Well not really, but the headline above is almost as silly as the paper. From the “I can’t stop laughing department”, some “it can’t be anything else but global warming climate change” silliness in Nature. No mention of PDO or other cycles.
In other news, Former Governor Sarah Palin is blamed for starting all this by making it Marmot Day instead of Groundhog Day in Alaska. As everyone knows, marmots can’t forecast a darn thing, but they can model. /sarc From a KU press release:
Climate change causes larger, more plentiful marmots, study shows
Finding by University of Kansas researchers is likely to have implications for many creatures that hibernate
LAWRENCE — This week, one of the world’s foremost scientific journals will publish results of a decades-long research project founded at the University of Kansas showing that mountain rodents called marmots are growing larger, healthier and more plentiful in response to climate change.
The groundbreaking study, published in Nature, is the first to reveal that changes in seasonal timing can increase body weight and population size simultaneously in a species — findings likely to have implications for a host of other creatures, especially those that hibernate.
Established by Kenneth Armitage, KU professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology, the long-standing investigation tracks yellow-bellied marmots in Colorado.
“We started this research in 1962, and every summer we’d record basic demography such as the age of the animals, gender, body mass, who survived and who reproduced,” Armitage said. “At the time we started, we had no idea that climate change was going to be a problem. But we collected that basic demography to use as a foundation for other kinds of study.”
Largely because of the KU researcher, yellow-bellied marmots have proven to be a valuable model organism for understanding larger questions. Armitage said that he first chose to study the marmot because it lives in easy-to-find burrows and is active in the daytime, so it is readily observable.
“I didn’t intend to spend 40 years studying marmots, but new questions kept coming up — physiological, hibernation, genetics and so on,” Armitage said. “It turned out that long-term studies of our kind are quite rare. Yet, it’s precisely the kind of data that you need to determine what climate change is going to do.”
The climate-change findings result from collaboration between a number of international researchers who used fieldwork by Armitage to underpin their analyses. Both Arpat Ozgul, lead author of the study from Imperial College London, and Dan Blumstein, a co-author from the University of California-Los Angeles, previously have worked with Armitage on the marmot project.
Using data collected between 1976 and 2008, the authors conclude that a longer growing season has boosted marmots’ individual size, overall strength and general population. The average weight of fully grown marmots jumped from 6.82 pounds in the early years of the study to 7.56 pounds in the later half of the study.
Additionally, the population growth of marmots increased from 0.56 marmots per year from 1976 to 2001 to 14.2 marmots per year from 2001 to 2008.
“The warming results in earlier snowmelt, which means that plants appear sooner and the marmots come out of hibernation earlier,” said Armitage. “They have more fat left which provides them energy to start foraging. Then they can start reproducing so their young are born earlier and have time to get fat enough to survive hibernation. Most importantly, the reproductive female can survive better. Being able to wean her young earlier, she has a longer season and survival of adult females has increased over the last years.”
Although Armitage is happy to see the yellow-bellied marmot thrive, the KU researcher cautioned that the boom in marmots is temporary; he expects that warming could harm them in the long run because of changes in snow patterns.
“This benefit to marmots is probably short-lived,” he said. “Snow patterns both benefit and harm marmots. Prolonged snow cover in the spring increases mortality and reduces reproduction. But if there’s less snowmelt to nourish plants that marmots forage in the summer, it will severely affect them. In droughts, we’ve had very high mortality.”
Could Prof. Armitage perhaps be induced to address this and other comments in this thread?
You’ll all be thrilled to know that said Professor made “All Things Considered” on NPR this evening. He was invited by the host to blame the fat marmots on “climate change,” which he obliged by doing. The connection with climate was, shall we say, fatuous.
/Mr Lynn
From 2001 through 2009 the atmospheric CO2 increased by 18% of the total increase from 1800 to 2001 while the average global temperature has not changed significantly and the trend of yearly averages through 2009 is down. The El Nino that made early 2010 look a bit warmer than the trend, peaked in March, 2010 and average global temperature is now dropping rapidly.
