Featuring a Sunday meditation where the pond rolled over and went back to sleep ... until Lloydie of the Amazon arrived and a Bloodnok joke seemed in order ...

 

 

The pond's desire to avoid the Djoker has meant giving up on some right royal reptile doozies ...

 

 

No doubt someone will chastise the pond for ignoring a veritable loon, and so acting at complete odds with its loon mission statement ...

But Stevo having a rant about the Djoker, Covid, life, pain, death and the whole damn thing has a very limited shelf life ... and that makes it entirely unsuited for a Sunday meditation ...

Better to go with a safe pair of hands, a scribbler in tune with the need for pompous solemnity, as once supplied by the Pellists and the angry Sydney Anglicans ...

 

 

Now the pond should make its position clear before getting into Polonius. 

It seems possible not to like Hamas that much, what with the pond's attitude to Islam being life-threatening, while also not particularly liking the gulag/apartheid like approach adopted by the theocratic Israeli state.

It's an old saw that those that are bullied resort to the ways of the bully ... and the pond isn't alone in thinking that things have taken a turn for the worst thanks to the last regime. 

This turned up in a St Louis Jewish publication back in August 2018, raising the matter of a theocratic state approach:

I was not quite 11 years old May 14, 1948, when the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel was read by David Ben-Gurion on the eve of Shabbat and rebroadcast the following night on my great aunt’s shortwave radio. We had just finished Havdalah.
I was quite impressed by the words of the text that proclaimed the promise of the state to “foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture. … We appeal to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the up building of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.”
Seventy years later, the state of Israel has tragically expurgated these promises to the dust bin of history. In just one week, the right-wing coalition that governs the country and controls the Knesset has made a mockery of the democratic principles articulated in Israel’s founding document. Consider:
• It has directed the Ministry of Education to forbid some people and groups opposed to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank from speaking at public schools. It has barred access by Palestinians to Israel’s Supreme Court of land disputes.
• It has prohibited single men and gay couples from becoming surrogate parents.
• And it has enacted a Basic Law statute that bestows upon Israeli Jews the exclusive right of national self-determination while downgrading Arabic as a language, both measures effectively relegating its non-Jewish residents to second-class citizenship.
People suspiciously possessing pro-Palestinian literature are subject to search and seizure operations by security personnel at Ben Gurion Airport and border crossings as well as at the Green Line that separates the West Bank from pre-1967 Israel. Only ultra-Orthodox rabbis may perform marriages and other life-cycle rituals. It is illegal for other rabbis to do so. If they do, they are condemned and even arrested, as was the recent case of a Conservative rabbi in Haifa who married an Israeli Jewish couple...

And so on, and that was back in 2018, and things have got a lot worse since then ... though they did make a feeble attempt to fix the gay parent thingie ...

But Polonius will have none of that, and can't see any mote in his own or Israel's eye ...

 

Around this point, the pond became alarmed. 

Polonius had made reference to onetime film flack Garry Maddox at Nine, but there hadn't been a single mention that this dire situation was all the fault of the ABC ...

Surprisingly, Polonius seemed to be in favour of government funding for the y'artz, but surely this couldn't extend to funding for the ABC.

It's the pond's belief that Polonius spends his entire day with his eye fixed on ABC TV, and his ear tuned to ABC radio, partly because he can't stand advertising, and partly because he has an obsessive compulsive fixation about the cardigan wearers ... and so each column that he writes, the pond collects a handsome bet that within it there will be a mention of the ABC ...

Please, roll the dice maestro, and lets not have a crapping out with a 2, 3 or 12 ...

 

Bingo. The pond collects as usual. Polonius displays his obsessive compulsive fixation and all is right in the world ... sure, it's a modest mention up against the best of them, but the dear old obsessive compulsive is still fixated on RN ...

And what's more there was a Polonial reference to the cancel culture movement, though for the life of the pond, while it's tried many times to enrol in the movement, it's yet to find an office, or even a post box address, or perhaps a humble email or Twitter account ...

The pond is aware that some sort of movement to cancel things exists among conservative commentators of the Polonial kind. 

There has recently been a number of extravagant attempts to shut down assorted sweet young things ... it seems these days you can't make mention of gulags and apartheid without the cancel culture thought police bringing out the anti-semitic meme ...

