Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
In the New York Times, there’s an article on some research that suggest a slight shrinkage of plants and animals with warming. In the “you can’t make this up” department, here’s the illustration:
Figure 1. A big frog collected a while ago and a small frog collected more recently, which clearly proves that the frog on the left is larger than the frog on the right
The idea that creatures shrink in warmer climates seems at odds with the giant dragonflies and the dinosaurs and the like that lived when it was somewhat warmer than now. But that’s not the reason I brought this up. The beauty is in the press release.
First, the lead researcher is quoted as saying:
They cautioned that it was too early to make detailed predictions. “Things start falling apart as we try to make generalizations and impose more levels and hierarchies into our hypotheses,” Dr. Bickford said.
OK, that seems sound. Then the hyperventilating begins:
If all animals were to engage in coordinated shrinking it might not be so bad, the researchers speculate. But if, say, mice are shrinking faster than snakes, the snakes may not be able to capture enough of the mice to meet their energy requirements.
So we’re already off on the ship of speculation, miniature mice and “uncoordinated shrinking”. Reuters picks up the story, with Bickford again quoted:
“We have not seen large-scale effects yet, but as temperatures change even more, these changes in body size might become much more pronounced – even having impacts for food security.”
One supposes that they thought that wasn’t scary enough. Here’s the real capper:
“Impacts could range from food resources becoming more limited (less food produced on the same amount of land) to wholesale biodiversity loss and eventual catastrophic cascades of ecosystem services.”
So it’s too early to make detailed predictions, they’ve never seen this in nature, only in the lab … but they are willing to predict the changes might impact food security, make snakes chase smaller mice, limit food resources, cause wholesale biodiversity loss, and at the end of the day, they break out the big guns, it might end up in, wait for it, catastrophic loss of entire ecosystems …
But it’s too early to make predictions.
This reminds me of a headline I once saw in the “National Enquirer”, an American tabloid newspaper. The big print said
Two Headed Boy Found In Jungle!
Not satisfied with the impact of that, they had added a smaller sub-headline that said
Raised By Wolves Until 14!
But that still didn’t have the punch they wanted, so a sub-sub-head was added that said
Mother Teresa Rushes To Investigate!
These kinds of claims, that it’s too soon to tell but it might cause total ecosystems to crash, should be called “Enquirer Science.” Here’s my submission for the first headline:
Two Sizes Of Frogs Found In Jungle!
Clear Signal of Future Ecosystem Collapse!
Well-Funded Scientist Rushes To Investigate!
w.
[UPDATE] A reader pointed to the Daily Telegraph, which has this:
Animals ‘shrinking’ due to climate change
Polar bears are shrinking because of the impact of climate change on their natural habitats, along with many other animals and plants, researchers say.
Figure 2. Obligatory polar bear picture. Two thirds of the worlds polar bears could be lost in fifty years. I thought they had a better sense of direction than that.
I must confess, I find the idea of leetle teeny polar bears quite appealing …
Absolutely correct analysis. I’ve always shrunk (lost weight) in the warm months and gained weight in the colder months. Must be the warming.
We can just tax the snakes until they shrink down to the size of the mice.
It’s the seals I’m worried about. They breath through holes in the ice, y’know. If the ice melts, they’ll all drown!
Best,
Frank
Animals have shrinking for years, think about little old ladies.
I see pigs flying overhead. Oh my goodness look how small they have become?
I have a big dog. My neighbor has a small dog – depending on who was born firs determines whether the earth is warming or cooling.
This science schtick is easy-peasy.
Mike Bromley the Kurd says:
October 19, 2011 at 2:15 am
Why do I always feel queasy after reading stuff like this? I think it’s due to motion sickness from all the qualifiers…the epistemological part of my brain starts hurling from all the twists and turns and leaps of logic. I get none of that deep satiety that comes from an “aha!” moment….only a slushy unease.
Bizarre.””
Well said Mike, the brain rebels at all these “scientific” studies.
Victim of a pinhead’s pinwheel?
AGW must be real, because people’s brains seem to be shrinking at an alarming rate.
“Two thirds of the 20,000 to 25,000 polar bears in the world could be lost in the next fifty years. ” Actually, it’s a good bet that *every one of them* will die in the next fifty years. 😉
So why doesn’t someone post a picture of a Clydsdale next to a Shetland pony, and say that AGW is to blame?
I just read an article about how “endangered” polar bears spend the summer on land eating berries and grubs and whatnot. Strange…I thought they were supposed to be on ice all year long?
Hmmm, there seems to be a remake of a certain old movie in the making; this might be the frist press release.
Could somebody please apply some Global Warming to Mr. Gore? If he, his ignorance, or his ego were to shrink to normal human size, it might be beneficial to a lot of other peoples’ blood pressure.
Maybe, just maybe (gasp!), the smaller froggie is a younger froggie … ??? Anyone checked dates of birth …?
