From the FECYT – SPANISH FOUNDATION FOR SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY and the “singing 2C, or not 2C” department comes this croaker of a press release from some researchers that have way too much time and grant money on their hands.
A classifier of frog calls for fighting against climate change
The sounds of amphibians are altered by the increase in ambient temperature, a phenomenon that, in addition to interfering with reproductive behaviour, serves as an indicator of global warming. Researchers at the University of Seville have resorted to artificial intelligence to create an automatic classifier of the thousands of frog and toad sounds that can be recorded in a natural environment.
One of the consequences of climate change is its impact on the physiological functions of animals, such as frogs and toads with their calls. Their mating call, which plays a crucial role in the sexual selection and reproduction of these amphibians, is affected by the increase in ambient temperature.
Jaime Bosch (MNCN-CSIC)
When this exceeds a certain threshold, the physiological processes associated with the sound production are restricted, and some calls are even actually inhibited. In fact, the beginning, duration and intensity of calls from the male to the female are changed, which influences reproductive activity.
Taking into account this phenomenon, the analysis and classification of the sounds produced by certain species of amphibians and other animals have turned out to be a powerful indicator of temperature fluctuations and, therefore, of the existence and evolution of global warming.
To capture the sounds of frogs, networks of audio sensors are placed and connected wirelessly in areas that can reach several hundred square kilometres. The problem is that a huge amount of bio-acoustic information is collected in environments as noisy as a jungle, and this makes it difficult to identify the species and their calls.
To solve this, engineers from the University of Seville have resorted to artificial intelligence. “We’ve segmented the sound into temporary windows or audio frames and have classified them by means of decision trees, an automatic learning technique that is used in computing”, explains Amalia Luque Sendra, co-author of the work.
To perform the classification, the researchers have based it on MPEG-7 parameters and audio descriptors, a standard way of representing audiovisual information. The details are published in Expert Systems with Applications magazine.
This technique has been put to the test with real sounds of amphibians recorded in the middle of nature and provided by the National Museum of Natural Sciences. More specifically, 868 records with 369 mating calls sung by the male and 63 release calls issued by the female natterajck toad (Epidalea calamita), along with 419 mating calls and 17 distress calls of the common midwife toad (Alytesobstetricans).
“In this case we obtained a success rate close to 90% when classifying the sounds,” observes Luque Sendra, who recalls that, in addition to the types of calls, the number of individuals of certain amphibian species that are heard in a geographical region over time can also be used as an indicator of climate change.
“A temperature increase affects the calling patterns,” she says, “but since these in most cases have a sexual calling nature, they also affect the number of individuals. With our method, we still can’t directly determine the exact number of specimens in an area, but it is possible to get a first approximation.”
###
References:
Amalia Luque, Javier Romero-Lemos, Alejandro Carrasco , Julio Barbancho. “Non-sequential automatic classification of anuran sounds for the estimation of climate-change indicators”. Expert Systems With Applications 95: 248-260, 2018.
It is possible their research is a result of being affected by the Hypnotoad:
I posted a comment the other day relative to the bullshit claims around cow farts affecting the climate.
I thought it a bit of a run of the mill comparison, boring in fact, but considered the term ‘Frog Farts’ just too ridiculous.
It seems I was wrong.
I’m still waiting for the study headlined
Climate Researchers Adversely Affected by Increasing Ambient Carbon Dioxide Levels.
(or how viewing the world through increased CO2 causes the researcher to fear minute temperature increases)
Actually, this could be an interesting look at whether frogs evolve in response to climate change, or whether they do so fast enough. If frogs can’t croak and find other frogs, that could be a problem for mating. Perhaps this is an example of a time when the increase in the daily minimum temperature is not a good thing.
I imagine some frogs eat a lot of mosquito larvae.
Just thinking out loud, adding a different perspective.
I’m sure much of the research in my field would be considered a waste of resources by many people here. For example, as part of my graduate research I trapped small mammals in rainforest and nearby thickets of an invasive shrub. Esoteric, eh? But important for forest management.
Kristi,
I assume you’re aware that frogs evolved when Earth was much warmer, so would like it even more so.
Their and our tetrapod ancestors dragged ourselves out of the water in the Late Devonian and evolved into the ancestors of modern amphibians, splitting off from the lines leading to reptiles (including birds) and mammals, in the Early Carboniferous, both of which epochs were hotter than today.
