When social and political his­torians come to write the defin­itive history of the climate change debate, a chapter will surely have to be set aside to doc­ument the rise of one of the most cunning and media-savvy interest groups this country has ever seen. That chapter — assuming the authors strive for trans­parency of meaning and don’t adopt a naming scheme that is wil­fully obnu­bil­atory — will surely have to be entitled “The Penguins”.

Scientists have sug­gested that for the species Eudyptula minor (the so-called ‘little’ or ‘fairy’ penguin) inhab­iting northern Tasmania, Victoria and the Bass Strait islands, rising sea tem­per­atures may in fact prove to be pro­cre­at­ively advant­ageous. The theory is that warmer seas will encourage pen­guins to breed earlier, and breed better.

Before we con­sider the science (and we will*), a few items of his­torical record. Penguins, you will recall, were one of the the first major lobby groups to spread mis­in­form­ation about the envir­onment. In the eighties, pen­guins ran a cynical, pro-cholorofluorocarbon cam­paign in a des­perate attempt to fore­stall the col­lapse of the aerosol industry in which, as a species, they had massively over-invested. The pen­guins later changed tack, claiming that a hole in the ozone layer was in the best interests of human– and animal-kind in general. The ozone layer, according to the pen­guins, was simply an arti­ficial, psy­cho­lo­gical barrier pre­venting the creatures of Earth from claiming their destiny among the stars — or, as the penguin-funded bill­boards pro­claimed, a “no-go-zone layer”.

In these enlightened days, of course, we know that the ozone layer and its accom­pa­nying hole is in fact an elab­orate costume devised for Lady Gaga’s 2010 southern hemi­sphere tour. In any case, the focus of the envir­on­mental cause has shifted. And when it comes to climate change, pen­guins have been gallingly obstinate. First, they denied the very existence of global warming. Now, embar­rassed at having to acknow­ledge that the climate really is changing, the penguin lobby is trying to tell us that an increase in ocean tem­per­ature is actually a pos­itive devel­opment because it allow them to reproduce quicker, and more often.

But is this some­thing we want to encourage? Just what are the evil forces that lurk behind behind this heedless rush to breed? Every cloaca is pre­cious, and no penguin should have to sac­rifice its uro­genital integrity at the altar of fluc­tu­ating global tem­per­atures. Sadly, pen­guins already have enough excuses for indulging in hasty, ill-planned sex. How many times have we seen grainy images of pen­guins huddled in their shelters, caught in the act, filmed in that tell-tale “sex-o-chrome” night vision that speaks of a thousand Sphenisciforme sins? Some females even submit them­selves to per­forming flipper-jobs and other pro­foundly humi­li­ating acts simply to obtain a few nice pebbles with which to dec­orate their homes. Do we really need to be engin­eering those very cir­cum­stances which will propel these las­ci­vious creatures to ever more depraved sexual activities?

Another question we might ask is whether we really need more pen­guins. A quick survey reveals that pen­guins are in major pos­i­tions of power in nearly 0.0000001% of the com­panies cur­rently listed in the Dow 30. You don’t have to be a math­em­atician to figure out that this works out to a total of 0.0000003 pen­guins. In fact, all you need to be is a person who has a general func­tional intel­li­gence, a cal­cu­lator, and fingers.

Now, most climate change deniers are as laughable as an author of an article on climate change stooping to a pun about the envir­on­mental debate “heating up”. But as the envir­on­mental debate heats up, the pen­guins have adopted soph­ist­icated tactics, twisting science to their own ends and fash­ioning them­selves into several 40cm tall forces to be reckoned with. “Stressing the pos­itives of climate change is a clever move,” says one public rela­tions expert, who can’t be named due to having only just been invented by me for the pur­poses of this blog post, and whose ten word con­tri­bution to this piece scarcely war­rants direct quo­tation in any case.

One wonders what is to be the next line of attack against the envir­on­mental movement — and from which quarter such an attack might arise. A number of leading gir­affes, pointing (though not lit­erally) to the growing obesity epi­demic among long-necked ruminants, have already come out in favour of defor­est­ation because it encourages young gir­affes to con­sider a more varied and bal­anced diet.

There is only one place all this can end. By which, I mean this article. And, because this article has in fact ended, that place is here.

* Actually, no, it looks like we won’t. (↑)