Research, with latest findings regarding projected temperature trends is reported at http://climaterealists.com/index.php?tid=145&linkbox=true. It presents a rational equation that accurately calculates the average global temperatures since 1895 with a coefficient of determination of 0.88. That means that it explains 88% of the measured temperatures for 114 years and counting. The best that GCMs have done is substantially worse than this. The equation predicts that the trend of average global temperatures will decline. The above link and sub links, including links to the temperature data reported by the five reporting agencies, track the data back to the published credible sources.
As the atmospheric CO2 continues to increase and the average global temperature does not, perhaps the comments of ill-informed people will subside.
I think this guy is on to something! Has anyone else noticed that for the past 12K years there has been a feeeeenominal increase in the physical size and population of H.Sapiens (it’s a filthy little species that tends to live in dumps and smells like a wolverine, terrible temper too)? And Dinosaurs! How many remember those days? It was hot and muggy and… well for those of you who weren’t there, take my word for it.. those things were BIG. Yhep! I think he’s on to something. The hotter it is the bigger they get and the more hanky-panky too. Did I ever tell you about my Uncle Al or my cousin Dan? These guys were BIG!
I read an article in the Sydney Morning Herald the other day that Women’s Breast sizes have been increasing since the 1960s. The data is based on the change in the types of undergarments purchased by women over that time horizon?
Is there a correlation to AGW? Is more research required? Can I get a grant to further study this anomaly?
I don’t get it.
If the hypothesis is that global warming is bad for everything, and the finding is that global warming is causing marmots to thrive (bigger size and number), wouldn’t that cause one to reject the hypothesis?
I don’t get how thriving animal and plant populations are seen as a bad thing.
I’m embarrassed to be a KU student. But then, the temperature sensor on campus is not up to snuff either, tucked in between three large stone buildings. Maybe this researcher looked at the KU temp records. What an embarrassment.
It’s true! Just this past season at Tahoe, I was boarding along the treeline, when out of nowhere, this giant rat runs right out in front of me, I thought I was going to do a Sonny Bono (yes, they actually call it that now).
I asked the lift operator. He said I had probably seen a marmot, and yes, they are getting bigger because they are raiding garbage cans. They are worse than bears, cause they come in a pack. Mean too, especially in the dark. You find one of them “varmits” on top of your can at 4 am, you go back in the house, come out later and clean up the mess.
hope all is well with you – we noticed, it is about 15 degrees cooler in the hills these days!
Farmers provided an abundant amount of food for these animals as I am pretty sure you can not just kill them. Secondly where are the
predators that would normally hunt this animal. Mountain lions, wolfs, coyotes, etc have been wiped out in this area.
so, to say global warming is the cause is nonsense. What happened here would be true for any animal on the planet, an abundant
amount of food and no predation equals a fatter animal and lots of them. Just look at humans as for an example. No predation and
plenty of food for most of us. The environmenalist prevents the third world nations from achieving what the west has.
But they still eat better than the generation before them.
You don’t need to spend tax payer money on these nonsense experiments, history tells us what happens when the temperature
increases. During the medieval warming period civilizations grew. As with the marmots the population grew as the food supply
increased, mostly from farmers not global warming and there was no predation to speak of.
During the little ice age this trend was reversed. Death and disease was wide spread during this time period and many perished.
2 Points regarding marmot pelts:
1. My gut tells me that the demand for marmot pelts has decreased over the last 25-30 years with all of the PETA no-fur political correctness mumbo jumbo. Wouldn’t decreased pressure from a highly effective predator with a huge appetite for part of the animal (umm… that’s us) tend to increase the population and let individuals get live longer / grow larger until the population runs up against some other resource/environmental factor that limits it?
2. RE: Brego says: July 22, 2010 at 4:04 pm
There are no fleas on skinned pelts.
Right, but if the pelts were plague infested when they were still animals, then their untrapped cousins would provide a vector to spread the disease in the area. Burning the pelts was probably overkill, but moving away probably wasn’t. Plus fleas leaving their recently dead host could have found the trapper as their new home.