They survived the ice age of the Late Carboniferous and Early Permian by retreating to the tropics. When the world warmed up again in the Late Permian and Triassic Period, proto-frogs evolved, leading to true frogs in the Jurassic. They diversified, spread across the world and basked in the hothouse climate of the mid-Cretaceous.
A degree or two more of beneficial warming would only be good for frogs and other amphibians.
Kristi, as always you work over time to miss the forest for the trees.
You are concerned that a few degrees difference is going to hurt the frogs chance at mating.
Is every year exactly the same as the last? If this were such a critical factor, then a single warm spring would have killed all the frogs long ago.
There is also the well known fact that the last 100 years has been pretty much the coldest period in the last 10K years. We still haven’t gotten back to the average temperature over that time.
If frogs were as sensitive as you and the author of this study want to believe, how the heck did they manage to survive?
If you knew half as much science as you thought you do, then you would be able to figure all this out for yourself.
Felix,
Species don’t appear and then stop evolving. The ancestor of today’s frog were adapted to their habitat, and today’s species to their current ones. Some live in warm areas, some in cooler ones. But if frogs are physiologically unable to croak as they usually do because of an increase in temperature, that could have profound effects on their ability as a species to respond to other stressors. This is possible even if some nights they can croak OK.
I’m not arguing that this is the case, I’m saying it’s an interesting possibility. It would be one of the many unexpected ways climate change affects organisms.
The temperature change may seem small, but that’s an average, and temperature isn’t the only thing changing. Some species will thrive, some will do OK, and some will struggle or go extinct. The effect on humans depends on which species do well and which do poorly. Human and animal diseases and their vectors, crop and forest pests and pathogens, weeds and other invasive species could have negative consequences if they thrive.
An important pollinator goes extinct, and we’re talking major economic loss.
Nature is messy and flexible in some ways, but finely tuned in others.
MarkW,
You are boring.
Kristi
Firstly, why do alarmist’s always resort to name calling?
Secondly, the climate, and frogs have coexisted since long before man bothered them. At some point or another the climate has altered swiftly and dramatically, at which point, those unable to adapt die.
Nature is uniquely cruel in it’s ability to ensure survival of the fittest, and one mechanism for that is climate change.
You can be certain that if the climate remained stable and we all lived in bliss and peace, the survivalist nature of disease would eradicate us all.
Complacency is the enemy, not climate change.
And yes, I consider this study and your work valuable. But I sincerely hope you don’t promote your work as a poster child of climate change. Presented as a harbinger of climate change, this study is nothing more than sensationalist grant seeking.
I think what angers most people on this site more than anything, is the mis-representation of science. That should bother you as well, irrespective of your views on climate change.
*sigh*
A maximal 1 degree increase in the average nighttime temperature is going to overheat the frogs so that they can’t croak? First of all anyone who has ever lived near a frog pond will know that they are louder when it’s warmer and get sluggish if there’s a sudden cool period. It’s cold that makes them unable to croak.
And then there’s the fact that day-to-day variation is greater than the feared increase in the average. Is there any evidence that the frogs aren’t croaking on the warmer days? On the contrary, even the paper just says they may croak differently which likely has always been the case if it is true at all.
As usual, we search for even the most esoteric variation with temperature and once something is found a theory is constructed about how the change is catastrophic.
Kristi
“If nothing ever changed, there would be no butterflies.”
Origin unknown.
[“If no butterfly ever changed, no weather would change 1000 kilometers away.” The mods.]
HotScot,
(I’m sorry this is, once again, a long comment. You brought up important points)
“Firstly, why do alarmist’s always resort to name calling?”
Always, huh??? Are you referring to my comment to Mark? Since I’ve been posting here, Mark has been doggedly insulting to me. Have you never noticed how often “skeptics” insult people? I consider “alarmist” name calling.
“Secondly, the climate, and frogs have coexisted…
“Nature is uniquely cruel in it’s ability to ensure survival of the fittest.”
