Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Climate Change Jumps The Shark (Or The Cockroach)

Get your tiny violins ready folks, because we are being asked to throw a pity party for insects: Bugs: The Forgotten Victims of Climate Change

Research conducted by Hellmann and Shannon Pelini, one of Hellmann's doctoral students, indicates that global warming may affect a single insect species differently throughout its various life stages, and that global warming affects different insect species in different ways.

Most importantly, as climate change progresses, some insects may become trapped--like fish out of water--in habitats that can no longer support them. The insects may therefore go extinct or lose genetically important segments of their populations. But other species, and no one knows which ones yet, may be able to reach cooler climates by moving north on their own.

Oh, give me a break. There are an estimated 8 million species of insect on this planet. Why so many? Well, in part it is because bugs are so adaptive. They have been around and survived dramatic changes in climate before, many of the catastrophic variety like the event(s) that killed off the dinosaurs. In the course of this evolutionary process hundreds of thousands if not millions of insect species have gone extinct, and yet, last time I checked, bugs remain. Yet, now we are going to be asked to airlift bugs because climate will change, which is simply what climate does whether we like it or not????????

What nonsense.

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