 

 

It's extremely tiresome, and besides the pond is of the view that anything an actor says should be resolutely ignored.

The pond is more interested in the sort of ghosting that Fox News indulges in when the real anti-semites turn up in their roster with faux comparisons to Adolf, as if they've never watched a Mark Felton video ...

 

 

Yes, Fox News is big on cancel culture, ghosting style, as you can read at the Daily Beast (or head off to Yahoo News if you can't get past the paywall).

It reminded the pond of a recent Fox cartoon ...

 

 

 

 

It's funny how cancel culture can be so completely amorphous, a characterless conurbation, as to be utterly meaningless ... but that's pretty much par for Polonial thinking ...

 

 

Actually, as a devout atheist, the pond is no friend of Hamas, but then it's no friend of any kind of theocratic state, and that talk of apartheid isn't so far off the mark. 

The concept even has its own wiki ...

Israel and the apartheid analogy is a criticism of the Israeli government charging that Israel has practiced apartheid against Palestinians, primarily in its occupation of the West Bank; the term apartheid in this context may refer to the crime of apartheid in international law, or it may refer to an analogy in comparison with apartheid in South Africa. Some commentators extend the term to include treatment of Arab citizens of Israel, describing their status as second-class citizens. Proponents of the analogy claim several core elements of what they call "a system of control" in the occupied Palestinian territories meet the definition of apartheid in international law or are similar to what prevailed under the South African apartheid regime. These features regard such things as the ID system, the pattern of Israeli settlements, separate roads for Israeli and Palestinian inhabitants, Israeli military checkpoints, marriage law, the West Bank barrier, the use of Palestinians for cheaper labour, the Palestinian West Bank exclaves, inequities in infrastructure, legal rights (e.g. "Enclave law"), and disparities of access to land and resources between Palestinians and Israeli settlers. It is argued that, like South Africa, Israel may be classified as a settler colonial society, in violation of international law.

Well yes, and so on and on, and all that and much more, with settlers thinking they can roam around popping off anyone they don't like and seizing anything they do like ... but the pond wouldn't expect Polonius to look much beyond the fluff he keeps in his tummy button ...

And now having mentioned fluff, it's time to turn to Dame Slap.

The pond doesn't want to do it, but as previously explained, all the old regulars are on holidays, and so prime reptile thinking is in short supply ...

The pond thinks Dame Slap has fallen on lean times. 

Back in the day, when she donned the MAGA cap and strode out into the New York street to celebrate the arrival of the mango Mussolini, the Dame was something to see. 

In the annals of climate science, her partnership with "Lord" Monckton was legendary, heroic, especially when the pair discovered that said science would be used by the UN to introduce world government by Xmas ...

Sadly, the glory days are behind her, which goes to show what can happen to her, or the Victorian Liberal party, when given a good krogering ...

Back in the day the pond could run a chirpy cartoon, knowing it would fit neatly with Dame Slap ...

 

 

These days not so much ...

 

Some politicians? But the only politicians bleating about the verdict were the usual suspects ...

 

You can google such stories if you like, but the pond felt a deep ennui.

The blame here firmly rests with Dame Slap, who clearly has gone soft. 

She used to be the hard woman, the head kicker of News Corp, and it was easy to rustle up a cartoon or two to go with her pieces ...

 

That's the right stuff, while Dame Slap is busy with the wrong stuff.

What can the pond do with this sort of half-baked, wet behind the ears, sponge cake, lily-livered offering?

 

It's easy to see why the pond decided to go with the cartoons, even if the text didn't match up ...

Someone had to celebrate the tough elephants that would squash a troublesome fly ...

 

Ah, the good old days ...and then, this ... back to the patented Dame Slap lamington roll ...

But what of the glory days of the mango Mussolini?

The pond only perked up at the final gobbet ...

 

For some reason, the pond misread Dame Slap's closing remarks, and thought it read like this ...

 ...This alleged crime may have rightly gone unpunished. More than two months passed without an arrest. The District Attorney, after recusing himself, sent a letter to local police arguing there was not enough evidence to convict.
There was feeble video evidence, half a minute long, showing Arbery jogging along the suburban street at 1pm. There is a white truck, one defendant bravely holding a shotgun, the other nervously holding a handgun. Arbery was not armed when he was shot dead, but he could have been.
After hearing defence arguments that the defendants were trying to carry out a noble legal citizen’s arrest of a man they assumed was a thief, and then acted in self-defence, the jury delivered a guilty verdict against all three men.
Juries are not always right, for the simple reason that human beings are fallible... if the mango Mussolini were still running the United States, this would not be allowed to stand ...

