rod mclaughlin


You can't make it up IV: "Mammals adapt to changes in the climate" (28 dec 11)

You may have thought that mammals don't adapt to changes in the climate. For example, that polar bears did not evolve white fur as they invaded the Arctic. Or that caribou do not move south during ice ages. But now, scientists have discovered that mammals do, in fact, adapt.

“Although we’ve always known in a general way that mammals respond to climatic change over time, there has been controversy as to whether this can be demonstrated in a quantitative fashion... We show that the rise and fall of these faunas is indeed correlated with climatic change - the rise or fall of global paleotemperatures - and also influenced by other more local perturbations such as immigration events.” - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

You may laugh. Academics often have a way of making self-evident banalities sound like serious insights, but these are 'hard' scientists. The climate change hypothesis, political correctness, and fear of saying anything the slightest bit controversial has reached the point where contributors to the National Academy of Sciences are like the public relations department at Chevron, having to say nothing, while paying lip service to the theory of unprecedented man-made climate change.

 



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