It’s always something with these people, who are often the same ones who complain about Christianity in public (but still want their holiday days off with holiday pay)
Climate change vs. Easter bunnies
Easter is still a great day for worship, candy in baskets, pagan equinox rituals and running around the yard finding eggs, but every year it gets quite a bit worse for bunnies.
And no, not because the kids like to pull their ears. The culprit is climate change, and the folks at Climate Nexus found that rising temperatures are having adverse effects on at least five species of rabbit in the U.S.
Take the Lower Keys Marsh rabbit, for instance. An endangered species that lives in the Lower Florida Keys, this breed of cottontail is a great swimmer – it lives on the islands! – but it is already severely affected by development and now by rising sea levels. According to the Center for Biological Diversity’s 350 project, which highlights species that are most directly impacted by global warming, an ocean level rise of only .6 meters will send these guys hopping for higher ground and a .9 meter rise would wipe out their habitat completely. As creatures go, they are about as charismatic as can be – they’re even named after Playboy eminence Hugh Hefner (Sylvilagus palustris hefneri) – but that’s not going to help them with this problem.
.6 meters is equivalent to 600 millimeters. Key West has a sea rise of 2.42mm per year, equal to 247 years of sea rise. Provided it continues.
Most Easter-y of all are the pygmy rabbits, tiny bunnies native to the U.S. that weigh less than 1 pound and live in sagebrush territory in the American West. They are believed to be the smallest rabbits in the world. More and more, the pine-juniper woodlands have encroached on the sage, or their habitats have been destroyed by development. Several populations, such as the Columbia Basin pygmy, almost went extinct and were saved by zoo breeding programs. Great burrowers, pygmy rabbits also rely on winter cover by digging tunnels through the snow to escape predators, but lesser snowfall is leaving them exposed.
So, woodlands have been encroaching as well as developments have destroyed woodlands? Sounds more like nature and land use, not man-caused climate change. Sorry, sorry, I’m not supposed to mess with the Cult of Climastrology scaremongering.