It's tragic when the pond has to suggest to Dame Slap ways she might lift her game and get back into the cancel culture zeitgeist ...

Never mind, on to the bonus of the day, and with the paucity of the materials on offer - who'd have thought the pond would yearn for "Ned", the bromancer et al? - the pond had to settle for a very short, sublimely lyrical lizard Oz editorialist offering ...

 

 

Didn't you just love it? Claims the weather is somehow broken are disproved over time ... and dams are the answer ... and won't Barners be pleased ... and we all might just as well learn to live with it and make the most of it, because there'll be good times ahead ...

Meanwhile, on another planet, a few samples ...

 

Yes, just learn to live with it, and build a few dams, and run a few Bjorn-again stories, and make the most of it, and there'll be good times ahead ...

 

 

But wait, what about a bonus to the bonus? 

What about Lloydie of the Amazon, safely tucked away at the very bottom of the page, out of harm's way and away from doing much harm ... apart from spreading contempt as a form of science ...

 

 

Note that introduction ... "chagrin of catastrophists" ...

What's a good antonym for that? "Blessed loon?

As a way of kicking off the discussion in a calm, rational way, unencumbered by emotive terms, the reptiles repeated the dose of "chagrin of catastrophists" at the top of the piece ... just to make sure the pond was really pissed ...

 

 

 

Now it so happens that, at the time it happened to be blessed by blessed loon Lloydie of the Amazon,  the pond was doing some grazing in The New Yorker and came across a piece by Joshua Yaffa, currently outside the paywall under the header The Great Siberian Thaw ...

Unlike Lloydie of the Amazon, for whom the pond has a thinly veiled, but quite profound contempt, it's based on actually visiting the location under discussion, and discussing it with various experts and the sort of eccentrics you might expect in a remote location such as Siberia ...

But the pond is stuck with Lloydie of the Amazon, and so must begin the slog of the very long bonus to the bonus ...

 

 

Hang on, hang on, forget Lloydie's impression of Said Hanrahan by John O'Brien at the start. 

What if the pond broke up the Lloydie text with a few morsels from The New Yorker, crumbs that might tempt readers to leave the pond and Lloydie and head on over there ...

...One of the more outlandish proposals came from a Soviet scientist named Mikhail Gorodsky, who called for positioning an artificial dust ring—similar to Saturn’s rings—around Earth, to create a heat dome over the poles that would raise temperatures to the point that the permafrost would vanish entirely. In the mid-fifties, Mikhail Kim, an engineer who had first arrived in Norilsk as a Gulag prisoner, devised a more practical solution. His idea was to build on top of cement piles driven as far as forty feet into the permafrost. The piles would elevate a building’s foundation, keeping it from warming the ground below and allowing cold air to penetrate deep into the soil. An Arctic construction boom followed.
Soviet engineers came to treat vechnaya merzlota as exactly that: eternal, stable, unchanging. “They believed they had conquered permafrost,” Dmitry Streletskiy, a professor at George Washington University, said. “You could construct a five- or nine-story building on top of piles and nothing happened. Everyone was happy.” But, Streletskiy went on, “that infrastructure was meant to serve thirty to fifty years, and no one could imagine that the climate would change so dramatically within that span.”...

You see, it's much better written, informative and interesting, and the pond made sure that quote had a teaser element.

For the stickers, it's back to Lloydie ...

 

Please allow the pond to repeat the dose ...

