Embarrassed by the stubborn refusal of polar bears to die out, or even to appear convincingly rare, climate scientists are touting a new poster child species for our collective climate guilt – the white lemuroid ringtail possum.
The possum is restricted to just one mountain range in tropical Australia. Previously numbered in the thousands, the species was almost wiped out by a heatwave in 2005.
“I think this really should be a wake-up call,” tropical rainforests expert and James Cook University researcher Professor Bill Laurance told AAP.
“We’re arguing this is a better icon for global warming than a polar bear because it typifies the type of biodiversity we will lose in the future.”
JUST four white lemuroid ringtail possums have been found in the wild and scientists say the species could soon become the first creature to be wiped out by global warming.
Source: https://au.news.yahoo.com/a/24520231/possum-a-polar-bear-of-climate-change/
h/t to Eric Worrall
However, it may be down, but not out, from 2009:
Reports of white lemuroid ringtail possum’s extinction premature
A RARE possum said to be the first Australian species wiped out by global warming appears to be clinging to survival, if still vulnerable, in north Queensland’s tropical rainforest.
Last year, the white lemuroid ringtail possum was reported to have vanished from high-altitude rainforests in north Queensland. It was the first Australian mammal extinction attributed to climate change.
The white possums are native to the mountains that surround Port Douglas and Cairns. When news of their apparent demise was reported, rising temperatures and global warming were blamed.
As it is written:
Sometime in the near future, there will be a new paper discussing the decline of the white lemuroid ringtail possums. This future paper will state that it was not “Global Warming” that caused the decline, but: (Pick one) human encroachment, an unusual increase in predators, a disease, a decrease in the possums food supply, or (insert your own favorite here).
So shall it be.
Lemoroids…. that sounds painful !!!
Here we go again.
I was thinking, whenever the university that I graduated from solicits donations I can ask if they have a climate studies program and then state that I won’t donate a dime till the people participating in the climate studies fraud are terminated and prosecuted for fraud. There you go, an idea for dealing with the problem in a small way gratis.
Almost Iowa says:
“Can someone explain how it got all the way from Australia to Almost Iowa? Oh! Oh! Wait a minute, I know! Climate change!!
Oddly enough you are quite correct. Marsupials dispersed from South America to Australia by way of Antarctica in the Late Cretaceous or earliest Paleogene when it was a lot warmer in Antarctica.
And then the American Possum wandered across from South America a couple of million years age when the Panama isthmus connected North and South America. And once the last (latest) ice age was over it of course headed for Iowa.
tty says:
July 22, 2014 at 1:04 pm
………..
It comes from the highest authority
http://australianmuseum.net.au/common-ringtail-possum
(australian natural museum research institute)
Hi,
There is a new ‘e-petition’ (UK):
http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/61879
“Classify the terms “denier” , “climate denier” or variants thereof as hate speech.
Responsible department: Home Office
We the undersigned request that the offensive terms, “climate denier”, “denier”, “denialist” and other variants being used to harass sceptical scientists or other people who do not ascribe to the hypothesis of man made climate change or man made global warming be classified as hate speech in accordance with the Public Order Act 1986.
Scientists and others should not be subjected to hateful, offensive names in order to diminish their standing or to make them accept a consensus view.”
I thought it deserved a bigger audience.
Our American possums are robust, with a toothy smile that could be offputting. But the thing to remember is even though they can open the jaws wide like an alligator and give off an impressive hissing sound, they are mostly defenseless. If you pester them long enough they invariable faint, or play possum. They’re not playing. The threat causes their system to be overloaded.
If by some accident, like if you reached down and picked one up in the dark thinking it was a cat, and it happens to bite you, it’s not like being bit by some other feral creature. Their internal temperature is too low to support the nasty diseases associated with rats or other vermin.
You would have more of a chance to catch rabies from a feral cat, than from a possum.
They’re smarter than dogs. One possum who as a baby I rescued from the bottom of a waste bin it had become trapped in, remembered the incident and would approach me without trepidation for the rest of it’s life.
They have four hands rather than feet. If you could train them, they would make a hell of a piano player.
lea says:
July 22, 2014 at 12:44 pm
“I would be thrilled if ‘global warming’ knocked out every possum that exists in the world. Nasty, disgusting creatures.”
Damn, that would be a shame. O’possums are good eating (especially in a stew), and here in Texas, about 40% of their diet is copperhead and rattlesnake snakes. Seems the little beasties are immune to the venom of pit vipers.
How are the climate weasels doing?
Climate Change Lecture
Wild weather: Is climate change already taking its toll?
1 October, 6:30pm – 8:30pm (doors 6pm), Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London, WC1R 4RL. Tickets £14, available in advance only.
Given by Friederike Otto , Post Doctoral Research Fellow, University of Oxford
Are the extreme weather events we’re seeing linked to increased carbon in the atmosphere and if so, how do we starve off (?!, stave off, Dr. Otto ) the dangerous consequences of climate change?
No Thanks
These creatures are in north Queensland’s tropical rainforest. Don’t they carry out some logging there? If you get rid of the trees does the heat get to them? What if its habitat was left alone? Put snails in the desert and they die.
Lemuroid ringtail possum threats
The most significant threat to the lemuroid ringtail possum is global climate change. Prolonged exposure to temperatures above 30 degrees Celsius causes this species to loose control of its body temperature, leading to eventual death. The lemuroid ringtail possum is also particularly vulnerable to the adverse affects of climate change as it occupies cool forests at the high end of the altitude range in the region, meaning it has nowhere to go to escape the heat (1).
