Thursday, February 23, 2012

We don't need no stinking evidence: CO2 will allegedly make us smaller

Global warming 'could make us shorter' after horses found to have shrunk last time world heated up | Mail Online
Philip Gingerich of the University of Michigan said that the study clearly demonstrates the relationship between temperature and body size and agrees this may occur as a result of current warming patterns.
He said: 'I joke about this all the time - we're going to be walking around 3 feet tall if we keep going the way we're going.
'Maybe that's not all bad and if that's the worst it gets, it will be fine.

'You can either adapt, or you go extinct, or you can move, and there's not a lot of place to move anymore, so I think it's a matter of adaptation and becoming smaller.'
[1998] Why are we getting taller as a species?: Scientific American
modern humans are taller than those from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In fact, over the last 150 years the average height of people in industrialized nations has  increased approximately 10 centimeters (about four inches).

5 comments:

Derfel Cadarn said...

I believe the During the age of the saurians that CO2 levels were quite elevated.So then we could also conclude that we will become 15 feet tall and rather robust?

goodspkr said...

It doesn't make sense. In warmer weather there would be more food which should increase the number and size of animals. In ice age times you would think to find the animals shrinking in numbers and size due to the scarcity of food.

Dan Collins said...

It does make sense. Larger bodies mean less heat loss overall, because the ratio or mass increases with respect to surface area of a body, and the surface is where you lose the heat.

That said, human beings have been getting larger, as anyone who's seen medieval doorways or Renaissance armor knows. If it means that I have to fly alongside smaller people, that's fine with me.

BenV said...

I want them to explain how Dinosaurs got so big. It was really warm during the time of Dinosaurs.

Anonymous said...

Wait...what? You mean the world has been warmer in the past, when human contribution of CO2 to the atmosphere was effectively zero?

Who would have thunk the world could warm (and cool) w/o human activity being the cause?!?!