A recent Science News article, “Gila monsters may struggle to survive climate change,” claims that Gila monsters living in the Mojave Desert may be displaced and lose habitat due to climate change. The story is purely speculative with no proof given that Gila monsters have suffered from the past hundred-plus years of warming, and the study referenced relies solely on unreliable climate models.
The Science News article cites a study published in Ecology and Evolution which used “climate change forecasts” (climate modelling) to predict how the native environment and preferred habitat of the Gila monster may change under future warming scenarios.
Science News reports that in “lower emissions scenarios, the team found, not much changes for the Gila monsters,” however under the high emissions scenario, “large swaths of the desert ideal for the lizards could vanish by 2082, resulting in a loss of over a third of today’s suitable territory.“ This may sound reasonable at first glance, but if the study authors meant for people to take the results seriously, they should have started by using reasonable climate model scenarios. The researchers chose only two scenarios, represented by RCP 2.6 as the low emissions scenario, and RCP 8.5 as the high-end emissions scenario. The problem is that RCP 8.5 has been abandoned by even mainstream alarmist scientists and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) because it is an implausible, possibly impossible, projection. It would require a colossal uptick in the amount of fossil fuel use, possibly more than the planet actually contains. It is certainly not a “business as usual” or even a “slightly more business” type of scenario.
Scientists have exposed the problems with RCP 8.5, as well as the fact that the models themselves run way too hot, as Climate Realism covered here.
Gila monsters have existed in the American southwest since at least the late Pleistocene, 10-8 thousand years ago, and their genus has existed since the Miocene – 10 million years ago. They have persisted through extended periods of much hotter and significantly cooler average temperatures than have been projected under even the most extreme, implausible warming scenarios.
The Mojave has likewise seen severe drought periods even as recently as the mid-20th century, according to a 2004 U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) study. Data do not indicate they are getting worse with time.
It is far more likely that, if Gila monsters continue to see population declines, it will be because of human development related habitat destruction, and the pet trade, not warming. The study authors admit in the abstract of the paper that the Mojave has seen increases in urban sprawl and human population growth. Cities in the Mojave Desert basin, such as Barstow, California, Bullhead City, Arizona, and Boulder City and California City, Nevada, have all experienced population growth and urban expansion over the past half-century, encroaching on Gila monster habitat. In addition, the Mojave desert and the species that make it home are under threat from solar energy development with thousands of acres being cleared of vegetation, including protected Joshua trees, to make room for thousands of solar panels – in supposed service of stopping climate change.
The Gila monster migration data presented by the study authors, although interesting, was unfortunately informed by flawed climate models and the extreme modelling scenarios they chose to use to forecast the species decline. In the process, they ignored the long history of the species and its evolution and survival across shifting climates, and downplayed other factors that directly threaten the lizard. Promoting the catastrophic climate change narrative is not going to help preserve the Gila monster’s habitat. Instead, it is likely to encourage even more damage to their range in the form of land-hungry, habitat-destroying solar developments.
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RCP8.5? Really?
Received Climate Psalm 8.5
“There is a green hill far away”
Rancid Climate Prophecy 8.5
In a personal communication with me, a climate “scientist” confessed the only way they could they could get a signal was to use RCP8.5!
Although the results of the emissions scenarios / pathways used as inputs to the climate models are reported by WG-I (Working Group One, in “The Scientific Basis” assessment reports) they are actually generated by WG-III (Working Group Three, “Mitigation”).
You have to read through more than 7400 pages of PDF files (AR6 WG-I = 2409 pages, WG-II = 3068 and WG-III = “only” 1990), but the IPCC openly disclose the “objectives” when coming up with the scenarios / pathways in FAQ 3.3, “How plausible are high emissions scenarios, and how do they inform policy?”, on page 386 of the AR6 WG-III report :
A lot to unpack there, but a few of my “inferences” … which are “more likely than not” to be wrong … follow.
1) RCP8.5 (and SSP5-8.5) are there to explore “bad things that might happen” (what the IPCC calls “risks”, which they use in the sense that I was taught the word “hazards”, i.e. “potential / theoretical consequences”).
For computer modellers this has the advantages of either a higher “signal-to-noise ratio” and/or those “bad things” happening earlier in (computationally expensive) simulated time.
2) “Higher than anticipated” population is a bad thing for the IPCC … but they aren’t misanthropic at all …
3) “Higher than anticipated” economic growth is a bad thing for the IPCC …
4) What is important is to list “risks” … and completely ignore the likelihoods of those “risks” actually occurring.
.
In the current “publish or perish” reality that is post-normal “(Climate) Science” a draft research paper with the conclusion “We found nuffink, no signal at all” simply doesn’t get published … and your chances of getting the next research grant go down.
If the only way for your scientist friends to “get a signal” is to use RCP 8.5 (or SSP5-8.5 or SSP3-7.0) then they will end up using that pathway … or else have to find new jobs … as in “Would you like fries with that ?” jobs …
It doesn’t matter what RCP is used…
… if it is from a “climate model” it is junk and a meaningless fantasy.
Didn’t the deserts of the American southwest become very green during the advance of continental glaciers? The Gila’s survived that too.
Humans were responsible for that, too, I’m sure.
The first time the first humans domesticated the first campfires in the savannas of East Africa 90,000 years ago, populations of venomous lizards fell into precipitous decline all over the world.
What the world desperately needs is more monsters, Gila or otherwise, more dragons, more bad pipsissewas, and while we’re at it, more pterodactyls. If only Jurassic Park-type critter breeders manage to create them from fossilized DNA!
If the world had renewable, carnivorous, flying dinosaurs with 30-foot wingspans, it would be a much better place. Shepherds might not be too crazy about ’em swooping down and noshing the lambs, but heck, you can’t please everyone.
same flawed analysis on the demise of the horned toad that were prolific in Texas prior to the 1970’s.
fire ants destroyed them, not climate change
Shurely that’s wildfire ants?!
Fire Explosion ants.
Human induced natural ants driven to wildfire acts of violence.
“Five years ago, Hromada — then at the University of Nevada in Reno — and his team compiled existing Gila monster observation …”
I’m surprised folks from UN-Reno would report a result using RCP8.5 without a very prominent caveat about its extreme and near impossible nature. Reno researchers are (usually) better than that. I blame it on the ClimateCult™ virus.
The money lure and career advancement from publishing is a strong corrupting influence. I told the gila monster that as it crossed the trail in from of my stopped vehicle yesterday, far from the nearest town.
Doomsday sells. Running out of monsters sells. Trying not to get your toga in a knot, and feeling gratitude for the wonderful, ever-changing world we live in, does not sell — unless you’re some kind of Pollyanna, or another variety of conscienceless freak.
I would suppose that gila monsters would say, the warmer the better.
Wallace et,al concludes:”There is no statistically significant evidence that the steadily rising CO2 has impacted any of the 14 temperature data sets analyzed.”
Using emissions scenarios to predict temperature sits on pure assumption that is unsupported by data. Even using the lower emission scenarios is unsupported.