Article suggests that global warming would be BAD for reptiles
...Kearney says using modelling that combines spatial data on climate, geography and vegetation, with behavioural models they were able to determine whether the priority of thermoregulating ectotherms such as reptiles and insects was to keep warm or stay cool.
"What we've found is that for a large fraction of the planet's animals their main priority is to thermoregulate to stay cool," Kearney says, "and global warming is going to make keeping cool harder."
Posts
1 comment:
Tom, I have a pikachu update for you.
First let me say it's painfully obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together that reptiles love the warm. The idiot who wrote this article needs a chaperone around scizzors to keep from hurting himself accidentally.
Now in the give and take between a comment by Bob at the recent LA Times blog on pika, the supposedly heavily put upon rabbit relative that is the world wildlife funds favorite candidate for global warming "canary in the coal mine", I learned of Doc Beever.
Beever is the WWF financed USGS biologist who provides a figleaf of respectability to the periodic WWF press releases about the impending doom of pika due to the supposedly dramatic climate change in the Nevada high desert. Strangely, nobody else seems affected by this alleged climate change but no matter.
In a little noticed report by Beever in 2007, link (probably deliberately ignored), the doc discovered a population of the pikas living at elevations and temperatures he had previously infered to be uninhabitable.
The pika of Hays Canyon are thriving with a wealth of grazing land, their haystacks are overflowing, at temperatures averaged from 0.54°to 12.27°C hotter than are tolerated by other populations in the great basin and elevations 1914 to 2136 m, which they found preferable to adjacent, easily reachable, higher elevations.
In short, everything that the world wildlife fund has said about pikas is wrong. Not just a little wrong. They are "reptiles prefer the cold" wrong.
Post a Comment