Remember how climate change was going to wipe out all the mountain Pikas? Never mind.

About as cute as any rodent. Pikas and marmots will eat the wiring insulation and gnaw at the rubber of any vehicle left unattended at a mountain trailhead.

All reasonable questions. A fundamental ideology of green delusion is change is bad, when in fact change is the natural and unavoidable and relentless norm, although short lived humans hardly see any as sustained change in a particular long term direction is so slow. Fact is that the variation you describe is small and almost certainly and wholly within a natural range of short term noise, Far smaller than what that our short interglacial range has covered, up and down from today, from written historical accounts that are more meaningful than predictions of models or these partial and unsupportable green assertions, because those who recorded history before instruments simply documented what happened, not to try to prove some climate belief.
Animals migrate and move seasonally all the time, perhaps they over exploit their habitats or feel like a change, or another species starts to share the resource. These little fellas, which may be the ones I once saw at Yosemite’s Glacier point?????, like Polar bears, are clearly mobile and comfortable in a range of climates , up and down from the fixed population studied. If you were a real scientist, and found a population had reduced or disappeared from a location, the first thing to do would be to look for it somewhere else, not declare extinction based on some fixed demography. Conclusion: These are not serious scientists as their study is fundamentay flawed by design (or as reported)..
Just to make three points, very quickly.
1. CORRELATION AND CAUSE: What globa temperature change there is does not correlate with CO2, over the industrialistion time scale we have measured, or the historical one before that using proxy indicators, Temperatures have also gone down while CO2 d goes up, and vu ice versa, and usually the CO2 change lags the temperature change so more likely an effect gtthan a cause. Because oceans emit CO2 as they are warned.
2. SCALE: The forcing effect of CO2 is about 0.5% of water vapour if you believe the amplification effect of IPCC models, less than one 1 in 600 if you take the IPCC lower range, e,.g. no amplification by the O2 warming effect on water vapour, or even a reduction due to more clouds, etc. Any CO2 effect is smaller than the natural variation in water vapour’s dominant GH effect and nobody knows much more.
3. CO2’s supposed direct IR absorption effect at 700nm wavelength also falls off logarithmically with concentration, so 20-40ppm has the same effect as 200-400pp. The band saturation effect. None of this suppports a tipping point, which is absolute bollocks on any serious scientific basis, hysterical nonsense that any rational scientist can destroy in 121 discussion in minutes on the evidence of natural data and proven physics.
4. Any AGW effect from ACO2 is tiny and diminishing with concentration in the noise of the MUCH larger water vapour effect, if GHE is even as hypothesised and not simply a function of gravitational pressure on a mass of air .
5. FOLLOW THE MONEY: Apart from all the research grants that require the academics to create predictive models that prove atmospheric CO2 is the dominant cause of this tiny change, rather than find the actual cause, the real agenda is the use of the assertions and the model’s results, that exceed any actual measurements in recorded fact, to justify the anti CO2 AKA big oil/coal/energy suppliers green politics and also justify a multi $Trillion climate change “renewab’e energy”.protection racket, justified and enforced by law as a solution it clearly is not in grid energy supply fact to reducing CO2 emissions and supply sustainability, on the hard facts of engineering.
AS with the other climate rhetoric, the science reality is different. Why did we stop using sail? Only the wind is free, in fact weaker, much more impractical and expensive. Not even really renewable when including construction resources required to capture a useful amount, and requiring much greater resources to store it to be supplied the majority of the time when its dark and the wind isn’t blowing, etc.
Renewables are woefully inadequate to replace fossil to deliver the energy we need, when needed, and require massively more expensive storage per KE Wh supplied without the fossil it relies on to fill the majority supply gaps. For most countries nuclear energy is the only energy source that is capable of powering a moder developed economy after fossil, also adequate, sustainable and affordable, with effectively inexhaustible fuel of which it uses a tiny amount per KWh. But the fact humans have learnt to harness the nuclear binding energy that naturally powers our sun in the few thousand years we have existed as hom sap, in one short interglacial between regular dominant ices ages, coming again soon, offends the wannabe Neanderthal green hunter gatherers, whose irrational pseudo science objects to industrial age technology they don’t understand or approve of, in fact any technological improvement mankind introduces to better adapt a small part of the natural environment to support our needs. The core of this is the idea we are somehow a stable permanent presence on a constant planet, instead of an ephemeral and VERY short lived species, whose even shorter lived civilisation has evolved in one short interglacial interval of a few thousand years, between 100,000 year ice ages tt have predominated throughout the xistence of homo erectus, , when Northern Europe, Russia and Canda are under a lot of ice most of the time and the oceans are at their normal level, 100 metres down at the the continental shelf edge, etc., all on the wholly disposable and short lived third rock from our rather average sun, in galactic terms.
But that’s only the reality, versus belief/religion exploited for a fast buck by climate change priests and snake oil renewable energy salesmen exploiting the hard of science people and their politicians. Not IMO. Science fact versus science fiction.

If you want to get a handle on the range of variations try this. Really not a lot, up or down, all over the map., but 0.8 degrees globally since 1880, when measurements started at the level that is useful and comparable, – unless you are Michael Mann and the IPCC mafia , in which case they need adjusting to fit the hypotheses they were paid to [prove, and make it seem we are at the warmest part of the interglacial, it was CO2 what dun it, and the Minoan, Roman and Mediaeval warmings were all imaginary to the historians of the time, and the geological record. All untrue in science fact, on actual data record and the physics.
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/201802

@Smart Rock: Bingo. But few if any mainstream journalists have even the tiniest inclination to do the most basic research into Earth’s history. CNN’s John Sutter is one of the most guilty…as is most of the staff at TWC (w/the notable exception of Ari S.)

It is a well known fact that starving polar bears pushed out of the ever-shrinking arctic have migrated to mountain-tops and evolved into pika. There are a couple of details missing from this analysis, but that’s the way climate science works.