The Swordfish and the Manatee

China was just hit by the strongest Typhoon in 50 years as well, and last year was the strongest hurricane season on record, but I'm sure this is all coincidence. I'm gonna stick my head back in the sand now.

Most people know the manatee by another name, sea cow, which is not undeserved. Unlike their distant mammalian cousins, dolphins, porpoises, and whales, they are not smart enough, nor obviously fast enough, to get out of the way of motorboats which roam the same intracoastal waterways as they do. I am not saying that global warming is not happening, but what a single manatee, or even a herd of manatees is doing that far north may have nothing more to do with Global Warming than my snow cone melting in my hand on a warm sunny day.

Maybe he was just dazed from being struck by another motorboat and, his sense of direction being a little off, he just followed a warm current, that happened to be the Gulf Stream flowing north!

And what about the Mediterranean Swordfish? Well he was certainly a long way from home also, but its not like he crossed the Atlantic and traveled through the Panama Canal!

Reminds me of the the soldiers in Monty Python and the Holy Grail discussing how Arthur's squire might have gotten hold of cocoanuts, which did not grow Northern Europe. Something like:

"Well, they could have been brought here by Swallows."

Well, you know the rest!

Yes I absolutely agree global warming may have nothing to do with it. It's possible that global warming has nothing to do with the large "dead zones" due to explosive algae blooms off the west coast, It's possible that two seperate warm water animals showing up in regions historically too cold for them is coincidence. Polar bears starving to death, Coral Reefs bleaching, the new incidents of forest fires in Alaska, all can be explained without global warming. All merely anecdotal evidence, certainly not cause and effect.

Except cause and effect isn't the only way to prove something scientifically. There is also statistics where standard deviations from norms, though individually uninformative collectively can say something about a system. When two warm climate sea animals show up in cold water climates in the same week there is a statistical significance. It may be coincidence, but the more often these things happen, the less likely we can say it's coincidence (this is the basis of bayesian logic).

So yes, I aknowledge that your observation that individually these things may have nothing to do with global warming, but I never listed a one to one correlation. What I said was "I'm sure this is all coincidence" I was trying to express my frustration that there is a debate on global warming today when there are literally mountains of data that would be and incredible coincidence otherwise.