Willis
I wonder if Jennifer Sheridan and her co-authors have read this paper
Global Height Trends in Industrial and Developing Countries, 1810-1984: An Overview, Joerg Baten
http://www.econ.upf.edu/docs/seminars/baten.pdf
Here we have a 165 year data set containing global homo sapiens height measurements from which Baten has extrapolated a global height trend (disappointingly, the data is actual height rather than anomaly or the parallel would be uncanny). Give or take a year or two, this is also the period for which we have a recorded increase in global temperature supposedly driven by atmospheric CO2 increase.
During the period covered by the paper, global mean temperature rose approximately 0.6ºC while global mean homo sapiens height rose (see figure 2) by approximately 5.5cm or 3.3%.
Now the last time I checked I believe that homo sapiens was classed as a species, consequently one would have expected the researchers to have at least examined this data to see if it was consistent with their theory!
I’m waiting for those domesticated polar bears.
Clearly we’ll all need refrigerated ponds in our backyards so we can watch the cute little things frolic.
Better get working on all that generating capacity to run the icemakers.
Human says – “Mother Gaia, we shrunk the
kidsfrogs!”Mother Gaia says – “Silly humans. Go back to shrinking the kids.”
Human says – “Mother Gaia, I think you adopted me . . . I do not think you could be my mother. You are so mean to me but not to other life.”
Mother Gaia says – “Insolent human, now I am going to punish you by making you stand in the corner with a lifetime subscription and back issues of Andy Revkin’s articles.”
Human says – “Mother Gaia, no not that . . . anything but that! I’ll take water boarding instead!
John
Is there a limit to how much more bizarre climate science can get.
What will it grow into in 20 years, for example.
I’m not sure there is a limit. We’ve already seen the one that says “Aliens might come to wipe us out because our CO2 emissions demonstrate we might be uncontrollable/evil”.
“CO2 released by Man will cause a CO2 flash-over event and the Milky Way Galaxy, possibly even the entire Universe, will be completely destroyed.” That might be as far as it goes but who knows?
Hmmm,
“Experimental research suggests that for every additional degree Celsius, a variety of plants lose between three and 17 per cent in size”
Don’t tell that to the Hockey Team – it might upset them!
Come to think of it: a Hollywood proposal for that remake. “The Incredible Shrinking Al.” Guy gets hits by AGW instead of radioactivity. Lots of CGI sound and fury; the end drowned in the usual mystic-cosmic kerfluffle à la 2001: A Space Odyssey, Phase IV, Contact, Melnacholia: hallmark of any serious SF film. (The Jack Arnold original was the first film to employ that technique, after all). I would suggest Jack Black to play Mr. G. (a follow-up to his Lemuel Gulliver; their senses of sublime humor also match).
Any takers for the role of the cat?
With regard to frogs in jars, I recall conducting that experiment about 35 years ago. I recall firecrackers as well. I don’t recall any signifcant scientific outcomes, and results were not pretty. I’m a bit more of a whimp than I was at that young age. Perhaps that’s a good thing. 🙂
I have climbed Mt Kinabalu. It is an ecological island, in that it is a lone isolated peak rising out of the jungle. All sorts of weird, large things are found there, earthworms as big as snakes, acorns the size of tangerines, and the crowning glory, Nepenthes raja, a pitcher plant big enough to drown and eat rats.
I’d say the flora and fauna could use a little shrinking!
Willis,
Yup, the “two-headed boy” story was a Weekly World News article, May 14, 1985, not the National Enquirer. Google Books has the article:
http://books.google.com/books?id=nO8DAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PT4#v=onepage&q&f=false
Cover is quite similar to what you said, except for probably being raised by “animals” instead of wolves (“raised by wolves” is a pretty common expression) and at the time of the article the kid was 10, not 14, which was mentioned in the text.
http://books.google.com/books?id=nO8DAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover
26 years later, if that was all of the details that got fuzzy concerning a tabloid cover you likely only glanced at… Not bad, could be worse.
Perhaps this is how there is such biological diversity in the Amazon rainforest – the relative heat there (compared to this chilly day in New Hampshire) means plants, people, frogs, and other animals there must be really small. That allows for a lot more species to squeeze in there. Or something like that. Perhaps I should visit the Amazon lest someone point out my observation lacks supporting evidence.
More seriously…
While I’m here, I once raised some American toads from polliwogs a housemate brought home from a drying puddle until metamorphosis. I floated a sponge in the aquarium for the new “toadlets” to climb on. They looked much like adults, only smaller. Unless those frogs in the photo were well dated and sexed, I’m gonna be skeptical the photo supports anything other than a) there are frogs and b) frogs can be different sizes.
And adult females are a lot bigger than adult males.
It should be noted that all frogs have indeterminate growth. That means that in contrast to e. g. mammals and birds, who grow rapidly to full size on maturation, and then stop growing, frogs (and many other ectotherms) grow rapidly when young, but then keep on growing slowly for as long as they live. So I feel fairly confident that the left frog in the image is older than the right frog (also note the colour difference), but that is about all you can say.
How do you know the frog wasn’t just dieting? I know lots of folk who sweat off a few pounds in a sauna.