In California, the monarch butterflies have returned for their annual wintering.  Last year was a bad year; this year is a good year.  For the leftists, this is a cherished miracle that runs counter to anthropogenic climate change, rather than just another part of nature's endless cycles.

In a funny way, when it comes to climate and nature, leftists always remind me of babies.  The reason peek-a-boo is such a wonderful game for little babies is that when you hide your face behind your hands, as far as the baby is concerned, that face is gone.  When the baby sees your face again, it's a miracle.

Leftists are the same.  When it comes to the Earth, they respond emotionally only to that which they can see, regardless of millennia of natural cycles.  When something they once saw is gone, as with the baby and the face, they assume it's gone forever.  In California, when monarch butterfly populations dropped, leftists knew they were gone forever.  But nature had other ideas, and they're back.  Yay!

Here's the story from the Associated Press, a former news agency and now a recycler of leftist myths and propaganda, including climate change madness.  Here are the opening paragraphs of a much longer article on the subject:

There is a ray of hope for the vanishing orange-and-black Western monarch butterflies.

The number wintering along California's central coast is bouncing back after the population, whose presence is often a good indicator of ecosystem health, reached an all-time low last year. Experts pin their decline on climate change, habitat destruction and lack of food due to drought.

An annual winter count last year by the Xerces Society recorded fewer than 2,000 butterflies, a massive decline from the tens of thousands tallied in recent years and the millions that clustered in trees from Northern California's Mendocino County to Baja California, Mexico in the south in the 1980s. Now, their roosting sites are concentrated mostly on California's central coast.

This year's official three-week count is underway, but already an unofficial count by researchers and volunteers shows there are over 50,000 monarchs at overwintering sites, said Sarina Jepsen, director of endangered species at Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation.

Image: Monarch butterfly.  Piqsels.

Peek-a-boo!  Butterflies gone.  Oh, no!  No more butterflies.  Peek-a-boo!  Miracle!  Butterflies back.  Honestly, just like babies.

I strongly believe that we must be Earth's stewards.  When we abuse the environment, we're destroying something precious and diminishing resources that we and our progeny both need and enjoy.  But still, there are two things we must remember: one, we're not all-powerful.  We can affect local environments and climates through pollution and development, but we do not control the immensely complex cycles of sun, wind, clouds, water, the Earth's rotation and orbit around the sun, etc.  Those are on Nature's or God's timetable (whichever you prefer), and we're not big enough to touch them.  Two, the Earth is a dynamic system, and we're part of that dynamism.

I like to use England as an example of that second point.  Most people would agree that England is an exceptionally pretty country with its villages and pastoral landscape.  That's all man-made.

Once, England was almost completely wooded, which is how we get those nice tales of Robin Hood and his Merry Men in Sherwood Forest.  The marvelous half-timbered houses were half-timbered because there wasn't enough timber left for houses made entirely of wood.  Plaster started filling the gaps.  Humans adapt, and nature adapts.  Such is the cycle of life on Planet Earth.

And in California, the butterflies have come back.

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