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 …
jim hogg says:
October 19, 2011 at 10:40 am
“I’ve seen this claim several times – that increasing warmth will produce smaller animals. Must be easy to check though: most animals will have north-south distribution limits and if there’s any truth in the claim then presumably the part of the population that lives closer to the equator will be smaller on average if it’s correct. And, presumably someone will already have looked at this. I can feel a grant application coming on . . .”
Been done and there is truth to that. There is even a name for it, the X Rule, which I can’t recall off the top of my head. One example is white-tailed deer. Bigger at the northern end of their range, which is why all the super-keen trophy hunters are going to central Saskatchewan these days.
WHEN FOOD SUPPLIES ARE SUFFICIENT, being larger in a colder climate is an advantage because of better heat conservation (and being larger can be a major survival advantage in intraspecific competition and predator protection).
That said, it is far, far more complicated than that. Size ultimately depends ofn food supply. The Pygmy Hippo lives in a climate as hot and more humid that the regular species but is necessarily smaller because of reduced food supplies in the rainforests where they live.
For the same basic reason, some island pops of species are smaller than mainland ones.
Meanwhile, as Willis has so well described, this current AGW scare story is so incredibly unscientific, oversimplified and stupid that I would never have believed it could make it past a grade school discussion… and it would not have in the pre-AGW Fantasy Era.
What next?
OK, can I bring the discussion back to the Hockey Stick
– here we have a study that shows that as the temperature increases, plant & animals grow less (i.e. are smaller)
So, could this not be the reason for the infamous ‘Hide The Decline’ decline…
i.e. the decline that can’t be explained, and thus must be hidden, can in fact be explained thusly:
– as the temperatures in the later half of the 20th century increased, the trees grew less, causing the decline (which was hidden)
– this would then seem to indicate that trees can’t be used as treemometers, since they both tend to grow more and also less as the temperatures increase (or decreases), and vica versa!
That is my theory, I also have one about dinosaurs.
Goracle :
Hmmmm. Wouldn’t snakes adapt to the shrinking mice so that they, in turn, would also be smaller and require less energy? This, no doubt, is from the same crowd that says they believe in evolution. So, what am I missing?
Do you mean that you don’t believe in evolution, and thus believe the earth is about 6000 years old?
Hmmm, must be a UN Climate Change conference coming up.
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
October 19, 2011 at 6:11 am
Is there nothing the internet doesn’t know? Very sweet find, many thanks,
w.
So the little teeny, tiny bottles of Budweiser on the miniature wagon drawn by the Cydesdales under glass at the pub was actually a PRE-CURSOR of things to come, vice an advertizing piece scaled down to, well, fit in the bar?
No wonder I’m just a blonde and not a science major. Dang it, I don’t look good in “doomed”.
You forgot the shrinking sheep.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/5722145/Climate-change-makes-sheep-shrink.html
I suppose, then, we should expect skyscraper trees in Alaska and tundra in the tropics?
Al Gored. . . much appreciated.
OK, what I want to know is…which frog is the Republican one and which is the Democrat? Is the bigger one the Republican because it eats the small Democrat ones, or is the small one the Republican because it believes in smaller government?
And is one of them a “crunchy frog?”
It must be true. Since global warming started the New York Times company has been getting smaller and smaller. If global warming continues, the NYT company will shrivel away to nothing.
We do occasionally see these odd photos of a polar bear perched on top of a small iceberg. I doubt that they are trying to keep their feet dry. Rather, I suspect they are hunting for seals — by taking a high vantage point, they can see down into a bigger expanse of water, and hence are more likely to see a seal passing by. Furthermore, when they dive in they are more likely to kill the seal on impact if they have a little more altitude.
Note that in this case there is solid ice sheet in the distance, just a short swim for a polar bear.
If the mice get to small to feed the snakes, the snakes can always swallow the deer instead. If they are not themselves proportionately smaller as well!
😉
Ahhhhh, I do hope that our esteemed British viewers don’t do a double blink and think this article is about shrinking the venerable French people.
John
Tom_R says (October 19, 2011 at 7:53 am): “Willis, you owe me a keyboard for the figure 1 caption.”
Indeed. I was immediately reminded of the Monty Python “economist” and his bar graph:
“This column represents 23% of the population. This column represents 28% of the population! And this column represents 43% of the population!!”
Wait! Here it is!
Even assuming the frogs are the same age, were they both collected at the same altitude on Mt. Kinabalu?
Among the more dismissed questions in cosmology is “Is the universe expanding, or are we shrinking?”
The striking case of these frogs suggest that we should take a fresh look at that question.
(p.s. kadaka : Nobody stole Obama’s teleprompter. It ran away.)
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEnKLhi83J8&w=420&h=315%5D
It’s well known that animals are much smaller in warm regions than in cold regions: elephants, rhinoceros, hippopotamus… Although after that Seinfeld episode, I thought that shrinkage had to do with cold…
Frog the size of a child reportedly found (and eaten) in Malaysia
When you’ve discovered a 20-kilogram frog with the legs the length of a seven-year-old child’s, do you A.) keep it for posterity; B.) donate it to science; or C.) eat the sonofagun before it eats you?
http://io9.com/5835375/frog-the-size-of-a-child-found-eaten-in-malaysia
I would still like to see how the claim that a temperature rise has occured in Borneo from the 80’s to 2008. The records can not see a rise http://www.tutiempo.net/en/Climate/Sandakan/964910.htm
Frogs ain’t wot they used to be…
The link between optimal size and temperature is real, but applies only to warm blooded creatures that need to maintain a body temperature above ambient. If you are warm blooded then being big makes it easier to keep your body warm because the volume/surface area ratio is more favourable, and being skinny makes it easier to cool down for much the same reason. This reasoning obviously doesn’t apply to cold blooded creatures like frogs.
As a Canadian I am struck with horror at the very though of global warming. To think that the temperature has risen by one degree a century makes me fear the future. Some days here the temperature goes from minus twenty at night to plus ten in the day, I cannot imagine what would happen when that turns to minus 18 at night and plus 12 in the day. I suspect Greenland would be a giant hot pool, the Tundra turn into orange grove and the polar bears march in protest on Ottawa. At minus 18 the whole winter parka business would go bankrupt, the only slight consolation would be the increased tourist revenue from the Christmas sunbathers on the beaches of Hudson bay.