Pirates of Global Warming
This month’s pirate reference comes to us by way of the theory of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The theory was first introduced in an open letter from Bobby Henderson to the Kansas State Board of Education after deciding that creationism must be taught alongside the theory of evolution. I had disregarded the Spaghetti Monster as a heavy-handed response to the hard-headed, but had missed this important bit of context:
You may be interested to know that global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of Pirates since the 1800s. For your interest, I have included a graph of the approximate number of pirates versus the average global temperature over the last 200 years. As you can see, there is a statistically significant inverse relationship between pirates and global temperature.
A stunning find! And like an overly literal translation of the bible, so accurate — except when it’s not. The horizontal scale, as Edward Tufte would say, “repays careful study.”