 

...By 2016, a regional official had declared that sixty per cent of the buildings in Norilsk were compromised as a result of permafrost thaw. On May 29, 2020, a fuel-storage tank belonging to Norilsk Nickel, one of Russia’s largest mining companies, cracked open, spilling twenty-one thousand tons of diesel into nearby waterways and turning the Ambarnaya River a metallic red. Executives at the company said that the damage had been contained. But Georgy Kavanosyan, a hydrogeologist based in Moscow, who has a popular YouTube channel, travelled to Norilsk and took samples farther north, from the Pyasina River, which empties into the Kara Sea. He found pollutant concentrations two and a half times permitted levels, threatening fish stocks and ecosystems for thousands of miles.
The Kremlin could not ignore the scale of the disaster, which Greenpeace compared to the Exxon Valdez oil spill. In February, 2021, the state ordered Norilsk Nickel to pay a two-billion-­dollar fine, the largest penalty for environmental damage in Russian history. The company had said that the piles supporting the tank failed as the permafrost thawed. An outside scientific review found that those piles had been improperly installed, and that the temperature of the soil was not regularly monitored. In other words, human negligence had compounded the effects of climate change. “What happened in Norilsk was a kind of demonstration of how severe the problem can be,” Vladimir Romanovsky, a professor of geophysics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said. “But it’s far from the only case. Lots of other accidents are happening on a smaller scale, and will continue to.”
To get a sense of how permafrost thaw is changing the landscape, I took a drive out of Yakutsk with Nikolay Basharin, a thirty-two-year-old researcher at the Permafrost Institute. Our destination was Usun-Kyuyol, the village where Basharin grew up, eighty miles away. His family, like many in Yakutia, had a cellar dug into the permafrost, where they stored meat and jam and lake ice, which they melted for drinking water. “You live on it for all these years but never really fully understand it,” Basharin told me, explaining his decision to study permafrost science. We set off at dawn to catch the first ferry across the Lena River; because of the ever-changing effects of permafrost on soil structure, building a bridge has thus far proved unfeasible...

Meanwhile, the reptiles were dressing up Lloydie of the Amazon with a truly banal illustration ... not science, more a snap from a tourist pamphlet ...

 

 

Well the pond has kept the illustration small, because there's only so much unremitting banality any beach-going possum should be required to handle ... and now back to the read ... because there are lizard Oz readers who are apparently unaware that Australia is not the world ...

 

 

Some might note that Lloydie of the Amazon is slowly changing his tone. He usually works this way, celebrating things, knowing that his readership will settle for "catastrophist" and flit off ... but in an uneasy way, he starts to let reality drift in, though only so he can give it Curry ...

How about another quote?

...Walter Anthony found methane emissions five times higher than Zimov’s initial estimate. Radiocarbon dating showed that the gas was emitted from organic matter that formed between twenty and forty thousand years ago, during the Pleistocene era, indicating that permafrost thaw had reached layers that were deep and ancient. The research was published in a paper in Nature, in 2006, which immediately became a foundational text in establishing the impact of permafrost thaw on climate change.
When I was in Chersky, Zimov took me out to the lake. We walked through shrubs and felt the crunch of bright-red cloudberries under our feet. At the water’s edge, Zimov asked, “You see the bubbles?” Once I knew to look for them, they were impossible to miss. It was as if the lake were a giant cauldron on the brink of a very slow, barely perceptible boil, with a pop of air here and there. Methane.
Zimov explained that, even during Chersky’s frigid winters, temperatures under the lake’s surface remain above freezing. Unfrozen water allows microbes to keep digesting organic matter long after the surrounding landscape is covered in snow. Water also has a powerful erosion effect. “The bank is slowly thawing and collapsing, taking with it fresh pieces of permafrost into the lake,” Zimov said—more fuel for the release of methane. As Walter Anthony, who is now a professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, put it to me, “Once permafrost thaws to the point where it creates depressions filled with water, the thaw starts to go deep and fast and expands laterally—you can’t really stop it.”
The mean annual temperature in Chersky has risen by three degrees Celsius in the past fifty years. An equally pressing problem is snow cover. “Snow is like a warm blanket—it doesn’t allow the wintertime cold to penetrate all the way into soil,” Zimov said. One of the effects of climate change is more precipitation in the Arctic ecosystem around Chersky. Yearly snowfall has increased by as much as twenty centimetres since the early eighties, adding two more degrees of warming effect. As a result, Zimov explained, permafrost that used to be minus seven degrees Celsius is now on the verge of thawing, if it hasn’t already…

Now remember those are only intended as teasers, designed to send people off to The New Yorker. 

But the pond must play fair with those who feel compelled to read on with Lloydie of the Amazon ...

 

 

Around this point, the reptiles again interrupted Lloydie with a snap of awesome banality ...

