The effects of a warmer world are visible in animals’ bodies | Hacker News Reader

The effects of a warmer world are visible in animals’ bodies

economist.com

86 pointsjkuria45 comments

It's hard to prove that these mutations are adaptations to the global warming specifically, but events like mass die-offs of Australian flying foxes are pretty conclusively caused by extreme heat waves - and since there is a 100+ years of historical records we know for sure they're happening now at much higher frequency than before.

The opening sentence shows a deep misunderstanding of climate change.

> FOR HUMANS, adapting to climate change will mostly be a matter of technology. More air conditioning, better-designed houses and bigger flood defences may help ameliorate the effects of a warmer world.

When millions of Bangladeshis are flooded from their homes, a/c and sandbags won't help, nor when malaria-bearing mosquitos reach Europe, etc.

Unfortunately the title makes a small logical leap.

From the article: "Her team combined data from different species in different places. Since they have little in common apart from living on a warming planet, she says, climate change is the most plausible explanation."

While climate change may indeed be the most plausible explanation, this headline seems to transform from "most plausible" into a causal link.

Probability is fundamentally all we have in science. The only distinction is in the level of confidence use in inference of the data. 95% is fairly typical though particle physics requires and impressive level >99.9999%

even if one accepts this, which I don’t (what is the probability of mathematics being a quantum ultrafinitist glandular endomorphism of classical electromagnetism? What is the probability that the sun rises tomorrow? What’s the probability the standard model is true? It’s nonsense.) you could totally interpret what he said as “original paper claimed 20-80% confidence, economist article assumed 95%” and that would be a reasonable probabilistic reading

One way of considering the things you describe in terms of probability is to frame them as bets, and then set the probabilities based on what bets you might make (e.g. what odds would you want in a bet on whether the sun would rise tomorrow). Personally I find that makes some of the more difficult statements a little more palatable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_epistemology

> what odds would you want in a bet on whether the sun would rise tomorrow

How would you denominate such a bet? I don't think money would have much value in a world where the sun failed to come up one day.

the point being that IMO the way you understand and come up with and reason about something like “classical mechanics” or “timeless decision theory” or “quantum enlightenment time cube satanic world order simulation” or “risc v architecture” is not about probability, and saying science is about probability totally elides the actual complex information and reasons that go into creating and using those in favor of just saying “they have a probability and we can change them”.

I understand what you’re saying, but I have to highlight a mistake.

In science, what you’re talking about is not a “probability of being right”, but a probability of not getting the same experimental results completely randomly, without any underlying cause. You still might have 0% probability of being right. With “95% confidence” there still could be no measured effect whatsoever, you just made the same experiment multiple times and randomly finally got big enough random numbers to get you 95% confidence.

It’s not a nitpick, it is a serious mistake that 95% social scientists make.

There's a lot of global changes that could be underlying contributing factors. Global air and water pollution, pesticides, microplastics. Things that were regional that are becoming global as Earth's massive interconnected recycling systems chug on our waste. The entire planet has traces of radioactive isotopes that were essentially non-existent before nuclear testing. Light pollution. Global insect apocalypse. You can create a list and rank them by the potential contributions. I didn't read the whole article because paywall, but there are lots of things that are all globally different than a century ago.

> this headline seems to transform from "most plausible" into a causal link.

One of big alternative explanations why animals/humans get smaller closer to tropics is not because of lack of food, but because of too much of it

The quicker the species can grow to maturity, the more food calories can be spent for procreation.

Why do you think this is a relevant critique to the article/paper? The study is about a global trend in increasing appendage size within populations due to warming ("Allen's rule"), not whole body size ("Bergmann's rule"). Secondly, the role of food is acknowledged as a potential factor in the section on causality, but justifiably rejected as the sole factor.

https://archive.is/ozASI

Does anyone else find the Economist's lack of bylines and complete author anonymity to be off-putting? It's scary how much influence they have and how no one seems to mind that they don't feel comfortable putting their names on the stuff the advocate for and report on.

Great article!

> no one seems to mind that they don't feel comfortable putting their names on the stuff the[y] advocate for and report on

The first-line accountability is deliberately on the editors rather than the reporters.

While I can understand the point of view, focus on the content not who the writer is, I'm not really a subscriber. I like to have some sense of a person's background on a subject the less I follow it. It also sets a ceiling on the amount of trust you can develop with readers IMHO.

    In a paper published in Trends in Ecology & Evolution, a team led by Sara Ryding, a PhD candidate at Deakin University, in Australia

I think that's the author we should care about, not who wrote the article in The Economist.

> no one seems to mind that they don't feel comfortable putting their names on the stuff the advocate for and report on.

This is a really weird interpretation of "it's editorial policy". The journalists aren't declaring anything about their confidence in what they're reporting. It's not their choice.

So why are they working at the Economist? Because (1) it's hard to get a journalism job, and (2) the Economist is a prestigious place to work.

I wouldn't read too much into it.

First, journalists shouldn’t be “advocating” for anything. Second, a byline only serves the purposes of allowing ad hominem attacks rather than focusing on the content.

Quite the opposite. I appreciate that the focus is on the content of the article and not the author.

I personally like it. They comment their rationale for this choice here, under "Author anonymity": https://www.economist.com/frequently-asked-questions

It lessens the incentive for journos to chase clout and try to inject their "personal brand" into their writing. Personally, I love it.

