Loch Ness Monster
Global Warming Killed Nessie
By Daniel Muniz

There goes the neighborhood! The demise of the fabled Loch Ness Monster has been attributed to global warming by one of the top researchers of this legendary beast. So if climate change snuffed out Nessie, then Bigfoot and Elvis could very well be the next victims of a hotter planet.

Robert Rines abandoned his 37 year search when he turned 85. An American and a World War II veteran, he devoted nearly half of his life investigating the elusive Loch Ness Monster. Curiosity first brought him to Scottish Highlands in 1971 but his own personal eyewitness account of a 25 foot long elephant skin creature slithering through the water in the next year turned him into a serious Nessie researcher.

Although Rines lived in Boston, he purchased a cottage nestled on the banks of Loch Ness so he could perform his annual summer research in which he led countless expeditions. He followed up every credible lead and personally interviewed a multitude of eyewitnesses. And over the years he also amassed quite a number of strange sonar readings of mysterious moving objects traversing deep within the lake.

But perhaps his most noteworthy accomplishment that won him worldwide acclaim is the “flipper” photograph.

Using a submersible camera and a high powered light for cutting through the murky water, this picture ignited quite a stir which led to speculation that Nessie could possibly be a plesiosaur, an aquatic dinosaur.

However, this picture is actually a retouched image. Due to the high peat content from the surrounding soil, visibility underwater is extremely poor.

So enhancing the photograph also enhanced its shadowy flaws. And because of depth perception, there really is no way of knowing if this is just an ordinary fish fin or bubbles. It is a fascinating image but due to its grainy quality and poor resolution, it doesn’t past muster in the scientific community.

Nevertheless, after nearly four decades of exhaustive research, Rines really has absolutely no concrete irrefutable evidence that the creature exists. Even though he became a respected expert in Nessie, Rines has produced no skeletal remains and he has not captured a live animal and there are no tissue samples from an available dead specimen. And without solid proof, the Loch Ness Monster doesn’t exist.

But that didn’t stop Rines from asserting that global warming must have killed off Nessie. He has deduced about 100 places where he thinks the remains of this animal must be. However, it is far too convenient to blame the absence of Nessie on climate change. First of all, the bare facts must be examined.

In geological terms, Loch Ness is practically a brand new lake. It was created by the last ice age approximately 10,000 years ago in which retreating glaciers dug out this enormously deep fissure in the earth. And prior to its formation, its present day location was frozen solid for about 20,000 years. So in other words, this deep water lake has not always been Loch Ness for the past millions of years.

So if Nessie is a plesiosaur or some kind of prehistoric water-borne reptile, then it must have recently migrated to Scotland sometime within the past 10,000 years.

Now the global warming explanation is rather dubious.

Given that researchers think that the Loch Ness Monster is descended from dinosaurs or some other kind of prehistoric lizard, then it has to be a very hardy creature to be able to survive the past few millenniums.

Unbeknownst to a lot of global warming activists, climate change is the norm for the planet. There is no such thing as a normal or average temperature.

The global warming of this planet for the past couple of decades is miniscule at best. The Medieval Climate Optimum occurred from about the tenth century and lasted until the fourteenth century. During those centuries, Vikings raised livestock and grew crops in Greenland and grapes were cultivated in Britain. It was a very warm period for the planet which was subsequently followed by the Little Ice Age which also lasted for a few centuries.

And several thousand years before the Medieval Climate Optimum, there was another great period of global warming known as the Holocene Climate Optimum which may have lasted for thousands of years.

If Nessie was able to weather through both Optimums of tremendous warming that lasted for centuries as well as survive the brutally harsh Little Ice Age which froze over the River Thames in London, then it would be a safe bet to assume that a couple of decades of very modest temperature increases ought to be no sweat. After all, the polar bears made it through both intensely warm Optimums so why couldn’t Nessie?

The real problem is that no proof means that it doesn’t exist. And if something hasn’t been proven, then it is useless to speculate on any possible reasons for its demise.

I have an open mind for about anything in our physical universe but I also use rational thought and reason so I have to be presented with convincing incontrovertible evidence about the existence of the Loch Ness Monster. So until that happens, Nessie is a fine legend but global warming killing off this animal makes for absurd comedy.

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