Like the wool sweater that emerges from the dryer a size too small, global warming seems to be shrinking sheep.
On average, wild Soay sheep on Scotland's island Hirta are 5% smaller today than they were in 1985, according to a team of researchers led by Tim Coulson of Imperial College London.
"The decrease in body size was due to a reduction in growth rates caused, in part, by the changing climate," Coulson said in an interview via e-mail.
Evolution favors the development of large sheep, which can more easily survive harsh winters, Coulson explained. So the researchers became curious about the overall decline in size of the animals on Hirta.
They discovered that as the climate has grown milder, small lambs that would not have survived previous winters were now living to grow up and reproduce.
Since size is inherited, the survival and reproduction of these smaller animals lowered the average size of the herd.
Oh my God. There is so much wrong with the "logic" behind this it is difficult to know how to begin.
For starters, no attempt seems to have been made to look at other factors. Were the size of the flocks constant? We don't know. Why should that matter? Well, if you have more sheep on the same limited land mass, like, oh I don't know, say an island, then the sheep could be smaller because each is getting a little less food. The article states, wrongly, that size is only determined by inherited factors. If the reporter believes this he is an idiot. The supply of food is the primary factor accounting for the size of individual animals.
Could warmer weather also have an effect? Of course, but ti would be only one factor among many, AND you would have to get look at all of the said factors. (Real science is a bitch that way.) For example, what are the ocean currents like in the area? Have they shifted over the last 30 years. Oops, no one seems to have checked that. How does this compare to other eras when weather changed? Oops, no data on that.
So why is this interesting? We already know in human populations, when weather is harsher crop yields will be diminished and, as a result, people will more likely be malnourished. (Do any of these idiots remember the famines in Africa? Were they really that long ago?)
Of course, with any domesticated animal there is another potential factor. Human beings. All domesticated creatures have features that have been selected by their handlers. Sometimes, these features have been selected for a purpose, sometimes they were a bit of an accident. (For example, the selection of German Shepherds with a specific crouched look has also made them susceptible to hip problems - the look was intended, the related health problems were not.) Was any attempt made to see how the shepherds on the island may have been influencing the sheep? Doesn't sound like it.
Actually, the fact this "study" was conducted in a remote area should raise red flags. Last time I checked, we have been told that warming was a global phenomena. Why wouldn't sheep everywhere been showing the same traits? Why do we need to traipse off to some remote corner of the world to find this "result"? Could it be they wanted to limit the ability for other researcher to verify the findings, or maybe find other solutions? Seems likely given the sheer number of sheep one can still find in rural England.
In general, if one wanted to show something like what the researchers claim they are looking for, one should look for it in wild producing populations and not in domesticated animals at all.
But, then again, that would make sense, and the AGW "debate" isn't about making sense it's about bureaucrats gaining power.
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