The way they do it is significantly better than almost any other magazine out there in my opinion.

I can only read the first part because of the paywall. How do they know that a bigger beak is cause by higher temperatures? What’s the cause / effect there?

NB. just curious / not a climate denier!

No paywall: https://archive.is/ozASI

Animals bodies evolve to adapt to changes in the environment. This is nothing new. It's literally the process that has driven life forward since life first appeared. And given that the planet has so far only warmed an average of 1.1 degrees celcius due to climate change, isn't it a bit overzealous to blame animals' adaptation on climate change?

> And given that the planet has so far only warmed an average of 1.1 degrees celcius due to climate change, isn't it a bit overzealous to blame animals' adaptation on climate change?

The worldwide average doesn't really tell the full story, because there can be significant local extremes that are far greater.

See, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lytton,_British_Columbia, a town that broke the all-time temperature record for Canada and then burned to the ground the next day.

> there can be significant local extremes that are far greater

You're moving goal posts. Either we're talking about global climate change, or we're talking about local changes. Local changes have always happened, and animals either adapt or die when they do. There is no argument that the global average change is any more than 1.1c in the last century.

Both are important. People who go "a couple degrees average isn't that big of a deal" are missing a big part of the dangers of global climate change.

Humans can't survive more than a few hours at a wet bulb temperature (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature) of 35°C, even if they have shade, drinking water, and fans available. If air conditioning fails, you're dead.

As the global average creeps up, some of these local variations in hot, humid places without sufficient power infrastructure to reliably run A/C for everyone like Bangladesh have the potential to kill millions.

1.1 C = around 39 F

The world temp has gone up 39 degrees? That is much higher than I thought.

That couldn't be right?

I'm tired today.

That's not how it works.

A rise of 1.1 degrees C corresponds to a rise of 1.98 degrees F.

You have read the scale¹ instead of interpreting the value as a delta, a step, a degree. ¹(1.1°C above freezing reread in °F - 39°F - which means "the difference between a temperature almost never reached in Denmark and freezing water, plus 1.1°C".)

The Celsius scale uses 0 for "freezing water" and 100 for "boiling water".

Fahrenheit uses 32 for "freezing water" and 100 for "body temperature". (The "32" comes from interpolating Rømer's scale, and 0 is somehow "the minimum temperature ever one expected in Denmark".)

The single degree (step) is halfish/doublish that of the other scale: C = (5/9)F (from freeze to body temperature it's ~37 steps in °C and ~68 in °F). And there is an offset of 32.

It burned to the ground due to a wildfire caused by sparks from a train, not from the heat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lytton_wildfire

Wildfires don’t spread much better in 90F vs 121F. The big thing that causes uncontrollable spreads is lots of fast wind.

> Wildfires don’t spread much better in 90F vs 121F.

That's missing the point a bit. That said, vegetation sure does get dry fast in a 120 degree heat wave, though.

Yes they do, when higher temps have dried out the vegetation.

Lack of humidity dries out vegetation more than heat.

Literally in the first paragraph of what you shared:

> The fire, one of the 2021 British Columbia wildfires throughout the province, was facilitated by the 2021 Western North America heat wave.

this comments are like bingo for climate science misunderstanding

evolution doesn't happen on time scales of 100 years

+1.1 avg temperature implies much larger localized changes

Agreed. Yes, some animals will handle it, and we'll hold them up as examples. But the crash in diversity from all those who don't is tragic. The genetic diversity that is the bounty of millions of years of iteration and "learning" in ecological systems is a huge loss to our planet's resources and (by proxy) our own future wealth.

> evolution doesn't happen on time scales of 100 years

Phenotypic selection does happen on this timescale. Industrial melanism[1] has been pretty well studied.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_melanism

Yeah – and on top of that, the commenting user seems to underestimate the gravity of "only" a few degrees:

> The study also calculates extinction risks at different warming levels. It finds that 2% of endemic species are at risk of extinction if warming is limited to 1.5C, and 4% are at risk at 2C. However, the risk rises to 20% for land-based ecosystems, and to 32% in marine ecosystems if warming hits 3C.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/04/climate-change-will-h...

Evolution happens on the time scale of "birth" to reproductive age for the organism in question. I know of no corporeal entity still considered adolescent after a century.

I have never even worked with an evolutionary biologist but the concept of "punctuated equilibrium" has been around for quite a while.

[] my sloppy use of "birth" includes cells budding, seeds sprouting and the rest of the messy details.

[] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium

Extremely out of my league here, but it seems logical to me that if there is a mutation, it only initially happens in a single organism. Like a single specific bear might mutate, but certainly not all of them at the same time. That organism then needs to mature (if not already) and reproduce to spread the new mutation. It seems it would take several generations of successful breeding and on top of that successful passing on of the mutated gene to have the mutation actually spread beyond just the initial one. Reproduction rate of the organism would also play a huge factor I'd imagine, like a mouse can have hundreds of offspring in a single year due to a 21 day gestation period compared to a human.

> evolution doesn't happen on time scales of 100 years

Evolution may not, but selection may happen on that time scale, especially for animals that live short lives.

What is the difference between selection and evolution?

Selection is a process by which evolution works, so this is a false distinction. Modern definitions of evolution are usually something along the lines of changes in a population over time. There's no inherent time scale over which those changes can be observed, except for that of the generation time itself.

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