 

 

 

The pond notes it for the record, and also notes that Lloydie's tone grows darker in the next gobbet, as he keeps the company of catastrophists ... but not to worry soon there'll be a goodly dose of denialist Curry ...

 

 

Say what? Things are a bit grim? Who'd have guessed it?

...In 2018, a report prepared by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gave humans a maximum carbon budget of some five hundred and eighty billion tons in order to have an even chance of limiting warming to one and a half degrees ­Celsius. The panel’s models have only recently started factoring in various permafrost-thaw scenarios, but they offer such a wide range of possible outcomes that permafrost has become, as Schuur put it, the “wild card” of climate science. He and his colleagues estimate that permafrost emissions might make up five to fifteen per cent of the I.P.C.C.’s allotment.
The I.P.C.C.’s models also miss a significant cause of greenhouse-gas emissions from permafrost. Its estimates presume that all thaw will be gradual, caused by rising air temperatures, and do not take into account thermokarst, or “abrupt thaw,” as Schuur prefers to call it, which can trigger nonlinear events like rapid erosion or landslides. “Those events are essentially irreversible on human time scales,” Susan Natali, a scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, in Falmouth, Massachusetts, said.
Average global temperatures are on track to rise by nearly two and a half degrees Celsius this century. At the latest U.N. climate-change conference, held in Glasgow in November, participating countries reaffirmed the goal of holding warming to one and a half degrees, even as plans for doing so remain vague. Most models presume that temperatures will surpass that limit, and that a successful global effort to keep warming at a manageable level will involve measures to bring them down again. “The problem is, you can’t just turn off, let alone reverse, permafrost thaw,” Natali said. At a certain point, nature takes over. Even the most forward-thinking legislature in the world can’t pass a law banning emissions from permafrost. As Natali put it, “It won’t be possible to refreeze the ground and have it go back to how it was.”

Meanwhile, strange things have started to happen ... won't someone think of the reindeer ...

...The outbreak represented the first anthrax cases on Yamal since 1941. Just about everyone, from scientists to herders, had believed that the bacteria-borne disease was eradicated long ago. Two hundred thousand soil samples taken during the previous decade showed no evidence of anthrax spores. But in a normal summer the upper layer of permafrost in Yamal thaws to a depth of twenty inches or so; in 2016, it had reached nearly three feet in some places. In a subsequent report on the causes of the outbreak, a panel of Russian experts wrote, “The emergence of anthrax was triggered by the activation of ‘old’ infection sites following anomalously high air temperature and the thawing of the sites to a depth beyond normal levels.”

Back to Lloydie, getting infected by Judith Curry yet again ...

 

In an interview published on her website? 

Well it's a source, but perhaps Lloydie of the Amazon should campaign for a trip to Siberia ... he might find strange things are happening ...

...Permafrost thaw has brought to the surface all sorts of mysteries from millennia past. In 2015, scientists from a Russian biology institute in Pushchino, a Soviet-era research cluster outside Moscow, extracted a sample of yedoma from a borehole in Yakutia. Back at their lab, they placed the piece of frozen sediment in a sterilized culture box. A month later, a microscopic, wormlike invertebrate known as a bdelloid rotifer was crawling around inside. Radiocarbon dating revealed the rotifer to be twenty-four thousand years old. In August, I drove out to Pushchino, where I was met by Stas Malavin, a researcher at the laboratory. “It’s one thing for a simple bacterium to come back to life after being buried in the permafrost,” he said. “But this creature has intestines, a brain, nervous cells, reproductive organs. We’re clearly dealing with a higher order.”
The rotifer had survived the intervening years in a state of “cryptobiosis,” Malavin explained, “a kind of hidden life, where metabolism effectively slows down to zero.” The animal emerged from this geological “time machine,” as he put it, not just alive but able to reproduce. A rotifer lives for only a few weeks, but replicates itself multiple times through parthenogenesis, a type of asexual reproduction. Malavin removed from the lab fridge a direct descendant of the rotifer that had crawled out of the permafrost and placed it under a microscope. An oval-shaped plankton squirmed around; I imagined this blob, two-tenths of a millimetre in size, as a nervous explorer who awoke to find itself in a strange and unexpected future...