We don’t know how fast climate will change or how long it will continue (even though we have some control over it). Nor do we know how the Earth’s ecosystems changed as a result of past rapid change. Regardless, we can be absolutely certain that nothing like today’s changes have ever happened because humans have dramatically changed the world in so many other ways. We have destroyed habitat and cut it up into fragments, which alters species ability to move with climate, and can affect evolutionary response. We have brought pathogens and invasive species from one place to another. Local ocean changes include temperature, pH, pollutants, nutrients, silt levels and salinity, potentially affecting currents in turn. It is the combination of stresses like these and the rate of change that could make it particularly hard for some species. The idea that climate change will be a good thing for people and nature is facile and completely unsupportable, as is the idea that it will be bad for everybody.
Nature is not “cruel.” There is no motive, no thought behind nature’s drivers. Only humans can change nature through will, and only humans can be as charitable as they are cruel.
“You can be certain that if the climate remained stable and we all lived in bliss and peace, the survivalist nature of disease would eradicate us all.”
Why would I be certain of that??? That’s a fantasy world, anyway. Bliss and peace?
“Complacency is the enemy, not climate change.”
I don’t know what you mean.
(I think I have to break up this comment to get it posted)
HotScot, Part 2
“And yes, I consider this study and your work valuable. But I sincerely hope you don’t promote your work as a poster child of climate change.”
Thank you. My work had nothing to do with climate change, but similar work could look at the response to elevated CO2 of weedy invasive plants compared to the native trees that would otherwise become established. One study would not demonstrate a pattern, but if 30 similar studies on a range of weeds found similar results, it’s more likely a general phenomenon. (This is one traditional type of “experimental reproduction,” and it has worked quite well.)
I dislike the poster child thing in general; it reeks of environmentalism, which I’ve never liked. I dislike mixing politics/policy with science, which is also common among skeptics. The science needs to be interpreted on its own merits, in context, by people who have the expertise to do so. I do not have that expertise in climate science, and rely on authority, just as I rely on the authority of my mechanic to know what is wrong with my car. It’s far easier for me to judge scientific reasoning, methodology, philosophy and professionalism. I prize these concepts and what they represent; they make the field of science what it is today. I am proud of America’s tradition of excellence in science; no other nation can come close to what we have achieved. I hate to see its image wrongly tarnished.
“Presented as a harbinger of climate change, this study is nothing more than sensationalist grant seeking” (You got your name-calling in, too, HotScot.)
The media more often overstate things than the scientists. The language of press releases is not that of grant applications. I can’t find the original frog study, and can’t judge the research. “Presented as…,this study…” The presentation and the study are two different things.
“I think what angers most people on this site more than anything, is the mis-representation of science.”
It sure angers me! It’s far harder to take than the talk about policy or politics.
I agree that the media’s portrayal of science has been affected by alarmism and lack of scientific understanding. It has helped fuel a backlash against science itself, even if the media have been more to blame. This has been especially obvious in the blogosphere There are comments based on PRs and abstracts that assume (often untrue) things about the science.
There is on WUWT oversimplification of complex systems, broad pronouncements of the “truth” without understanding the details, and research bashed just because it talked about “models,” even if the models are common statistical analyses. It’s “grant mining” if it touches on climate change, as if genuine concern for the future has nothing to do with what people study.
I could go on at length about the misrepresentation of science.
Oh, how on Earth did I miss that? The link to the research is right at the bottom! Duh.
Rich Davis,
Oh, come now, Rich! Don’t you understand even the fundamentals of climate change? Regional variation? Unusual events? One degree is not simply added to the pre-industrialization global temperature norms.
You have not read the published frog research, I assume. It is mostly about a method of identifying anuran calls. Call change (or inability) in response to temperature rise is the climate change context, important because it is so closely tied to reproduction.
You are welcome to interpret frog behavior based on your own experience, and say the science is wrong. That says a lot.
I must say dear Kristi, that every time I feel a sense of Fremdschämen at the way people interact with you, it takes only a few hours at most before I realize how they lost it with you and find myself back in the same position.
I concede your point that I am oblivious to nearly the entire body of literature on ectothermic tetrapods. And I’m sure that does disqualify me from the odious practice of applying logic to personal observations.
But I’m resolved not to mud wrestle with you any more than necessary, so I will leave it at that.
Ah, but what about all the rat farts out there lurking in the darkness.
