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 …
I am reminded of
“The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.”
a story told by a drunken bum to Mark Twain.
From:
http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Mark_Twain/61
“There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”
“When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.”
“You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”
What happened to the “humans shrunk to cold” theory like the Inuit population is the NE Siberia. They got tiny and kind of round, and the explanation was that it was an adaptation to cold (less surface area exposed).
Anyway, this article is so full of it is not even worth the typing effort I put into it. So they are telling us, that within 25 odd years, the frogs that do not even look the same (I hope at least they identified the correct species to compare), shrunk by about 50%. Fine. So even if you say that the entire warming in the last century occurred in the last 30 years, you get these frogs to adapt really fast to a 1C warming.
Or maybe, I can draw another conclusion, if I compare Yao Ming to the rest of the Chinese population, I see that the Chinese population shrunk by 50% compared to him. This leads me to the conclusion that a) there has been a lot of warming in China lately and they adapted fast, or b) Yao Ming lives in a very cool place.
If the solution a is correct, then we have nothing to worry about. Since humans and the rest of the biota adapt really fast to external “stress”, there is no need for immediate action against the CO2 stress. My prediction is that by the year 2100, the planet will be populated with midgets at all levels.
/sarc off
This reminded me on an experiment I saw on TV many years ago when the hot debate was if the electromagnetic fields may have an effect on life development. The smarty panties researcher used two chicken eggs and two powerful electromagnets. He kept one (yes 1, not 10 or 100) chicken egg exposed to a positive magnetic field, and one (not 10 or 100) exposed to a negative magnetic field during all incubation time. When the chicks hatched, the one that was exposed to the positive magnetic field was actually bigger (or smaller, I don’t remember) than the one exposed to the negative magnetic field. Logical (and necessarily scary) conclusion: a static magnetic field have an impact on life development!!
With this kind of great minds watching over our future and every day well being I really feel safer.
The need for shrinks is growing.
I was told by my college psychology professor that the IQ range for PhD’s in the US is 80 to 180. Perhaps all this warming is shrinking the low end.
Was this peer reviewed?
Seems life is going to imitare art
…18/9/2012 T.V. Flash on all Dial-A-Program Services
This is an announcement from Genetic Control:
“It is my sad duty to inform you of a four foot restriction on
humanoid height.”…
tty;
“large size of some ectotherms (particularly insects) during past geologic epochs ” may have also had something to do with atmospheric density:
http://levenspiel.com/octave/dinosaurs.htm re pterosaurs, but the same principle would apply to dragonflies, etc.
Another fine piece Willis. I was going to point out the demise of the Polar bears in fifty years but Harold beat me to it.
HaroldW says:October 19, 2011 at 5:20 am
“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. 😉
On another note:
eyesonu says: October 19, 2011 at 3:23 am
Willis, Anthony, and crew, how do you discover all the nonsense that is produced by the ‘titled’ idiots. Is the title Dr. becoming short for Dumb reasoning in academia?
I always thought the Bugs Bunny cartoon had a word play on Elmer Fudd’s name. I assumed they were making fun of the title ‘Doctor”, since “PhD” would be pronounced; “fǔd”.
“In laboratory experiments, for every 2 degrees the scientists cranked up the temperature, various types of fruit size decreased anywhere from 3 to 17 percent. For fish, the shrinking was even more pronounced, from 6 to 22 percent.”
There are 2 possibilities here:
a) these experiments took 30 years for each 2 degrees which were “cranked up”, or
b) the scientists increased the temperature much faster than even the craziest of IPCC predictions.
This is a similar error to experiments concerning coral. Obviously if corals are suddenly exposed to a less alkali environment then this could affect growth, but this tells us nothing about how they would adapt to a similar change over a century.
Willis, you owe me a keyboard for the figure 1 caption.
You have got to be kidding me. Global warming will shrink the animals? Every plant and animal that I have seen from a tropical climate is larger,more taxic and dangerous than most animals from a temperate or arctic climate, with the exception of the large predators. This is either an adaptation problem or diversity within the species
I grew up in Maryland to a height of 6’1″. My son grew up in Florida to a height of 6’4″. Based on the (clearly sufficient as the article suggests) one data point i think the author has it backwards.
Can I now be funded?
The list of global warming consequences is becoming very big.
A fine example of BS ( Bad Science).
Any kid that has played with polywogs will tell you the the size of frogs is caused by the amount of water available. 😉 pg
Olen says:
“The list of global warming consequences is becoming very big.” – Like this – ROARRRMEMEEUW – The sound of a lion in transition. Sorry couldn’t resist.
Willis,
I have a .pdf of the original full article if you’d like it. You can email me at kip at i4.net.
It worse than you thought…it is not a study at all really, but a Perspective piece.
So what exactly is the US GEOLOGICAL SURVEY doing making analysis of future animal populations?
Hey guys
“… which clearly proves that the frog on the left is larger than the frog on the right”
“I’m not putting frogs in my Gore Jars to replicate this, no way, no how.”
Stop It! My sides are hurting!
I see there is still no common sense or reality checks for these pseudo-scientists that want AGW.
“In laboratory experiments, for every 2 degrees the scientists cranked up the temperature, various types of fruit size decreased anywhere from 3 to 17 percent. For fish, the shrinking was even more pronounced, from 6 to 22 percent.”
Really? Then please explain why the Bass in Stick Marsh Farm Reservoir in Central Florida, created in 1987 as a runoff with warmer than normal water has been producing Largemouth Bass that are growing at the incredible rate of 2.5lbs/yr – far exceeding growth rates of Bass in nearby, colder lakes?
Too bad that Anthony does not want to investigate. If he did, he would find that these are not two frogs – it is actually just the same frog, which has simply been warmed with a short-wave infrared lamp. Which of course does prove that warming shrinks frogs.
I will laugh my ass off if the ‘shrunken’ frog is found to be an undiscovered sub-species, one destined to become extinct without us even knowing according to WWF modeling.
Though i’ve never been able to work out how you can claim something to become extinct if it you don’t know of it’s existence.
Only Reuters would pick up this kind of environmental scare story. I do not read anything by Reuters anymore, they demonstrated their bias when the IPCC released their AR4 report in 2007 and at every climate summit since.
Reuters causes serious facepalm.
I guess they might have a point. I mean, frogs were the size of small dogs in the 80s, and they sung and danced.
I don’t have a problem living in world with smaller mice and no snakes. What’s the problem with that?