Extended cold could kill invasive iguanas
Dropping temperatures slow down lizards
Photo credit Bjørn Christian Tørrissen
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With this week’s evening temperatures falling toward the upper 30s, strange fruit may drop from South Florida trees: non-native, invading iguanas that many residents consider more pest than pet.
“It’s a big deal for me,” Jessica Morgan, a Margate homeowner, said as she watched a yard-long, bright orange male iguana roam near her butterfly habitat. The reptile has a slightly smaller green girlfriend.
“They climb up on the bank and will poop on my dock,” she said. “Fingers crossed that this cold snap will kill them. I don’t have the heart to beat one to death. I hope the weather does it for me.
Iguanas become immobilized when the temperature drops into the 40s, as it did Sunday night, said Tiffany Snow, nuisance-wildlife biologist for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. While they usually revive when the temperature rises, they could die if it remains below 40 degrees for three days or so, she said.
It is legal to kill iguanas, but it must be done humanely. Among the options is decapitation. Some local animal control authorities will accept live iguanas that have been trapped, Snow said.
“If somebody is looking to trap them, I guess right now would be a good time because they’re not moving,” she said.
Thanks to the genius of the moderation queue, it now looks as though I’m advocating putting manatees into the freezer in order to humanely destroy them!
Not so. i was referring to humanely killing iguanas by putting them in the freezer.
(Besides which, manatees are really big and need an extra large freezer)
What about the Python population? seems they to would have a hard time.
Pythons and Iguanas- a waste of perfectly good Cowboy boot leather…
They made it through the Little Ice Age. Maybe they didn’t though. Let me check again.
Not being of either religious persuasion (denialist or warmist) the question I have. Does carbon dioxide warm the atmosphere via absorption of Infrared energy radiated away by a heated Earth Surface?
If not, why wouldn’t it? You can see that carbon dioxide will absorb certain frequencies of Infrared in a scanning IR instrument.
If it does absorb the radiated infrared, heat up and then reradiate the energy in all directions (some back to Earth’s surface to replace some of its lost energy warming it some), how much will it warm the surface?
If you did not have water at all and just the current atmosphere what would the effects be on the Earth’s temp? If you doubled carbon dioxide in this scenerio how much would it heat the Earth?
Are the AGW people really totally wrong with their ideas? I think they may be prone to extremes to sell the idea to the Public, but isn’t the foundation still valid?
We are having a super cold spell in the entire Northern Hemisphere, how does AGW explain this?
It’s Climate Change I can believe in!
John A (20:11:44) :
i was referring to humanely killing iguanas
Isn’t it something how animals are so cautious to kill each other in the kindest ways? I especially find it going the extra mile to be certain of painless death when they swallow another animal alive to suffocate, and burn in stomach acids, rather than to shred to death first.
Steve in SC (19:19:33) :
9 iron
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Is that what Tiger Woods got?
It’s good to be at da top o’ da food-chain.
John A.: Let’s open a “The most humane way to kill them would be”……….. contest.
My entry: Give them a one-way ticket to Al Gore’s place. The Gore Affect will do the rest.
rabidfox (20:03:29) said:
Ahhh, yes. The self inflicted pain we are about experience.
Clive (19:45:57) :
Whoa! This is all wrong folks. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Warmers repeatedly tell us that WARM is a threat to biodiversity! Ergo COLD must be good for biodiversity. Any suggestion that cold is killing critters cannot be true. The iguanas and manatees are not really dead. They are asleep.
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Not so good for humans either.
In the Little Ice Age did humans kill humans in the most humane ways?
Oh No! I won’t have anymore to shoot with my pellet rifle when laying out at the pool. It’s legal and humane as long as its a headshot.
JoePapp (19:58:57) :
Night of the Iguana…
2010 Version..
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Wasn’t the 1998 Godzilla in a giant iguana with emotional problems?
Does this include the killer bees and fire ants?\
btw… frost damage on the Florida Citrus crop is nothing new, we just haven’t seen it like this since the 70’s.
Dave F (18:50:15) :
“Is it just me or are all species either extinct, endangered, or invasive?”
I don’t know, which of the above are you?
Last time I saw a cold killing iguana, I was playing Diablo II . . .
