I don't have access to the article, and there really isn't anything given in the abstract to actually link the change in body size to global warming. I hope the article does a better job than "warmer temperatures are expected to reduce bird size and here are a bunch of bird species which have gotten smaller over the last 4 decades, therefore climate change."
It is a scientific paper, not an "article". The abstract is pretty clear summarizing the findings and I'm not sure what you would otherwise expect from the abstract of a paper.
edit: leaving as is but, "research article" or "paper", i was replying to the common usage meaning of "article". Anyway, my point about the abstract stands and the rest of the paper supports it well.
It is indeed an article though you and the comment you're 'correcting' leave out the word 'research'. Articles submitted by scholars and scientists with their groundbreaking research are termed as research articles. The article describes a model of what might be as in climate models. As you say, we also use the word 'paper' with 'peer-reviewed' if it's published in a peer-reviewed journal.
I think the money finding from the abstract is that temperatres above 40C predicts changes in bird size and wingspan length over an n > 70,000 specimens.
Macronutrients shift by minor amounts (single digit percentages), but there is more overall food. CO2 causes a more efficient use of water in photosynthesis and improves overall crop yields. The last time CO2 was in the thousands of PPM, the ancestors of birds...AKA dinosaurs...thrived and grew to enormous sizes.
There are few details in the abstract but wing length is notoriously difficult to compare across measurers - the standard method of measuring the leading edge of the wing by gently straightening the primaries along a stopped ruler can easily generate differences of 2-3mm for different people measuring the same bird. It can be done for small groups of people who work together - wader ringers (shorebird banders if you are in the Americas) where they deliberately practise to standardise their technique. If the sample sizes are good then the error should be consistent across time so the conclusion might still be sound.
The good news from this is that nature is splendidly adaptable and able to compensate for changes that occur within a few decades. That says that plants and animals are a lot more robust than we think they are.
UPDATE: One confounding factor is that standards in handling birds are always improving so there's no way of telling whether measurements are comparable across time.
UPDATE: Thanks to throwaway5752 for finding the full text. The birds were measured by a single observer so you can ignore everything I said. Interesting result.
There have been huge changes in habitat during the same period, driven largely by urbanization and changes in agricultural patterns, that dwarf any changes driven by climate. We actually had Ectopistes migratorius go completely extinct by 1901, due to habitat destruction, not climate change.
But the important thing is the rate. How would you measure the habitat destruction? Distinct species per unit area? Biomass per unit area? Climate change affects no possible proxy that you could select as fast as a bulldozer and a housing development. (And in recent years, climate change has been positive for global biomass.)
Yes, but you are conflating local effects with broader trends. A housing development may result in the partial or total habitat destruction of a couple of species, climate change is causing the destruction of a double digit percentage of all species across the board.
As of yet, actual habitat destruction by humans has wiped out far more species across the board than climate change has. Perhaps that will change some time in the future.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 55.7 ms ] threadWhen I search for the paper's title, I found the full text on the third result https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/610329v1.full
edit: leaving as is but, "research article" or "paper", i was replying to the common usage meaning of "article". Anyway, my point about the abstract stands and the rest of the paper supports it well.
It this now how we say that a species is adapting evolutionarily?
Humans "do" this aswell, yet i don't see people complaining that humans have less body-hair because of "global warming".
I'm really wondering about the effects of the poorly-titled studies/HN articles on the human population in the next 40 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_measurement#Wing
The good news from this is that nature is splendidly adaptable and able to compensate for changes that occur within a few decades. That says that plants and animals are a lot more robust than we think they are.
UPDATE: One confounding factor is that standards in handling birds are always improving so there's no way of telling whether measurements are comparable across time.
UPDATE: Thanks to throwaway5752 for finding the full text. The birds were measured by a single observer so you can ignore everything I said. Interesting result.