Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A group of biologists have demanded more resources for data collection, so they can fill in the missing pieces of biodiversity models which forecast ecological catastrophe.
Forecasting climate change’s effects on biodiversity hindered by lack of data
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – An international group of biologists is calling for data collection on a global scale to improve forecasts of how climate change affects animals and plants.
Accurate model predictions can greatly aid efforts to protect biodiversity from disturbances such as climate change and urban sprawl by helping scientists and decision-makers better understand, anticipate and respond to threats that imperil species and ecosystems.
In a paper published in Science on Thursday (Sept. 8), biologists cite a critical lack of data on key biological mechanisms – such as how animals and plants spread during their lifetime and how they evolve in response to changes in the environment – as the main obstacle to improving models’ ability to forecast species’ response to climate change.
“This paper is a call to arms,” said Patrick Zollner, article co-author and Purdue associate professor of wildlife science. “The world is in dire circumstances. We’re losing a lot of species, and we’re largely unaware why. How do we need to rethink the kind of data we’re collecting so we can take advantage of modern modeling tools to understand the outcomes of climate change for ecological systems? This could help us forestall losing wildlife that we later deeply regret.”
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The abstract of the paper;
New biological models are incorporating the realistic processes underlying biological responses to climate change and other human-caused disturbances. However, these more realistic models require detailed information, which is lacking for most species on Earth. Current monitoring efforts mainly document changes in biodiversity, rather than collecting the mechanistic data needed to predict future changes. We describe and prioritize the biological information needed to inform more realistic projections of species’ responses to climate change. We also highlight how trait-based approaches and adaptive modeling can leverage sparse data to make broader predictions. We outline a global effort to collect the data necessary to better understand, anticipate, and reduce the damaging effects of climate change on biodiversity.
Read more: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6304/aad8466
On one hand it is refreshing to see a group of scientists admit their climate projections are incomplete. But it is also sad that said scientists seem to feel compelled to couch a request for more funds in such apocalyptic terms.
Who knows – perhaps this is what you have to do these days, to attract the attention of climate obsessed science funding panels.
Update (EW) – fixed a typo
Why give them more money to “access” more data. They end up altering the data anyway…
They didn’t predict a dodo catastrophe. A much simpler and observable problem set. Over one million annually in America alone. I wonder if dodos practiced the same rites.
More biased models built on biased models? How ’bout we defund all climate-related “research” and let them fend for themselves.
I know, I know: It wus CO2 wot dun it!
(where can I pick up my grant cheque?)
Instead of complaining about a lack of data, these dudes should leave their comfy office’s & go collect the data they want – but that would be too sensible & interfere with their career path.
Catastrophes don’t come cheap. If it’s doomsday you’re looking for, that’s the result of mankind irresponsibly, then it’s gonna take some cash to formulate the data to fit the predetermined result. When you’re asking people to compromise integrity and prostitute themselves for a political cause then you’re gonna have to pony up some serious greenhouse cash.
Bio-diversity is at its greatest in warm/wet environments such as tropical rain forests, and at its least in cold arid climates such as Antarctica.
Tells one all that one needs to know. A warmer wetter world will be good for bio-diversity especially if CO2 is increased since CO2 is essential for all life forms at the base of the food chain, and is causing the world to green faster than man can deforest it.
No grant money needed when the base facts are so clear cut.
When you pay all your scientists to be activists, all you’re left with at the end of the day are activists.
Here in New Hampshire, apparently the moose population is down, and the main culprit is of course climate change.
“Shorter winters” are blamed for a supposed increased population of ticks weakening the cow moose, and decreasing survivability of calves. Sure. And the children aren’t going to know what snow is. Or skiing. Whatever the reason is, they don’t even mention the annual moose hunt, or even suggest (horrors) putting a moratorium on it. That’s a sacred cow.
Regulated hunting is almost never a reason for numbers decline. In many cases, it actually holds healthy numbers up by culling over-dense areas.
There is, at least in Canada, a lot of legal but unregulated hunting going on. And it’s increasing at a rapid rate. What I’m talking about of course is ‘Rights based’ hunting (Aboriginals and Metis). In many areas – wide swaths of the country – Rights based hunters can hunt, with the backing of the Canadian constitution, at any time with no seasons or limits (fish too). Game like moose and caribou are being hunted to the point where a number of populations are in danger of extirpation. But that’s OK. The only issue and root of all wildlife woe’s is climate change and CO2 emissions.
I naively believe that people most often believe what they tell other people believe… except lawyers, elected politicians and salesman! Adults understand that those three exceptions are expected to lie.
I don’t see much benefit for the biology researchers to lie unless they’ve pinned themselves into a bad career corner. Hopefully the truth will set them free.
