Posted on 01/12/2006 7:40:32 AM PST by cogitator
..eyep, I think it's the 50's that skews findings
Doogle
"But it must be true! I saw it on the NBC Nightly News last night!"
This requires them to link anything they possibly can to it.
They've just about used up all the easy ones, so now their claims will become more and more ridiculous as they have go to insane depths to come up with scare stories.
As we can see here:
Not all frogs are endangered.
I'd like to see the Nature authors respond to that article. It's a good response.
What's the big deal - it's just survival of the fittest.
Now the truth is out!
Global warming forced Anna
off the tennis tour!
Yes, but... one of the primary adaptations for climate change is to move. Because species' ranges and habitats have been restricted, it's harder for them to move, making extinction more likely. Leaving out climate change entirely, human activities have certainly restricted the range of a lot of species.
In the end it's still survival of the fittest as it was meant to be.
Excellent article. The Global WarmingTM true believers just don't like being held to acutal scientific standards.
I find it amazing that the climate never changed over thousands of years until Bush became President.
Frog extinction?? how did they manage to kill off the french?
Oh yeah---tell that to the nutria and fire ant (and thousands of other species whose range has been greatly expanded by human activity.
Climate changes, species go extinct---so what. It has happened since the planet cooled enough to have liquid water.
Change is the reality of the world--you "global warming" propagandists are trying to achieve stasis--which is flatly impossible.
I think you're over-reaching. As I said, I'd like to see the author's response to a fair criticism, and the article seems like a fair criticism. The biggest question, in my mind, is whether the coarse resolution cloud cover data cited would be able to detect trends of increasing cloud cover in a micro-climate like the Monte Verde cloud forest. This is a critical point. The temperature data for that location indicate a favorability toward increased cloud cover.
Just for grins, I've provided a map showing the study area (it's the "MonteVerde Reserve" northwest of San Jose. Compare that to the "study area" box shown on the cloud cover map in the World Climate Report article. (I may see if I can repost that here).
If I had a goal, it would be to limit, as much as possible, the loss of habitat and species tied to human activities. That's a vague and unquantified statement, but it acknowledges that stasis is impossible. However, some planning can mitigate avoidable losses.
So I would be interested in ways that the increasing cloud cover hypothesis put forward in the Nature article could be verified. If you're interested, I already found an article indicating that high-resolution estimates of cloud cover for a particular region differ significantly from low-resolution ISCCP data.
What about the huge disparity between the statistical difference of roughly 12% worst-case increase in extinctions determined by the refuting author vs the 60-ish% claimed by the author(s) of the Nature article? That is a glaring, significant difference.
The authors of the Nature article do not claim that the 69% loss is directly attributable to the change in local climate. They state two things of interest: one, that an increasing incidence of fungus infestation can lead to extinctions of populations still experiencing "normal" weather (i.e., climate change increases the chance of a fungus infestation entering the population and spreading); and two, that most of the extinctions have taken place at altitudes where the minimum temperature is shifting (upward) toward the growth optimum of the fungus.
Because World Climate Report is a climate change skeptical site (it's chief is Dr. Patrick Michaels), the "review" is certainly written to support their POV. But I also stated that its a fair criticism with points that deserve a response. I hope that the hypothesis put forth in the Nature article is critically examined, such that the points raised in the WCR article are addressed.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.