Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Recycled climate wisdom from Seth Borenstein…
Global warming shrank animals in the past. Scientists say it could happen again.
Seth Borenstein, Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Global warming shrank certain animals in the ancient past, and scientists worry it could happen again.
Warm-blooded animals got smaller at least twice in Earth’s history when carbon dioxide levels soared and temperatures spiked as part of a natural warming, a new study says.
University of New Hampshire researcher Abigail D’Ambrosia warned that mammals — but not people — could shrivel in the future under even faster man-made warming.
“It’s something we need to keep an eye out for,” said D’Ambrosia, who led the new work. “The question is how fast are we going to see these changes.”
…
Read more: https://amp.usatoday.com/story/99345782/
The abstract of the study;
Repetitive mammalian dwarfing during ancient greenhouse warming events
Abigail R. D’Ambrosia1, William C. Clyde, Henry C. Fricke, Philip D. Gingerich and Hemmo A. Abels
Abrupt perturbations of the global carbon cycle during the early Eocene are associated with rapid global warming events, which are analogous in many ways to present greenhouse warming. Mammal dwarfing has been observed, along with other changes in community structure, during the largest of these ancient global warming events, known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum [PETM; ~56 million years ago (Ma)]. We show that mammalian dwarfing accompanied the subsequent, smaller-magnitude warming event known as Eocene Thermal Maximum 2 [ETM2 (~53 Ma)]. Statistically significant decrease in body size during ETM2 is observed in two of four taxonomic groups analyzed in this study and is most clearly observed in early equids (horses). During ETM2, the best-sampled lineage of equids decreased in size by ~14%, as opposed to ~30% during the PETM. Thus, dwarfing appears to be a common evolutionary response of some mammals during past global warming events, and the extent of dwarfing seems related to the magnitude of the event.
Read more: http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/3/e1601430.full
Shrinking animals is one of my favourite climate scare stories. The fear of climate shrinking animals has such a camp 1980s science fiction feel, but what they are actually talking about is a very gradual process which took place over a prolonged period – certainly not something a person could “keep an eye on” over any reasonable timeframe.
The most important thing that has most certainly shriveled over the decades of the human caused climate change debate is the credibility of the scientific community in general. The ever growing volume of this kind of excrement will continue that trend.
It’s not the credibility of the scientific community that has shriveled, it’s (half) the (American) public’s trust in it. For decades the scientific community has been defamed by propaganda aimed at the Right, and it sunk in but good. There are reams of original documents surfacing describing just how they wanted you to think, and they were very successful. Big Oil and Friends scheming about newspaper ads, radio interviews with scientists they pick and “train” as spokesmen, materials for the media… And even though the models got better and evidence accumulated, the messages they fed you stayed the same.
Makes a surreal read. Makes so much sense, though.
http://www.climatefiles.com
Kristi Silber, that rationale of why people mistrust science is truly precious. So various greens, who are leftist when being political, running anti-GMO campaigns, are not undermining science? What you seem to object to is anyone disagreeing with your policy preferences, and using science as a reason.
There’s clear evidence this is already happening.
As I get older, I’ve noticed I get shorter – what else could it be other than CAGW?
See comment @ur momisugly Max Photon March 22, 2018 at 10:31 pm above.
Ah yes, but I also get fatter.
The Russians. Or the Martians. Or the Klingons.
So, adaptation is bad. Got it.
An interesting study would be if Alarmism causes brains to shrink, or if small brains is an existing feature of Alarmists.
How sweet to be an idiot…. – Neil Innes, songwriter for Monty Python
Actually this is a well-known and well understood phenomenon. It shows up clearly in the Pleistocene as well. Animals during interglacials are significantly smaller than animals of the same species during glacials. It is so regular that it can sometimes even be used to determine if a particular deposit is glacial or interglacial. And it has been known for a looong time. Kurtén wrote about it in “Pleistocene mammals of Europe” fifty years ago.
This is typical Climate Science™, take a long-known and well-understood phenomenon and write a climate scare story around it. Neither journalists or peer-reviewers are likely to notice. Also think how much safer research is from an appropriations point of view when you can be sure in advance of your results.
It doesn’t work for poikilothermic (“cold blooded”) animals by the way.
