Global warming seems to be quickly becoming a sort of catch-all villain for whatever natural disaster currently befalls us.
The latest is news out of France as reported by the Telegraph.co.uk that giant hornets have inundated the French countryside and threaten to cross the English Channel to wreak havoc on an unprepared Britain. Writing for the Telegraph, Peter Allen tells us that “global warming has largely been blamed” for the fast spread of the hornet population.
According to Allen, the hornets first arrived in France hidden in a shipment of pottery from China in 2004. This, of course, has nothing at all to do with global warming and everything to do with globalization. But that’s another subject entirely.
The fear is that the already struggling beekeeping industry in France may be obliterated by the hornets, who love nothing more than a meal of honeybee larvae. Allen says “the French beekeeping industry has already been decimated by pesticides and long, hot summers,” but then goes on to blame cold winters for the plunge in the honeybee population:
“Honey production from the 1.3 million hives run by 80,000 beekeepers has been decreasing annually  down by 60 per cent in south-western France during the past decade. A spokesman for the French National Been (sic) Surveillance Unit said the bee death rate during winter was now up to six in ten.”
The headline at the Drudge Report, where we found this story, said, France Invaded by Swarms of Giant Hornets – Global Warming Blamed. The facts as presented by Allen really say nothing about global warming as a cause of the problem yet, with insertion of a single line attributed to no one – “global warming has largely been blamed” – the impression that millions of Drudge Report and Telegraph readers will take away is that somehow, global warming is at the root of the French hornet invasion.