Whatever you do-DON’T LOOK AT THE HYPNOTOAD! I did and now I am sending all of my life savings to frog sex hook-up research. The hypnotoad must have previously gotten to these researchers. Looks like they didn’t eat enough frogs legs in Europe afterall.
Grant mining can be very innovative; but I suspect has a large carbon footprint.
Have a laugh and listen to this: In a future where robots do all the work, only officially approved categories of human jobs can get public funding. So a man registers himself as a category inventor, and gets public funding…
…listen on
It would seem to me that a rapidly reproducing species such as amphibians could reasonably be raised in a more controlled environment where temperature could be the only differing variable, such as a laboratory. The published study is far too uncontrolled to assert anything.
“With our method, we still can’t directly determine the exact number of specimens in an area, but it is possible to get a first approximation.” — somewhere between 1 and 1,000!
Yet, they are certain they are measuring warming of fractional degrees in an environment that experiences diurnal changes of tens of degrees!
My god 🤦♂️ Imagine if taxpayers realised that they paid for this stuff.
Jamie,
Maybe Spanish taxpayers support what their scientists do.
No matter what they do or how they do it.
This is the EU, it’s more likely that they aren’t given the choice.
Tabernack! Tabernack! Tabernack!
Sounds about the same as always to me!
FRENCH CANADIAN TEACHES HOW TO SWEAR
Lovely entertaining during my coffee break. I suppose they mate during spring, I suppose the frogs voices are better off in years with late cold springs, rather than early hot springs. Is climate/weather affecting their voices more than the microphones eavesdropping on them? Most importantly: could it be the other way around, that the frogs are altering the climate?
only CO2 affects the climate. Surely you jest.
It’s reasonable that some critters change their song in response to the temperature. Exhibit ‘A’ would be crickets. Some folks think you can estimate the temperature based on cricket chirps. link
On the other hand … As I often drive through a wooded area and listen to the spring peepers (or whatever they really are) it is obvious that their song depends on many things other than temperature. There is, of course, the obvious temperature correlation that there are no frog songs in the middle of winter.
Also cicadas. When they’re hot they’re hot!
A frog he would a-wooing go,
Heigh ho! says Rowley,
A frog he would a-wooing go,
Whether the climate would let him or no.
With a roly, poly, gammon, and spinach,
Heigh ho! says Anthony Rowley.
Given that (a) the diurnal temperature may vary rather more than any climate change variation, (b) nowhere in the paper is there any mention of the temperature at the time of the recordings, (c) a small sample of 63 records for a total of about 1h 40min and (d) no actual observation of the success or otherwise of mating calls (ie, did they see any [mating] frogs), the conclusion they reach is unsustainable – to use green terminology.
Its eggs have glowing eyes…
Norway salmon aquaculture firm caught using lobster killing pesticide off of the cosst of Maine.
https://bangordailynews.com/2018/05/17/business/report-canadian-salmon-firm-admits-using-lobster-killing-pesticide-near-maine-border/
If you think climate changes, wait til you look at WEATHER! Don’t like the temperature? It’ll change in 5 minutes.
Frogs respond to current temperature, not theoretical, academic temperatures.
You missed the memo when CAGW hits we will never see cool weather again, like we will never see snow or sea ice or polar bears. These things are all apparently guaranteed so the little frog is doomed, it’s a frogastrophe.
And definitely not an average temperature calculated over a number of time periods that may not represent a temperature they have ever actually experienced.
So, I have heard tell that a frog in a pot of water would allow itself to be boiled alive if the temperature is raised slowly enough. I wasn’t sure I believed it. But here we have a peer reviewed paper that essentially concludes the same thing. If we raise the temperature slowly enough, the frog just won’t know it’s being boiled alive, won’t respond and is doomed.
It’s science!
Great technology to apply to the U.S. House and Senate… Classifying croaking noises would simplify voting choices…
fizzissist: Is that the guy who figured out how to put the fizz in my cola?
…Frog croaking altered by “climate change”…
Of course they are. Just like humans.
When the weather gets better, we say: “Good Morning! Lovely weather, isn’t it?”, but we don’t say that when it’s raining.
Presumably the frogs are doing the same….
For a moment I was expecting the title was about someone selling a frog that croaks “The Golden Age of Climate Change”. There’e gotta be a market for that.
Are they sure that they did not pick up sounds from a commercial for a popular beer?