…It’s possible to imagine technical solutions to avoid the worst effects of permafrost thaw on buildings, industrial facilities, or even whole settlements. In Yakutsk, I passed apartment blocks with large metal tubes installed near their foundations, filled with a cooling agent that, during the winter, condenses and flows belowground to keep the soil frozen. In Salekhard, the capital of Yamal, temperature sensors have been lowered into boreholes under the foundations of certain buildings—if the soil is at risk of thawing, scientists will get an alarm signal, presumably in time to make engineering fixes. Yaroslav Kamnev, the director of an initiative launched by the regional government to study the warming of the soil, told me, “You simply have to understand what is going on inside the permafrost, and everything will stay standing just fine.”
But what to do with the huge reserves of carbon in the ground, waiting to be turned into greenhouse gas? You can’t effectively monitor, let alone cool, millions of square miles of uninhabited tundra. “Technological fixes are impossible,” Merritt Turetsky, the director of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado Boulder, said. The most obvious answer, tragic in both its banality and its unlikelihood, is for humans to quickly and dramatically limit the burning of fossil fuels. “There is one way to keep permafrost frozen that we know is proven and demonstrated—reducing human emissions,”  Turetsky said. “A focus on other solutions might be intriguing, but it’s ultimately a distraction.”

And so to Lloydie's last gobbet, and it turns out after swallowing that Curry horseshit about decades, and don't you worry about that and so on and so forth, he finally lets a few other scientists into the room ... if only to give them another dose of Curry and the trots ...

 

 

 

Will the pond let the tepid Curry and Lloydie of the Amazon have the last word?

Fuck that for a natural variability joke ...

…Nikita, who is thirty-eight, has a degree in applied mathematics, but he is not exactly a scientist. His fluency in the world of permafrost came from years spent with Zimov around the station, an informal education that has made him an energetic steward of his father’s vision. For much of the time that I was in Chersky, he was tracking a shipment of a dozen bison that had begun their journey on a farm in Denmark, nearly five thousand miles away. They were on a container ship sailing on the Arctic Ocean, but because of storms at sea the journey was taking longer than planned. One morning, he announced that he was headed to the park to install a new greenhouse-gas flux sensor, which a group of scientists at the University of Alaska Fairbanks had sent to measure emission levels. I volunteered to go along.
It was a clear fall day on the river, with the golden leaves of the bushes and stunted trees of the tundra giving the scene the feel of a New England autumn in miniature. An hour later, we pulled up to the entrance of the park, marked by a few wooden steps built into the muddy riverbank. Nikita lugged the sensor in a backpack up a hundred-­foot tower and tinkered with it for a while, without success. After he came down, we walked through the territory, with pockets of knee-high grasses rising out of the flat expanse. “We’re not reinventing the wheel here,” he said. “This all existed at one point, we know that. How to re-create it now, though? That’s the question.”
We came to a caravan of camels, munching on grass and craning their necks in wary avoidance of us. They looked out of place this far north, but the fossil record shows that camels once grazed all over the high Arctic, their fatty humps providing stores of energy during the long winters. Like the mammoth, the Arctic camel disappeared during the late Pleistocene era, along with giant beavers and sloths, horses and cave lions—a Noah’s ark of lost Arctic species.
The permafrost, sealed underground, has managed to survive a while longer. But it couldn’t stay out of harm’s way forever. Neither could humans, for that matter. Whether we are thawing the permafrost or fighting to keep it frozen, its presence, like that of so much on this planet, is far less eternal than we once convinced ourselves. “People didn’t start acting as gods fifty or a hundred years ago, or even one thousand, but ten thousand years ago,” Nikita said. “The point isn’t whether it’s O.K. to act like a god but whether you’re acting like a benevolent or wise one.”

The pond thinks that Lloydie of the Amazon has provided the answer to that one. We're acting and scribbling like really mindless tools ... being a deity has nothing much to do with it when you carry on like a blessed loon railing at actual scientists doing actual observations, and drawing verifiable conclusions ...

About the only positive thing in all this? 

Well instead of the banal reptile illustrations, the pond's NY app interrupted the story with a cartoon which evoked how the pond felt after reading Lloydie of the Amazon giving the planet a dose of Curry and ending up sounding very much like Colonel Bloodnok in the grip of uncontrolled flatulence ...

 

 

 The pond's final Internet search? Insane reptiles fucking planet how make calm down ...