You are being misled by alarmists:
SCIENTISTS say a white possum native to Queensland's Daintree forest has become the first mammal to become extinct due to man-made global warming.
The white lemuroid possum, a rare creature found only above 1000m in the mountain forests of far north Queensland, has not been seen for three years.
Experts fear climate change is to blame for the disappearance of the highly vulnerable species thanks to a temperature rise of up to 0.8C....
Scientists believe some frog, bug and insects species have also been killed off by climate change. But this would be the first known loss of a mammal and the most significant since the extinction of the Dodo and the Tasmanian Tiger.
"It is not looking good," researcher Steve Williams said.
"If they have died out it would be first example of something that has gone extinct purely because of global warming."
Rising temperatures - which these researchers blame on man - are said to have caused this extinction. So let's check the mean maximum temperatures at the nearest big weather station, Cairns, and see if things have grown possum-deadly hotter over the past 30 years:
Good heavens! You mean in the 30 years to 2000, the temperatures were actually bang-on the long-term average?
Try again. Let's see if this year was hotter than average:
No, it wasn't. In fact, it's cooler in Cairns this year than it was a decade ago:
Port Douglas is even closer to this white possum territory, but its statistics don't allow similar comparisons. But there is this graph, showing that temperatures next to the Daintree were actually above average in the 30 years to 1980, when the white possum still could thrive:
Meanwhile, of course, the world's temperatures have actually fallen over the decade.
Do the researchers have a more plausible, albeit less media-friendly alarmist, explanation for the white possums' demise? Can they explain why they cried wolf on the temperatures?
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