With a classifying technique having a 90% success rate it is absolutely impossible to detect the subtle changes they claim to have detected. There’s only one valid comment: croak!
I went to school with several herpetologists and had two courses, but that was back in the days when you dealt with real animals. Like much nowadays do they lack field experience? Also there is a similar interest in marine fish sounds, more complicated due to movement and vision problems in a very noisy place maybe sometimes like listening to frogs in a storm. Their emphasis on selective “non-sequential” portions seems counter-intuitive, are calls subject to autocorrelation? Those I went to school with would not be satisfied with (or get away with) those statistics.
What a croak, I mean, crock.
No croak – I hear Yanny . . .
Did anyone hear “laurel”?
I heard Laurel oneday and then the next day I heard it as Yanny.
I think those frogs were saying “ribit” or “rebit” or something like that.
And don’t you love how the authors of this study assume CAGW is already happening. A lot of Alarmists seem to have that misunderstanding.
I’m almost 90% sure I heard ‘covfefe’….
Really needs to be linked to mating success to have any meaning. If frog mating can be simplified to best song wins, then would it not be plausible that if all songs diminish, they would do so at least in proportion (could argue fitter frogs actually could do better), so best frog still gets the prize?
Strange that they don’t mention how much temperature change is needed to mute the song.
More science we don’t understand. Let’s mock it!
I see the troll is back to his usual tricks. Anyone who disagrees with you is just stupid.
I was going to wish that you could find a new schtick, but then I realized, this all you are capable of.
because it’s total bullcrap……they are dealing with average temperatures…..frogs will just sing and mate 3 days earlier
WE, KEMOSABE?
We understand it quite well. It’s junk.
We understand it; religion masquerading as science, learn the difference Scott.
……And Scott demonstrates his understanding is zip.
What don’t you understand? Seems pretty simple to me.
Science can’t be challenged. Wait . . . what?
Hi Scotty old son, good to see that you’re back again. To explain the mocking: Most of us here get a little amusement at some of the sillier offerings of warmist research. It really is a case of “laughing to keep from crying” at what we regard as the foolishness of the human race, 21st century version.
We also take modest pleasure in poking fun at research that ALWAYS concludes that the effect of 1° to 2° C increases in global average temperature on any observable and quantifiable phenomenon will be BAD, If we were to stand back and think objectively about the effects of a modest amount of warming, we most likely would conclude that there is going to be a mix of effects that we could call positive and effects that we could call negative. It might be that negative effects dominate over positive effects, but there HAS to be SOMETHING that we could cast as a positive development. This principle is articulated in the old saying about every cloud having a silver lining.
But nooooooooo, it’s always negative. And sometimes we see a piece of research that predicts more and worse bad effects than a previous piece of catastrophism study. That goes into the WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT category, and we get another wee chuckle, and we make jokes about needing new words like WORSER and WORSEST.
You very glibly assert that we don’t understand this post about the effect of higher temperatures on frog croaking. Not understanding it would require a level of closed-mindedness that is (on the basis of evidence in critical comments here at WUWT) a characteristic of more who subscribe to the warmist-alarmist stance than those who are called skeptics. It is a fairly straightforward post that describes a simple piece of research; not much there to not understand
Lastly, we get amusement from the fairly obvious back-story that the post doesn’t hint at: it goes like this: “a couple of herpetologists at University of Seville are doing research on frog croaks, how they can be used to identify different species, how an audio recording might be used to estimate populations, how they might vary across different environments, and so on. A bit arcane, but not untypical of research projects in today’s crowded academies. What they do (because they’ve probably been down this road before) is to apply for a grant to fund their field work, and cast their study as researching the effects of climate change on froggy croaks. The grant is approved. The research gets done, and the paper published. To satisfy the granting institution (and to give a leg up to future grant applications) the paper describes the effects of a couple of degrees of warming on the croaks and those effects are cast in a negative light.”
Carry on sneering, old cock, if it makes you happy. We will carry on sneering back at you.
There you nailed it! It actually was interesting research, both in laying out their recording network and even in recognizing that a change in temperature caused changes in the frog calls. Then they had to add on that it only could indicate sure disaster for the poor little froggies, that’s where it went off the rails!
Koontz: Or swallow whatever they put before us.