OT:
I propose a name for the whistle blower: Sore Throat.
John A (20:11:44) :
(Besides which, manatees are really big and need an extra large freezer)
Or extra small pieces of Manatee. Manatee mince maybe.
I don’t have the heart to beat one to death. I hope the weather does it for me.
I’m going to have real trouble forgetting that statement. Works for Iguanas, Warmers and Politicians.
O/T but always good to keep in mind the intended ‘green bubble’ is bipartisan….
Secretive carbon startup brings Condoleezza Rice and $26m on board
C3 confirms it has raised $26m in funding, sparking speculation over what
the heavy-hitting startup plans to do with money
The company, known as C3, was founded a year ago by Thomas Siebel, the
entrepreneur who sold his business software firm Siebel to Oracle $5.7bn,
and over the past two weeks has filed documents with the Securities and
Exchange Commission (SEC) confirming that it has brought in $26m in funding from undisclosed investors.
Intriguingly, the company has also revealed that it has put together a
heavy-hitting board of directors, including Siebel himself, former Siebel
and Oracle executives Patricia House and Edward Abbo, Jay Dweck, a managing
director at Morgan Stanley, Condoleezza Rice and Spencer Abraham, a former
Republican senator and secretary of energy…
The involvement of Siebel, House, and former Siebel chief technology officer Abbo suggests the company is keen to break into the market for carbon management and reporting software – an increasingly crowded market that is expected to accelerate rapidly when and if the US adopts a national emissions cap-and-trade scheme….
http://www.businessgreen.com/business-green/news/2255650/secretive-carbon-start-brings
Norman (20:29:10) :
CO2 is a trace gas. If you double the concentration, it is still a trace gas. It absorbs certain wavelengths of IR, but since the atmosphere is miles thick, most of the IR in those wavelengths is absorbed almost completely already at the present CO2 concentration.
So increases in CO2 don’t make much difference. The current CO2 concentration is close to thermodynamic saturation already.
The AGW hypothesis is that increased CO2 will cause a slight increase in temperature (nearly unmeasurable). This slightly higher temperature will cause a slight increase in ocean evaporation. Water vapor is a strong absorber of IR — much better than CO2. The increased “green house” water vapor then causes the global warming. The CO2-to-water vapor positive feedback could then cause a run-away warming where more warming causes more warming….
….or so the hypothesis was in the 1980s and 1990s.
Unfortunately for the AGW crowd, this CO2-water vapor positive feedback loop does not seem to actually occur. CO2 concentrations were greater in the remote past with no run-away, and new research and measured temperatures in the last 10 years show no warming despite increased CO2. It may be that any CO2-caused warming mechanism is counteracted by numerous other factors, including increased condensation in clouds, which cool the planet.
Combined with many other influences such as variations in the sun, interactions of the sun with the earth’s magnetic field and cosmic rays (which may seed clouds), natural cycles in the oceans, ocean currents etc., the system becomes complex. No one really understands it enough to put the proper parameters for each effect into a model — since you cannot isolate the effects of so many variables. So they try various weighing factors in the models until they get results that seem to match past climate behavior. Unfortunately, these models do not seem to model future behavior at all well. It is sad that they are being used to direct literally trillions of dollars of the world’s wealth.
At this point, it appears likely that the effects of CO2 increases on world climate are so small they are lost in the noise. Normal weather variations are so large that any CO2-caused variation simply cannot be identified.
In other words, CO2 is basically a non-player.
…eight iron…
John A (20:11:44) :
Oh John, you should have left that one alone.
I was rolling on the floor. The thought of cramming a manatee into my freezer, thinking, not enough room unless I remove the shelves, and all to be humane!!??
Perhaps there is a very good reason why iguanas shouldn’t live in Florida. Gee, I wonder what it is?
FOXNews.com now has this story, including a comment on iguanas.
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/01/06/extreme-weather-mother-nature-gone-bonkers/
ken 67 (20:57:11) : “John A.: Let’s open a “The most humane way to kill them would be”……….. contest.
My entry: Give them a one-way ticket to Al Gore’s place. The Gore Affect will do the rest.”
Ah yes, the old Tribble Gambit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trouble_With_Tribbles_(TOS_episode)