The range of the lemuroid ringtail possum has declined greatly over recent decades as a result of deforestation and selective logging (1). This species has been particularly sensitive to the fragmentation of its habitat as, being a strictly arboreal species, it does not cross roads or powerline corridors that dissect its habitat (7). It also does not use habitat corridors (8). The lemuroid ringtail possum population has declined by as much as 97 percent in places where its habitat has become fragmented (2).
http://www.arkive.org/lemuroid-ringtail-possum/hemibelideus-lemuroides/
These creatures have lived through many heatwaves in Australias history. Perhaps it the missing trees.
Seriously, you just can’t make this stuff up…
“JUST four white lemuroid ringtail possums have been found in the wild and scientists say the species could soon become the first creature to be wiped out by global warming.”
Sorry, I forgot to indent the paragraphs starting from
and ending with
I first wrote about this in 2008 –
“Poster child for climate change” – you be the judge
http://www.warwickhughes.com/blog/?p=188
then I saw the issue again December 2013 –
Recycled five year old story about global warming threatening White Lemuroid Possum
http://www.warwickhughes.com/blog/?p=2530
and it seems to be on the rounds again.
Not claiming this source is comprehensive or unbiased, but here’s Wikipedia’s list of 20th-21st century extinctions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_extinctions#20th_century
As noted some years ago on these pages by Eschenbach, IIRC, almost all of these extinctions are of island populations that seem to have lost the battle with invasive species.
I had to laugh at the Costa Rican jungle toad that “may have gone extinct due to global warming”. Really??!! The tropics are the most immune regions to impacts of climate “change”, according to IPCC and all the other “authorities”
The polar regions are the “canaries in the coal mines”, they all say
The “unmentionable” extinctions are all of the Pleistocene megafauna that mysteriously disappeared shortly after Homo sp. arrived on the scene. Just gentle Earth-people living “in harmony with Nature”, doncha know?
Following the Dr. Friederike Otto’s link above, came across this:
Welcome to the world’s largest climate modelling experiment
Get started and help us predict the climate.
http://www.climateprediction.net/getting-started/
desperate times call for desperate measures.
” GeologyJim says:
July 22, 2014 at 2:55 pm
Not claiming this source is comprehensive or unbiased, but here’s Wikipedia’s list of 20th-21st century extinctions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_extinctions#20th_century
As noted some years ago on these pages by Eschenbach, IIRC, almost all of these extinctions are of island populations that seem to have lost the battle with invasive species.”
Don’t forget to include a number of ‘species’ that aren’t species or probably even supspecies. DNA testing is a wonderful thing…
Where is the autopsy?
How many acres do they inhabit and how many acres were surveyed and how many were homogenized?
This is reminiscent of the 4 drowned polar bears survey. Phffft!
I wrote about them in the climate extinction essay for the next book. There are two remnant high tropical rainforest national parks in Queensland where the lemuroid ringtails hold out, victim of earlier extensive logging. Cook U originally claimed the white had been extirpated in one of the two refuges, a victim of climate change. That proved false for two reasons. First, whites were later spotted there. (These animals are strictly nocturnal, and live and browse only in the high canopies of large mature trees. They are very hard to spot, and that is usually done by flash/floodlight causing a yellow reflection from their eyes–from which the fur color cannot be determined.) Second, whites are not a species. They are a genetic variant of the generic lemuroid possum, which is usually chocolate brown. And in both refuges, the brown variants are doing fine and still having the occaisional white offspring.
This whole thing was an embarrassing ‘crisis’ falsely manufactured by Cook University, since fully debunked ‘downinder’. As bad as the climate endangered American Pika (current EPA website) which isn’t (official 2010 finding of the US FWS). Or the Antarctic Adelie penguins, thriving except at the French research station where a breeding colony was disrupted by blasting to enlarge the runway. Or Churchill’s West Hudson Arctic polar bears. All also covered in the next book, and all thriving despite Warmunist pseudo scientific nonsense and very poor MSM reporting.
A possum once pissed on my head through a vent opening in the ceiling of my bedroom at about 3 am when I was a teenager. White and fluffy or not I will happily wipe them out myself! Where’s ma shotgun, Pa?
( just joking folks)
So, are these destined to be on the next Cola-Cola advertisements or the next WWF posters?
Was it not so hot the ocean was boiling around them in that heat wave? … Think Progress always be the truth. /sarc …heh, juiced up article from 2008
Australian Possum May Be Global Boiling Casualty | ThinkProgress
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2008/12/04/174202/possum-casualty/
Last few will probably be wiped out by green researchers treading on them while looking for an alarmist photo opportunity.
I can just see the Guardian/BBC headline now “Global Warming Squashed My Possum”
tty says:
Marsupials dispersed from South America to Australia by way of Antarctica in the Late Cretaceous or earliest Paleogene when it was a lot warmer in Antarctica.
They’ve found fossilized possums contemporary with dinosaurs. Cretaceous ocean temperatures were as much as 15 to 20 °C (27 to 36 °F) higher than today’s. So a critter that walked with dinosaurs and migrated to Australia by way of an ice free Antarctica is going to be done in by a 0.6 °C temperature increase?
.
I sure that fact they are all white allows them to hid quite successfully from feral cats which are no big problem in Australia.
/sarc