If warming by a degree or so is sufficient to interfere with a frogs ability to find a mate, how the heck did the frogs survive the Holocene Optimum when temperatures were 3 to 5C warmer than today?
Not every day was 5 degree warmer and there in lies the problem with this trash.
Ah, but that was natural warming, so it was OK. THIS warming is human-caused. It might look the same and feel the same, but it’s not. It’s evil, and it’s causing the mass extinction that’s going on around us – thousands of species every day are being eliminated. You won’t have noticed because you’ve got those d e nying blinkers on. Open your eyes, see that we’re on the eve of destruction, see that it’s all your fault, but if you stop driving your bloated SUV, you can help put it right again. Birds will sing, grass will grow, frogs will croak, the sun will shine, the seas will stop rising. Paradise regained.
So evolution is dead and climate change has replaced it. I will remember that.
+10
This is going to upset the French awfully first their wine gets nailed by co2 and now their starters get nailed by co2……..
Here on the Solway coast we have the most northerly population of Natterjack Toads in Europe according to scientists, if you can believe any of them.
I need to be convinced that the May temperatures in southern Scotland ever reach those of Spanish shores at spawning time.
Had the research determined on Spanish shores that the shallow, temporary pools that are a prerequisite for breeding were evaporating before tadpole metamorphosis had been achieved, I might have thought there was reason for the alarm, but it is yet one more example of research undertaken while in a state of total ignorance.
Do the Spanish also educate fifty percent of their children to ‘university’ standard?
Here’s one for you Josh! You dont have to be an herptologist or even biologist to dismiss this out of hand. How did the frogs and toads survive the Holocene Optimum when open ocean waves were breaking on beaches depositing driftwood on Greenlands now icebound north shore? How did they survive the 100,000yr glacial Maxima and the much warmer Eocene, etc. Sorry girls, as the say in Latin ” Thermit non facit Kermit Hermit”
Sounds like a great technique being abusrd by climate alarmism.
…..being abused….
hunter,
Didn’t you mean “absurd?”
Not as amusing as I had hoped. Back a decade or two ago the organized environmentalists were screaming that all frogs, all amphibians were going to go extinct. They blamed it on loss of habitat, new pesticides, and later AGW, everything but natural causes. What had happened is that several recently discovered species of frogs discovered in Tropical America couldn’t be found again when researchers went back to the area. It turned out to be a airborne fungus that was traveling across the tropics, nearly world wide something that didn’t make the MSM. More recently most of the species that were “lost forever” were found to be doing just fine. Regardless ever since amphibians have been the poster children for many environmental groups when screaming about the impacts of humans on the planet. The old canary in the coal mine analogy.
In the swamp/march/wetlands/epa-controlled-WOTUS the frogs dropped of seriously during the 90’s. This last summer, they were back in strong numbers. In fact, we saw large numbers of them hopping across the road again heading from one water source to another.
Yes it has been almost 25 years, but It looks like they are coming back strong.
(they also have only 4 total legs…:)
Forgot to include:
https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/volunteering/frogtoad_survey/index.html
We can’t forget about the internet meme of the ‘Alaskan Tree Frog” freezing in place for the winter.
With the attached cute Costa Rican tree frog photoshopped to have ice crystalls on his head.
There is of course a grain of truth to the frozen alaskan frog, but it doesn’t look like a tree frog. It is well prepared for winter as in wiggles down into the muddy ground, and yes it partially freezes and become immobile but that is its cycle.
These frogs sounding different in varying temps, maybe exactly what has been happening forever, temp swings of over 20 degrees I am sure have been happening everywhere and investigating their songs in normal swings probably wasn’t done until there was climate funding!
What a poster child study for how well peer review works. How could this study have been passed by reviewers when there is no way to obtain the conclusions from the data collected?
Temperatures vary by how much during 24 hours? How long do these frogs/toads have each day to call and mate at the correct temperature, 30 minutes. Have temperatures gotten so bad that instead of calling/mating at 4:00pm, there is no longer a time when the right temperature occurs during a 24 hour period? These are all things reviewers should have asked!
Which came first, the advocacy or the frog?
Maybe next they could load the frog up with a bunch of cocaine, like that chimp they’ve been doping up since the 70’s. Maybe a little LSD. Then play ‘Jeremiah was a bullfrog’ in the background and see what happens.