There is an ecological principle rooted in metabolism about this with a name which I forget. Am on a week fast from reading papers but the abstract says “…ETM2 is observed in two of four taxonomic groups analyzed in this study.” I’m a fan on what it takes to do palaeontological studies. Not so much on prediction of the future of evolution.
“Bergmann’s rule”
Aw but think of the decreased costs for keeping zoo animals! It’s win-win, I think.
And here I was under the impression that a warmer climate promoted more plant growth, which provided more feed to grow bigger animals.
When I want my beef cows to put on more protein, I always promote pasture growth so they’ll have more to eat (or give them more hay in the fall after cold weather stymies grass growth in my pasture).
I suppose I’ll have to switch seasons and raise my beef cows in the winter when it’s colder!
Or I could use logic and do what I’ve been successfully doing for years.
Steak, anybody?
It’s a natural reaction, and is happening today at least in the US deer herd. Northern deer are considerable larger than those in the south. Why? Because warmer clime deer do not need to extra weight/fat required for colder, longer Winters.
“…when carbon dioxide levels soared and temperatures spiked”
Typical of Alarmunists in their bizarro world, they get things completely backwards. No, numnutz; first, temperatures go up, then perhaps 800 years later on average, CO2 goes up.
Actually we don’t know that CO2 levels soared, only that d13C (the isotope ratio of coal) shifted which is interpreted as being due to an injection of isotopically depleted carbon into the system. However since it is unknown what the isotope ratio of this “new” coal was it is also unknown what the effect on CO2 levels might have been.
“University of New Hampshire researcher Abigail D’Ambrosia warned that mammals — but not people — could shrivel in the future under even faster man-made warming.”
Wow, Abigail! I mean just really, like WOW!!! You mean even faster than 0.8C in less than 170 years???
This effect works through ordinary evolution. Smaller animals have smaller offspring, if these survive better and have more offspring than larger animals, then the animals will tend to become smaller generation by generation.
However it works rather slowly. Human hunters selectively killing the larger animals have much larger – and faster – effect.
Hmmm. Didn’t the largest animals that ever existed, do so during a period of heightened C02?
Is there literally NO collateral knowledge being taught anymore?
This effect works mainly on larger continental animals and it’s about relative size. Interglacial mammoths were smaller than glacial mammoths, but they were still pretty big.
On islands things work out differently – large animals tend to shrink and small animals to grow. There have been pony-sized island elephants and badger-sized island hedgehogs.
With greater C02, foliage grows larger, providing more food for herbivores, which in turn grow larger, followed by the predators.
It’s a simple matter of biomass… which, on islands, is naturally less.
It’s already shrinking human brains….selectively that is and mostly in media occupations and advocacy orgs.
Weren’t dinosaurs huge and wasn’t it really hot and moist then? So the dinosaurs were shrunken from even bigger animals? Wow, I am soooo confused.
Oh good, when can I put a mini-whale in the fish pond?
Just when you think the leftists
could not possibly come up with a more
bizarre “campfire tale” to scare people
about the alleged
coming global warming catastrophe
… they invent shrinking animals.
I do give some credit to the bizarre stories:
I’ve been reading about climate change since 1997.
I was inspired twice,
to write an article
on climate change,
for my economics newsletter
— one in 2007
and the other in 2014.
Something changed in late 2014.
After many years of no global warming at all,
I noticed the scary climate change
stories were worse than ever,
and that really annoyed me.
I decided to start a climate change blog
to keep my newsletter subscribers up to date
on climate change issues.
A year later I decided to
include my climate blog URL
at the bottom of some of my comments here
as a public service for people who found
the science too complicated i article here.
My point, and I do have one,
is the slower the rate of global warming was,
the more bizarre were the scary stories
of a coming climate doom,
as if the general public are fools
who will ‘buy’ anything
that government bureaucrats
with science degrees claim !
I don’t understand why
shrinking animals would even
be bad — I wish my cat would shrink,
and eat less, saving me money.
I think leftists missed the mark
with this bizarre shrinking animals claim.
They should have claimed
global warming would shrink
something else — something
that men would NEVER want to shrink.
Now THAT would scare male non-believers !
Modern climate change “science” is a joke —
so why not tell a joke here ?
My climate change blog for common sense people
— so leftists must stay away:
http://www.elOnionBloggle.Blogspot.com2