They’re not interested in the truth. They just repeat the CAGW mantra. They could easily check things out for themselves as we have done, but it is not in their self-interest to do so. And yes, that makes them complicit, and it makes them liars.
Perhaps they suddenly realized the gravy train of funding AGW research is about to end and they had not received their “fair share” yet.
“We’re losing a lot of species, and we’re largely unaware why.” I thought that was called “natural selection”.
Climate “science” at its “best”:
Step 1: try to Frankenstein together historical measurement with modern measurement, despite an error bar from the former that eclipses, by several order of magnitude, supposed increase in warming over a decade
Step 2: plug those numbers into inconsistent, wildly inaccurate and practically irrelevant models to get a wide range of possible outcomes
Step 3: take the hottest and most unlikely outcomes and play “what if”
Step 4: take the worse case scenarios of Step 3 and go to the media to say you aren’t getting enough $
Repeat as needed.
Or, as Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds says, what can’t go on forever, won’t.
Biology first needs to nail down an agreed upon definition of species if they are going to try to study the loss, gain, or movement of them.
There is nothing wrong with biology, as a field of study, demanding a bit more of the funding pie. The ONLY way to do that today is find a hook into the Climate Change bandwagon — that’s where the big money is.
I doubt that many will really study the climate issue, they want the money to do other stuff, so each paper will mention the dire threat of climate change in the Conclusion or discussion, even if no data in the study is based on climate at all — just like a thousand other papers published each month.
Of course, they could just invent new species from the like giraffes.ones they have now….like they have just done with giraffes.
Giraffes ==> It gets even better! They determined the existence of 4 species with Bayesian statistics run against DNA samples….paper here.
For those who still insist that “Biology has a perfectly good and clear definition of species.” I will quote from this paper:
“Numerous efforts have been made to define species, but a clear-cut consensus has not yet been reached [15, 16]. Common to many species concepts is that “species” represent distinct evolutionary units with limited gene flow to other, similar units, and concordance among different character sets has been suggested to support species distinctness [17].”
The cites are:
15. Coyne, J.A., and Orr, H.A. (2004). Speciation (Sinauer).
16. De Queiroz, K. (2007). Species concepts and species delimitation. Syst.
Biol. 56, 879–886.
17. Avise, J.C., and Ball, R.M., Jr. (1990). Principles of genealogical concordance
in species concepts and biological taxonomy. In Oxford Surveys
in Evolutionary Biology, Volume 7, D. Futuyama, and J. Antonovics, eds.
(Oxford University Press), pp. 45–67.
Regardless of the claim’s pitch, which may seem a bit sharp, the point made is valid, I think.
The biological data in context of climate change seems to be very important, and at the same time it is scarce and poor.
Lack of such data, for a time, in relation to coral bleaching , lead to decades of claims of it been an “apocalyptic” extinction scenario due to AGW..
But lately with more data on that subject the obfuscation of such claims is becoming clearer…….
Also such data clearly invalidate the estimates of climate change and its periodicity established by the ice core data interpretation, at least for a place like Alaska, and to a degree for all places that experience full desertification.
Life species respond to climate change, and the climate change leaves a clear footprint in life of species…….
More and more of such data could be very helpful in validating the current estimates about climate change.
The only question about it will be the balance and the biases of the research and science involved with the process of producing such data….
It is very much needed I think, more knowledge the better…..
cheers
As a graduate of a Wildlife Management program in a School of Agriculture I would respectfully suggest that a point, as just noted, has been missed here. One of the very, very few advantages of age is that you have been there, done that, that is if you can remember it.
They correctly acknowledge the problem of models outstripping the data. The formal education in my age group was before the computer revolution, so we had to take courses in “real stuff.” And learn about models later, which I did when the fisheries models failed like the climate ones.
They acknowledge the models relationship to videogames. The man that started the computer program in our university told me something to the effect– don’t get too excited about them. If he was still alive he would be a great source of wisdom. Our program was way ahead, for awhile.
To keep it short, one question–What is relationship between the number of authors and the various parameters on the quality of papers? My impression is they have way too many.
‘perhaps this is what you have to do these days, to attract the attention of climate obsessed science funding panels.’
Well, it’s not like they’re producing anything of value. The sum total of their productivity is a scary headline that can keep the gravy train rolling.
It’s very anti-Darwin in a way – interfering with selection for a long-overdue extinction.
Biologists and the Gravy Train
Caribou move? Who knew? Can’t they model that?
“Current monitoring efforts mainly document changes in biodiversity, rather than collecting the mechanistic data needed to predict future changes.” This reeks of deductive reasoning. “We already know the trend; let’s seek out data that confirm our foregone conclusions.” This is not science. This is an exercise in authoritarian group think.