UPDATE: Highly recommended reading from Donna LaFramboise (h/t to reader Lars P), apparently this researcher has had several rebuttals posted against his previous peer reviewed version of this claim. One rebuttal by a prominent ecologist said:
“the worst paper I have ever read in a major scientific journal.”
So here’s Donna’s take on it:
The Backstory to the ‘Fleeing Species’ Claim
Journalists aren’t telling you that the lead researcher behind the species-are-fleeing-global-warming story has come to questionable conclusions in the past.
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I wonder how they excluded all of the other possible factors and settled exclusively on climate change as the culprit. For example below, look at global human population growth from 0AD to the present, and extrapolated to 2050 AD. I converted the flash interactive map from NOVA to an animated gif and added the years.
How do they know that the plants and animals are just tagging along with human growth and development which has made some tremendous latitude gains? It seems more plausible that plants and animals would react to this more than 0.7°C which is a fraction of normal seasonal variation at any latitude.
From the University of York:
Further, faster, higher: Wildlife responds increasingly rapidly to climate change
New research by scientists in the Department of Biology at the University of York shows that species have responded to climate change up to three times faster than previously appreciated. These results are published in the latest issue of the leading scientific journal Science.
Faster distribution changes. Species have moved towards the poles (further north in the northern hemisphere, to locations where conditions are cooler) at three times the rate previously accepted in the scientific literature, and they have moved to cooler, higher altitudes at twice the rate previously realised.
Analysing data for over 2000 responses by animal and plant species, the research team estimated that, on average, species have moved to higher elevations at 12.2 metres per decade and, more dramatically, to higher latitudes at 17.6 kilometres per decade.
Project leader Chris Thomas, Professor of Conservation Biology at York, said: “These changes are equivalent to animals and plants shifting away from the Equator at around 20 cm per hour, for every hour of the day, for every day of the year. This has been going on for the last 40 years and is set to continue for at least the rest of this century. ”
The link to climate change. This study for the first time showed that species have moved furthest in regions where the climate has warmed the most, unambiguously linking the changes in where species survive to climate warming over the last 40 years.
First author Dr I-Ching Chen, previously a PhD student at York and now a researcher at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan, said: “This research shows that it is global warming that is causing species to move towards the poles and to higher elevations. We have for the first time shown that the amount by which the distributions of species have changed is correlated with the amount the climate has changed in that region.”
Co-author Dr Ralf Ohlemüller, from Durham University, said: “We were able to calculate how far species might have been expected to move so that the temperatures they experience today are the same as the ones they used to experience, before global warming kicked in. Remarkably, species have on average moved towards the poles as rapidly as expected.”
A diversity of changes. These conclusions hold for the average responses of species, but individual species showed much greater variation. Some species have moved much more slowly than expected, others have not moved, and some have even retreated where they are expected to expand. In contrast, other species have raced ahead, perhaps because they are sensitive to a particular component of climate change (rather than to average warming), or because other changes to the environment have also been driving their responses.
Co-author Dr David Roy, from the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, illustrates this variation among species: “In Britain, the high brown fritillary butterfly might have been expected to expand northwards into Scotland if climate warming was the only thing affecting it, but it has in fact declined because its habitats have been lost. Meanwhile, the comma butterfly has moved 220 kilometres northwards from central England to Edinburgh, in only two decades.”
Similar variation has taken place in other animal groups. Cetti’s warbler, a small brown bird with a loud voice, moved northwards in Britain by 150 kilometres during the same period when the Cirl bunting retreated southward by 120 kilometres, the latter experiencing a major decline associated with the intensification of agriculture.
How they did the research. The researchers brought together all of the known studies of how species have changed their distributions, and analysed them together in a “meta-analysis”. The changes that were studied include species retreating where conditions are getting too hot (at low altitudes and latitudes), species expanding where conditions are no longer too cold (at high altitude and latitudes), and species staying where they are but with numbers declining in hotter parts and increasing in cooler parts of the range.
They considered studies of latitudinal and elevational range shifts from throughout the world, but most of the available data were from Europe and North America.
