Or, One Flew over the CRUcoo’s Nest

There’s no shortage of strange and bizarre journalism these days, and some of the strangest is from the strange and weird British Guardian. But this one is a real brain twister:

Peru’s mountain people face fight for survival in a bitter winter

So far, we have a story about unusually cold weather. Nothing surprising about that, there’s been a lot of that lately. So we have this rather dramatic paragraph:

The few hundred people who live here are hardened to poverty and months of sub-zero temperatures during the long winter. But, for the fourth year running, the cold came early. First their animals and now their children are dying and in such escalating numbers that many fear that life in the village may be rapidly approaching an end.

A bit melodramatic perhaps, but it follows from the headline. Now we get the totally unsupported statement:

In a world growing ever hotter, Huancavelica is an anomaly. These communities, living at the edge of what is possible, face extinction because of increasingly cold conditions in their own microclimate, which may have been altered by the rapid melting of the glaciers.

WTF? May have? No sources cited, just “may have”. The Loch Ness monster “may have” eaten my tighty whiteys, but they’re probably in the laundry. Their readers will eat orangutan crap up with a spoon if the venerable Al-Guardian feeds it to them.

The next several paragraphs describe the (real) problem from a cooling microclimate, with no more attention paid to attribution than “may have”. I certainly don’t mean to make light of their problems, which are very real and very damaging, but the only thing that they mentioned relating this to anything outside of the immediate area is the above “may have” statement. So finally we get to this:

Climate change campaigners and development NGOs say that the failure of Copenhagen has signed the death warrant for hundreds of thousands of the world’s poorest and that a quarter of a million children will die before world leaders meet again to try to thrash out another deal at the United Nations next climate change conference in Mexico in December. Among them may be these children of the high mountains.

Well, that’s a shocker. Activist groups making shit up.

Several more paragraphs describing the dire straights. No argument with any of that. Then they move on to the Peruvian government’s role, and how they’re not doing enough. All of which is fair in this kind of article. But then we get to this:

Last July, dozens of indigenous protesters were killed and scores injured when riots broke out in Bagua Grande in the Amazonas region over claims that the government was giving away land to oil and gas drilling. The relationship between Peru’s indigenous people and the government of the president, Alan García remains tense.

Tangentially blaming more of their misery on Big Oil. Then comes the “religion is the opium of the people” paragraph:

Religion is still a strong sedative in these communities, but although the first reaction to what they are facing might be fatalism – the feeling that they are in God’s hands – we are starting to see a change.

Did we miss any trite tired left-wing talking points?