Makes as much sense as the original study!
I thought Jeremiah was only interested in a little wine?
I would not be so quick to dismiss this theory out of hand.
I have lived all of my 56 years in Temple, TX. There is only one species of Grackle (black bird) that lives in Bell county, TX.
Over time, I noticed that the mating call of the male grackles had changed. Their call used to be a complicated “Awk, awk, awk”, then an adulating “AH-ah-AH-ah-AH-ah” and ending with an “Ah-Awk!”
Mid 80s or so I noticed the grackles no longer sang their entire song.
They began to shorten it or to leave parts out. Only two beginning “awks” and leaving either the middle “AH-ah-AH” or “Ah-Awk” ending out.
It has only been in the last five years or so that the birds seem to be slowly returning to their old call. Using all three beginning “Awks” and adding back the other sections.
Only a few have returned to the entire old song as of yet but I will continue to listen.
A few years ago I read a study where the authors claimed that changes in ambient noise (cities getting louder) was causing bird songs to change and I first followed this line of thinking when considering how the grackles had changed their call.
But now they are apparently transitioning back to their previous song.
Temple has gone from a population of 35,000 in the late 1970s to close to 80,000 today.
I can’t see how Temple got first louder and then quieter as the population grew.
But what is curious is that the change in calls seems to have followed the shifts in the natural 60-70 year cooling/warming cycle.
The up/down/”back” radiation greenhouse gas energy loop of the radiative greenhouse effect theory is pencil on paper, a spreadsheet cell, a “what if” scenario and NOT a physical reality.
Without this GHG energy loop, radiative greenhouse theory collapses.
Without RGHE theory, man-caused climate change does not exist.
And with a snap of the fingers and “Presto!!” the bazillion dollar global climate change fantasy is suddenly unemployed.
Must be why nobody is allowed to talk about this possibility. Not newsworthy enough? Or too far outside the fake news narrative?
The good thing about this technology is that it can be used to detect temperature changes. No change in sound, no temperature change.
If the sounds don’t change, he has to publish the results anyway.
But…but….I thought the enviros were alarmed about frogs dying off.
If they’re not croaking like they used too, wouldn’t that be a good thing?
Have these researchers nailed down yet what is frog-speak for “not tonight darling, I’m feeling a bit cold” or “It’s simply too hot, I don’t have the energy”? Or maybe even “I don’t like to do it when humans are listening. The heat makes them smell bad and it puts me off”.
Joking aside, what I can’t see, in the abstract quoted at least, is an acknowledgement that the frogs might actually be communicating with each other, linguistically, about the environment. Put more simply, they might change something about their mating calls as the weather changes, and humans are not yet knowledgeable enough about the language of frog-love to tell the difference.
Warmer temperatures seem to be causing women to croak like frogs, as an epidemic of “vocal fry” — a pathological speech pattern characterized by speaking in the lowest voice register — infects their ranks.
Vocal fry inhibits women’s mating chances because it’s annoying as $#%@!
Perhaps Kristi can move solving this crisis to the top of her busy to-do list.
Vocal fry is everywhere. Here are excerpts from just a few minutes of NPR.
Beware. Once you hear vocal fry there is no un-hearing it.
Not quite as annoying as California up-talking where every statement ends with the inflection of a question.
I got up in the morning?
At 10:30?
Like earlier than normal?
And I went to the mall?
To get my nails done?
…
Rich Davis, replying to Max Photon
And they talk that way because today’s millinieums and teen-techno-university grads have been programmed out of making positive, facts-based statements to others. EVERYTHING has to be “peer-approved” and fit within a “safe space” in front of others! Thus, EVERYTHING, every sentence, and every statement made in public needs to be phrased as a question, so others hearing it are not “challenged” by any stray “fact” they “might” disagree with or be “offended hearing”.
omg, I never thought of that? Of course that’s your opinion? I’m not triggered by it though?
My 27 year old niece is a riot. She has a beautiful voice, but to amuse me she’ll combine nasal up-speak with vocal fry. It is just so damn funny.
Kim’s stepdad Bruce/Caitlyn OTOH goes the other way.
A normal culture seeks to emphasize sex differences, which process is a lot more fun and interesting. Perverted “culture” seeks to unisexize everything, which is sick, twisted and no fun at all.