Birds, mammals, reptiles, insects, spiders, other invertebrates, and plants featured in the evidence. For example, I-Ching Chen and her colleagues discovered that moths had on average moved 67 metres uphill on Mount Kinabalu in Borneo.
Co-author Jane Hill, Professor of Ecology at York, said: “We have taken the published literature and analysed it to detect what the overall pattern of change is, something that is not possible from an individual study. It’s a summary of the state of world knowledge about how the ranges of species are responding to climate change. Our analysis shows that rates of response to climate change are two or three times faster than previously realised.”
Implications. The current research does not explicitly consider the risks posed to species from climate change, but previous studies suggest that climate change represents a serious extinction risk to at least 10 per cent of the world’s species. Professor Thomas says: “Realisation of how fast species are moving because of climate change indicates that many species may indeed be heading rapidly towards extinction, where climatic conditions are deteriorating. On the other hand, other species are moving to new areas where the climate has become suitable; so there will be some winners as well as many losers.”
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I wonder if they considered the explosion in human population lead to decreasing habitat thus forcing the move.
Even here in Australia the increase in population and the problems that accompany that – traffic, urban sprawl etc have been particularly obvious over my lifetime and especially so in the last twenty years.
The world is a totally different place but I doubt climate change has anything to do with it.
Yes. What else could possibly explain range changes? Other than a long list of things beside the dreaded climate change.
One glaring example in North America is the ‘bird feeder’ effect. Now many bird species range and winter further north because of that. Did AGW cause more people to feed birds?
And how do we explain the species that expanded SOUTH? Like Barred Owls?
But there is at least one very obvious error of the population map. What is that alleged population cluster on the BC-AK coast? Definitely not enough people to create what is shown there then. Indeed before Euros brought smallpox and general disruption, there were more (Native) people living there in 1760 than 1960. This same ‘pretend Native North Americans didn’t exist’ mentality is obvious throughout that early time sequence. This ‘denial’ is still chronic despite all the evidence that it is based on a false and racist myth. As if AGW was the only Big Lie prevailing in modern ‘thinking.’
Great Britain has suffered several waves where butterflies contracted to southern England. When they recover they have nowhere else to go but north and this has been in accurately blamed on global warming by CD Thomas one of the co-authors. The Comma is just one of the butterflies the warmists have exploited but they all typically have exhibited cycles of expansion and contractions. If the warmist are right that the COmma reflects temperatures then the correct temperature profiles indicate that recent temperatures are just now approaching the mid 1800’s.
From the 1948 Journal of Animal Ecology ” THE HISTORY OF THE SPECKLED WOOD BUTTERFLY (PARARGE AEGERIA) IN SCOTLAND, WITH A DISCUSSION OF THE RECENT CHANGES OF RANGE OF OTHER BRITISH BUTTERFLIES BY J. A. DOWNES”
The comma (Polygonia c-album (L.)) was once widespread in the south of England. About a century ago it became restricted to the counties of Gloucester, Hereford and Monmouth, but in the last thirty years it has spread again over the south of England, the Midlands and even to the Scottish Border, thus considerably exceeding its earlier range. The white admiral (Limenitis camilla (L.)) also be- came rare and restricted to a fewwoodland areas in the south and in Suffolk. Since i 920 it has again become widespread and common in the south and south Midlands.
Lars P says:
August 21, 2011 at 1:14 pm
Donna Laframboise, has an interesting article regarding the backstory to the fleeing the species claim:
http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2011/08/21/the-backstory-to-the-fleeing-species-claim/
That’s a must read, and short. It puts a period on the argument, and puts “Science” on a par with “National Geographic.” Thanks for the link. –AGF
Yeah, gardening. Here in my part of the uk I have tried different, more tender species that will be able to survive now because of our CAGW warmer, wetter winters and hotter, drier summers. They’ve all died. We’ve been told we can leave our dahlia tubers in the ground over winter if we cover them with mulch. How many have survived the last few winters? Bleedin’ obvious, isn’t it? None. I’m not going to be so lazy this year because I can’t afford to keep replacing them.
AG Foster (August 21, 2011 at 2:43 pm) says:
“That’s a must read, and short.”
Hits the spot alright.
