TWO GREENIE SCARES IN ONE

It was the "Summer of the Shark." In 2001, massive numbers of hapless swimmers were shredded up and down U.S. shores. Or so the media told us. Turns out there were 11 fewer U.S. shark attacks than the year before. The hysteria ended only in September, when the nation got some truly scary news.

But as 9/11 fades from memory, shark attack stories are back - with a twist. The media have combined them with another bit of nonsense it consistently promotes with the ominous name of "The Dead Zone." Shark attacks and a dead zone, oh my! Good thing it's all a fish story.

First, the "Dead Zone."

Every year during the summer an oxygen-depleted area forms in the Gulf of Mexico where the Mississippi River Basin empties. This depletion is called hypoxia. The zone waxes and wanes annually. If it's larger than the year before, the media make sure you know it. If it's smaller, they make sure you think it's grown larger. Thus CNN.com's recent headline: "'Dead Zone' Spreads across Gulf of Mexico." Nowhere does it say it spread considerably less than previously.

Now, since nature herself would never do anything bad - aside from earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, volcanic explosions, and minor stuff like that - we know the Dead Zone MUST be man-made. The most-often fingered culprit is fertilizer run-off from farms that goes into Mississippi basin rivers, creating algae blooms that soak up virtually all the oxygen within the zone.

And the sharks?

Well, the Dead Zone is to Louisiana marine biologist Nancy Rabalais what the Redcoats were to Paul Revere. But for the one, nobody would have heard of the other. Rabalais originally publicized the hypoxic area, she measures it, and she crusades against the horrible farmers and fertilizer companies she claims create it.

And the environmentalists love her for it, giving her accolades and cash awards that would send most people into a feeding frenzy. This includes the San Diego Foundation's 1999 Blasker Award, complete with check for $250,000. (The 2002 winner got only $47,000, but he was merely working on bioterror defenses against anthrax.)

Imagine Rabalais' panic then, when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which had given her its 1999 NOAA Environmental Heroes Award, announced the zone this summer will remain "about the same size as it has been since 1990." (Actually, it's only about two-thirds the size this year as in 2002.)

So panic led to gimmick. Playing off a small shark scare in Texas, Rabalais told reporters: "The higher number of sharks in shallow waters may very likely be due to the low oxygen being close to the shore at the time of the attacks." So the Dead Zone no longer threatens just mollusks; it now threatens man.

Except that "Sharks are not more numerous or more aggressive than usual," according to Tom Harvey, spokesman for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department in Austin. He told a local TV station, "They are not 'coming in' to shore more than usual. We've had two attacks within a week or so, and that is unusual, but what we're seeing is probably more of a media frenzy than a shark feeding frenzy."

Further, why would this year's much smaller hypoxic zone be triggering shark movements that previous much larger zones did not? Such logic escaped CNN, Reuters, BBC, and other media outlets that eagerly swam with the Rabalais story.

But while Rabalais' shark theory has no teeth, neither does her Dead Zone cause celebre, for a variety of reasons. One is that hypoxic zones occur all over the world in places where there is no fertilizer run-off. "There are millions of square miles of ocean that are naturally hypoxic," Derek Winstanley, chief of the Illinois State Water Survey in Champaign told me

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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