One of the supposed contradictions deniers love to point out is that climate science shows warming benefits certain species but causes problems for most others. Most recently, for example, Faye Flam’s Bloomberg column on an impending warming-assisted “rat explosion,” crop-destroying pests and “cockroaches of the ocean” got both WUWT and JoNova posts in response. As blogger Joanna Nova put it, “Climate change only makes bad things live and grow stronger.”
Though that doesn’t always hold true. For example, a recent Reuters story on the Tsetse fly finding its traditional home too hot to handle sort of flipped the script, yet deniers’ responses didn’t change. The story explains that the flies are likely responding to the overheating by moving to cooler locations, bringing their dangerous sleeping sickness to new territory. Because of this assertion, Bjorn Lomborg lamented on Twitter last week that “you can't just say that occationally[sic], global warming does good things.”
“Come on Bjorn, you know the drill,” a former Heritage stooge replied. “Cute/good fauna go extinct, while ugly/deadly fauna simply move or even expand.”
Strangely, there’s actually some truth to this denier’s statements about the lopsided biological impacts of climate change.
Though obviously every organism and ecosystem is unique, two broadly applicable issues are at play here. First, changes in the environment will be positive for species that are generalists, and negative for species that are specialists. Second, species that humans consider undesirable are usually generalists, while things that are considered “good” are more often specialists.
This goes back to evolution and the two divergent pathways species face. On one hand, some species evolve to take advantage of any situation--for example, by developing thermoregulatory processes that allow rats to survive a range of temperatures allowing them to live everywhere except the Arctic. Meanwhile, the Arctic is full of specialists, like blubber-covered whales that can survive the extreme cold and might overheat in a warming world.
Because they’re so hardy, generalist populations tend to be larger, making them more “common” and less “special” in our eyes, and because they’re not specific to any particular environment, they also tend to provide fewer ecosystem services, so we appreciate them less. The notoriously broad diet of the generalist raccoon, for example, has earned the internet-moniker of “trash panda,” while actual pandas highly specialized bamboo diet puts it at much higher risk of extinction.
On the other hand, specialists evolve to maximize their use of a specific ecological niche. They develop in an environment that’s relatively stable over the thousands of years it took to evolve, exploiting the specific resources available there (and perhaps only there) and playing a particular role in the food web.
These, generally, are the sorts of “charismatic megafauna” creatures that humans know and love specifically for their unique and highly evolved traits- like eye-pleasing plumage or fearsome fangs. And specialists are usually the sorts of plants we cultivate into food crops. Their long evolutionary journey, quickened by human agriculture, have made them perfectly adapted to the particulars of their environment, while also developing the unique flavors that makes them food.
When there are massive alterations to an ecosystem, for example, a change in the fundamental composition of the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels at a colossal pace, it only makes sense that the pesky generalists prepared for any situation would do well, while our more highly-prized specialists falter.
But to a biology-ignorant bystander, who ignores (or denies) the realities of evolution just as they do the realities of climate change, that looks like climate alarmists playing favorites and plying the sentiments of the public.
Deniers just don’t like that climate change and evolution team up to help pests and hurt the rest, apparently unable to wrap their mind around such an unnatural selection of Darwinners and darlosers.
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