Classic example of the junk pseudoscience called Conservation Biology – which is, in my well informed opinion, WORSE than Consensus Climatology.
I can hardly wait for AGW to die so the world can switch to looking closer at this junk science which is the basis of the whole corrupt ‘species-at-risk listing’ business and the Great Biodiversity Crisis Lie. People who have not beeen paying attention to this fraudulent ‘science’ and the very well organized gang behind it will be very shocked to see how bad it truly is.
One comment on that “must read” article. It notes that Daniel Botkin ripped Thomas’s first paper apart. That tells me it must have been ultra-junk because Botkin has done some atrocious junk imaginable in his first book looking at the journals of Lewis and Clark (Our Natural History) … seriously, absurdly, unbelievably bad stuff producing an estimate of the historic US grizzly bear population that could only have been a deliberate attempt to prop up the Conservation Biology gang’s grizzly bear project – one of the most lucrative and – for them – useful projects of all.
Conservation Biology is based on the revision or denial of history to produce fake baselines to make things looks worse. That is their First Lie.
“fleeing”, or “spreading”?
“Telltale signs are everywhere — from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest.”
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,944914,00.html
I love how the BBC are reporting this, yet last week they were reporting how Cuckoos migrating from equatorial Africa are returning to the UK in smaller numbers every year.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/14507798
“Cuckoos are one of several migrant species declining in Britain.
According to a 2010 survey by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), of the 10 UK birds which have declined the most since 1995, eight are summer migrants, including the cuckoo, turtle dove, yellow wagtail and nightingale.
Between 1995 and 2010 the UK lost more than 70% of its turtle doves and nearly half of its cuckoos. The RSPB called the declines “unsustainable”.
Maybe the UK climate isn’t to their liking any more seeing the weather has been mostly poor shorter summers and long cold winters over the past five years. Talking of the UK and cold seasons, the Holly berries are going red already on the tree outside, I don’t think I noticed that until mid-September last year and that was early. Not exactly scientific I know but there is form bordering on trend.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/weather/8135035/Holly-berries-suggest-harsh-winter-on-the-way.html
While the Arctic is a region where the climate has warmed the most, it is also where the magnetic north pole is moving by some 40 miles per year. could some of the animals, especially birds, be reacting to that as much as to the warm-up? If a bird imprint to magnetic north field when it is born, it would have to move 40 miles to be at the same intensity and direction the next year.
That map shows people living in the tallest of the Himalayan mountains by 2050!
Doug Allen says:
August 21, 2011 at 11:29 am
and
DesertYote says:
August 21, 2011 at 12:45 pm
I appreciate the comments, but note that i was careful not to write off the life sciences as complete pseudo-science, and I certainly do not advocate junking the entire discipline. It’s just that I haven’t seen many “thoughtful interpretations & modest proposals” lately; it’s more usually arrogant assertions of the Richard Dawkins variety. I first read On The Origin of Species in high school, and agree that Darwin followed Feynman’s admonition to state all of the possible problems and confounding variables in your theory – would that many more modern biologists adopted a similar humility.
I am also aware that a few biologists have brought some mathematical rigor to their work, but by and large they have been drowned out by the mass-extincters and their pseudo-statistics.
DesertYote, thanks for the tip; I will read some Dr. Tedford if/when I get a spare hour.
@ur momisugly Patricia Billingsley says: August 22, 2011 at 8:22 am
Interesting thought, although since the pole is moving towards Siberia, I’d think if some animals shifted as a result it would be a corresponding amount in both latitude and longitude… & offhand, vague recollection is that the shift is to the south east & far more ‘east’ than south? Birds must have a way to compensate for the pole shift, however, since it seems that it has always moved around a bit, and some birds manage to return to the same nesting grounds year after year… but it certainly would make for an interesting study!
R. Craigen says: on August 21, 2011 at 8:30 pm
“fleeing”, or “spreading”?
Indeed, of the 6 species I’ve checked out in detail, all are expanding their range. One, Cetti’s Warbler, has even expanded to warmer climes:
http://www.rspb.org.uk/wildlife/birdguide/name/c/cettiswarbler/index.aspx