“Taking into account this phenomenon, the analysis and classification of the sounds produced by certain species of amphibians and other animals have turned out to be a powerful indicator of temperature fluctuations and, therefore, of the existence and evolution of global warming.”
Have they tried using thermometers? it’s what put the frogmometers out of business.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Using auditory processing to identify frog species is pretty obvious, it’s how frogs do it and how we do it. Doing it computationally is a nice piece of engineering. But I used to live beside a river with lots of banjo frogs, and there is quite a lot of temperature variation over a night which really did not seem to bother the frogs. So what does the paper actually say? https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0957417417307662 is not behind a paywall. A quick skim through it revealed a paper that does a pretty good job of explaining and evaluating their technique but has NOTHING to say about temperature or climate except this: we can detect/measure frog calls and frog calls are affected by temperature so we MIGHT be able to use our technique to tell something about climate some day maybe perhaps. They report no experiments relating to temperature whatsoever.
Richard,
The first four paragraphs of the intro are directly or indirectly about climate change. There is relevant research referenced in the citations. This provides context for the research presented in the paper, which is about a method.
“They report no experiments relating to temperature whatsoever”???
“However, sound production in ectotherms is strongly influenced by the ambient temperature (Bellis, 1957; Gayou, 1984; Gerhardt & Mudry, 1980; Márquez & Bosch, 1995; Pires & Hoy, 1992; Schneider, 1974; Walker, 1957, 1962), which can also affect various features of the acoustic communication system. In fact, the ambient temperature, once it exceeds a certain threshold, can restrict the physiological processes associated to the production of the sound, and may even inhibit behavior calls.”
An artificial intelligence has also been programmed to look at the effect of climate change on the clothing of human females. This clothing, which plays a crucial role in the sexual selection and reproduction of human beings, is affected by the increase in ambient temperature.
Taking into account this phenomenon, the analysis and classification of the clothes women are wearing has turned out to be a powerful indicator of temperature fluctuations and, therefore, of the existence and evolution of global warming.
To capture the changes in clothing worn by women, networks of video cameras are placed in places where women change their clothes. The problem is that a huge amount of video information is collected in environments as busy as a woman’s changing room, and this makes it difficult to identify the types of garments being worn.
To solve this engineers have resorted to artificial intelligence. “We’ve segmented the video into small clips and have classified them by means of decision trees before putting them on the internet.
This technique has been put to the test with real videos of women changing their clothes provided by the National Museum of Natural Sciences.
“In this case we obtained a success rate close to 90% when classifying the videos”. In addition to the type of clothing, the number of individuals observed in certain geographical regions like beaches can also be used as an indicator of climate change.
When temperature exceeds a certain threshold, the clothing worn by women becomes restricted, and the wearing of some types of clothing like coats is even actually inhibited. In fact, the clothing worn by both females and males is changed, which influences reproductive activity.
OMG Ian,
It’s so much worse than we thought! All those coatless bodies will surely inhibit all reproductive activities among the bipeds, don’t you think? Did you check with any biologists? Wait, why?
I heard some snarky comments from some climate D-nier that the work is invalid because a mere 40% of the cameras were set up in the shower stalls at health clubs. They’re absurdly referring to an urban nakedness island.
But clearly there’s a solution which I am here to offer. Reprogram the AI to focus attention on adjusting the raw data from the past, by programmatically adding shawls and heavy woolen sweaters in proportion to years in the past. To take an example from our Australian dataset, in 1970, beach-goers in Sydney were wearing trenchcoats, and in the 40s, head-to-toe woolen goods were prevalent as was the norm going back to the early 12th century. (We have proxies to detect patterns prior to the 1780s written record).
A few technical difficulties that we’re working through- seeing a strange counter-seasonal effect. It seems that even as temperatures are rising in North America in mid-spring, there is an inexplicable apparent cooling in Sydney. To prevent any errors, the Australian sensors will be moved to an indoor nudist camp, to more accurately reflect conditions averaged with our next closest station in Papua New Guinea.
Please keep us updated on your exciting work, I’m particularly interested in reviewing some of the raw data as you post it. I only read the abstracts though. It’s not the naked pictures.
Forgot to mention, this Toronto firm is working with us on the charts. https://www.nhl.com/mapleleafs