population will be decreasing at an alarming rate because we aren’t breeding fast enough to replace ourselves.

    Thing three: The next glaciation is coming and all this crap will be moot.

    • commieBob

      I really wish global warming/climate change would effing hurry up. I wan’t all the beachside condo’s flooded, I want more hurricanes (people might start building to survive them) I want more heat to melt the poles and free up billions of acres of land for agriculture; I want it all………bring it on!

      And if I survive long enough to evolve web feet I’ll be several thousand years old.

      Is there nothing climate change can’t accomplish?!

  12. The reason the press are dying is nothing to do with the cut-n-paste mentality that pervades much of the press. Instead, the cut-n-paste mentality is a consequence of the slow death of journalism, which was destroyed when the internet took away much of its advertising revenue.

    To put it in perspective, 50 years ago, if you wanted to sell a house, a car or even a cricket bat, you had to take out an expensive advert in a paper. If you wanted to hire someone for a job, to advertise a business – you had no choice but to put an advert in a paper. And as a result, if you were looking for a house, a car, a job, you had little choice but to buy a newspaper. The result was that advertising revenue for papers was absolutely phenomenal.

    Then we had the printing (linotype) revolution, that suddenly enabled a whole raft of new magazines like autotrader (which funded the Guardian). Then we had the internet which enabled all these advertising sites to go online. Both these revolutions (as well as the onward rise of TV) took away the funding from newspapers with the result they could no longer afford to do real journalism and instead resorted to low cost copy-n-pasting of other people’s press releases.

    The result, as well as the susceptibility of the press to non-science campaigns like the climate cult, has been a massive cut in jobs so that even on my own small street there are two former journalists.

    In some areas (local papers) there has been reform with many local papers shutting down, or becoming geographically syndicated papers with a lot syndicated geographical wide content and much less local. But as yet, with the exception of a few papers like the Independent which have turned into glorified blogs, whilst the larger national papers have cut back, they still survive at least in name. So, as yet we have not seen the fundamental reform of the sector that is long overdue.

    So, yes, I do see these latest jobs losses as part of a continuing and ongoing haemorrhage jobs as they haemorrhage readers to places like this which cater for more niche interests. However, no, the move to copy-n-paste was not the cause, but the consequence of these historic changes.

    • I have friends who were at the top of the newspaper business.

      The loss of advertising revenue is absolutely true, as you say.

      But the death of the papers is from left content. You don’t have to cut-and-paste junk; you can cut-and-paste interesting, factual information.

      In the southeast, McClatchy has bought up most everything. As the businesses got weak, McClatchy jumped in. They may be more efficient, but they continue to bleed. Because of content.

      Content, content, content. People don’t want what they are selling.

    • Or could it be the internet has allowed common people to educate and fact check similar claims that would not have been available 25 years ago. I am sure copy and paste journalism has been around for hundreds of years. When news arrived on horseback, no one traveled hundreds of miles to do investigative journalism. Today everyone can be a journalist just with a cell phone or GoPro, even in a war zone. No more “sanitized” news for the masses.

  13. The St Kilda islanders had prehensile toes for climbing cliffs in search of Gannett eggs. I’m sure some of them might have had webbed feet too

  14. Oh yeah, on half the way to evolve to a dolphin 😀
    Due to climate change – what else 😀

  15. ….sure we could.
    But, then we wouldn’t call the creature a human. We’d call it a seal.
    This guy must’ve really liked “Waterworld”.
    (BTW it certainly won’t be happening in the mere 50 years we have left, but who am I to rain on their parade?)

  16. Very amusing. I believe that occasionally a child is born with webbing
    between toe or fingers, and Doctors remove it..

    But as per Darwin’s “”Theory” if that child was born into a muddy or very wet place, then webbing could be a advantage, so such a variation would continue.

    But just as with so many things in Nature, such a happening takes a very long tem, like hundreds of thousands of years.



      Not likely, unless your life depended on it. Diseases and mutations that should have ended quickly are instead prolonged, due to medical science, the ability to live without fear of predation, etc. We’re not really evolving any more.

    • The inhabitants of the Fens are popularly believed to have webbed feet. It is a gross calumny to apply the claim to the whole of Norfolk though!

  17. What bunch of foolishness! From a “man of science” nonetheless. How many “millions of years” would that take (assuming you believe in that other foolishness: evolution). If, according to “scientists” we’ll all be dead from global warming, I don’t think we’ll be walking there, quacking as we go!

    I sure hope “Doctor” Skinner is NOT a medical doctor. I feel sorry for his patients if that’s his doctorate.

    • “assuming you believe in that other foolishness: evolution”

      Don’t need to believe, there’s actual evidence.

      • Which Laws of Evolution were applied to arrive at the idea of humans developing webbed feet?

  18. Skinner?? Makes selkies come to mind, also Kurt Vonnegut’s Galapagos. The seas have been rising since the end of the last ice age with no effect. Fantasies.

