'Daft' story of loud whales gets 'tallest climate tale' award

A story claiming global warming is causing blue whales to sing louder as they struggle to be heard over breaking sea ice has been named the "tallest climate tale of 2018."

The London-based Global Warming Policy Forum, which made the selection, said "there was a lot of competition, with the catastrophe mongers across the media clearly working hard to ensure that they were in the running for this much sought-after accolade."

The think tank said judges believed a London Daily Mail story by Mark Prigg "deserved particular kudos because it was not only daft, but could also be shown to be daft at the time of writing."

"More circumspect journos like to conjure up catastrophes far into the future. Tall-tale telling of this quality is therefore not something you come across every day."

The judges also "particularly enjoyed L. Robertson's 'Climate change, weather and road deaths,' a paper in the journal Injury Prevention, which declared that rising concentrations of greenhouse gases was going to cause a rising death toll on the roads unless governments put in 'major mitigating countermeasures.'"

Another Daily Mail story claimed a small rise in global warming would make people more likely to wet the bed and trigger plagues of ticks and voles.

In the whale story, the London paper said the researchers "discovered the whales have been dropping pitch incrementally over several decade – but have not known why."

"Blue and fin whales are among the loudest animals in the oceans as well as the largest. Only males sing, humming about as loud as large ships."

The report explained whales' songs can travel 600 miles underwater, but "new research also extends the mysterious long-term falling pitch to related baleen whales and rules out noise pollution as the cause of the global long-term trend."

The AGU's Journal of Geophysical Research suggested the pitch drop is an "anatomical consequence of singing less loudly."

"The pitch could be increasing as whales sing louder to be heard over breaking sea ice, according to the study's authors."

Global warming has been the subject of some fairly odd ideas in recent months. One expert said dimming the sun would solve the problem. And a U.N. official called for an "ark" to save mankind.

Los Angeles had the idea to paint its streets white to fight global warming.

WND reported last summer that two scientists have concluded former NASA climate scientist James Hanson's warning to Congress nearly 30 years ago that human activities were causing catastrophic global warning was wrong.

Scientists Patrick Michaels and Ryan Maue of the Cato Institute said: "Assessed by Mr. Hansen's model, surface temperatures are behaving as if we had capped 18 years ago the carbon-dioxide emissions responsible for the enhanced greenhouse effect.

"But we didn't. And it isn't just Mr. Hansen who got it wrong."