  19. It’s an obvious wind-up. The Telegraph is a sceptical paper. James Delingpole writes for it.

  20. This article is from 2015, the science has advanced so much further since then. We will have fins and gills too.

  21. Perhaps even grow wings ? Just imagine the fuel savings if everyone could take care of air travel by own means ?

    Noise being a major drawback as most greens apparently already use vegetal substances that could get them supersonic even in the early climb.

  22. Evolve webbed feet in just 12 years?
    CO2 can move evolution along real quick now.

  23. How’s this:

    “Alaska is trapped in a kind of hot feedback loop, as the arctic is heating up much faster than the rest of the planet. Ocean surface temperatures upwards of 10 Fahrenheit hotter than average have helped to warm up the state’s coasts. When Bering and Chukchi sea ice collapsed and melted months earlier than normal this spring, the University of Alaska climate specialist Rick Thoman characterized the water as “baking”.

    “ ‘I intentionally try to not be hyperbolic, but what do you say when there’s 10- to 20-degree ocean water temperature above normal?” Thoman told the Guardian. “How else do you describe that besides extraordinary?’

    “The hot water has affected sea birds and marine life, with mass mortality events becoming commonplace in the region. The National Park Service characterizes Alaska’s increasingly frequent sea bird die-offs, called ‘wrecks’, as ‘extreme’. ‘The folks in the communities are saying these animals look like they’ve starved to death,’ said Thoman.”

    Most readers will actually take this seriously. –AGF

  24. Why aren’t people who already live in a wet environment developing webbed feet?

    Olympic swimmers spend a large proportion of their time in the water yet they have normal, although often very large, feet.

    Professional surfers, regular swimmers, those who shower/bathe regularly?


  25. This is exactly what happened to Patrick Duffy :

    Swimming advise :
    – Avoid to swim like this more than 12 feet (+- 1000000) in a row otherwise you will very likely (97% odds) develop the webbed hands, gills and adipose eyelid syndrome by year 2030, and this will be the end of the World as you see it.

  26. Nearly 400′ of sea level rise in the past 18,000 years, and still no webbed feet.

    Why would any fool think that moving shorelines inland a ways would cause a land mammal to mutate?

    Oh, well, it fits with the rest of the anti-science drivel their religion preaches.

    These jackasses really need to get a grip.

    I wonder how much time any of them spend realizing that their worlds are immortal in the information age, and they will be laughed at by their progeny for the next forever thousand years.

    The odds of this insanity not sticking to them for all of time is zilch.




    These jackasses really need to get a grip.

    I wonder how much time any of them spend realizing that their words are immortal in the information age, and they will be laughed at by their progeny for the next forever thousand years.


    • You have an English Lit degree so put the blame where it belong on the stupid journalist who inserted the standard reference to climate change to try and suck up to the boss.

      Water World: This scenario relates to global warming – melting ice caps could lead to a drastic rise in sea levels, forcing humans to live in an underwater community.

      Most of us would not put a Water World together with Climate Change but not that journo idiot.

  28. “Dr Matthew Skinner claims humans could evolve to have webbed hands and feet and less body hair so they could move quickly through the water”

    How does that work, exactly!?

    Our eyes would even become more like cats, so we could see in the murky gloom of seas and rivers and our lungs would shrink as we became used to using artificial tanks to breathe underwater.”

    Clearly, Dr. Skinner does not understand evolution.
    In Dr. Skinner’s thinking, adjustments to be able to use, forage, swim, etc. are passed on to their progeny…

    Another leftist elitist fantasy.

    • I think he forgot that he read Kurt Vonnegut’s Galapagos decades ago:


  29. Dr Matthew Skinner works at the Kentucky Fried Duck company. A sideline of his research deals with the question why, in spite of having been embedded in air for over a million years, humanity did not develop wings.

  30. But they say the world is going to burn up, so I’m thinking more like huge hair to shade our heads and maybe a camel hump or two or even gigantic ears to dissipate heat. The possibilities are endless!

  31. It is appropriate on many levels, and not at all surprising, that climate nutters would ressurect Lysenkoism and embrace it.

  32. So if all humans evolve webbed feet and global warming doesn’t happen …. will everyone need to have their feet circumcised?

  33. I will go to Wall-Mart and buy flippers. Humanities brains allow us to adapt and overcome…. and come up with stupid ideas too.

  34. The more the gaggle of climate changers are being completely ignored the more catatonic and ridiculous they’re becoming. I sense a more frenetic crisis in their outpourings of late –

  35. Ha ha. I am laughing at youse. Climate denialistas

    I actually got fed up with your stupidity a long time ago, and decided to act unilaterally. Im not boasting, but this is what a true woke elder has been able to achieve:-
    I have evolved a snorkel-type appendage on the top of my head, for breathing under the 300 feet of sea rise that is inevitable. Hairy feet to help me on the long migrate to Antartica, which will be the only habitable place on the planet

    Most important, i have evolved a thick furry wig, because although it seems warm today, by the time nasa have finished, it will be sub zero

  36. Given the amount of blubber I already have, I’m thinking a whale-human development instead.

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