Global Warming Hysteria: The Lizards Are All Going to Die!

If scientists want us to take the purported global warming threat seriously, they have to stop with the panic mongering.  Here’s the latest example: Scientists have issued a study warning that global warming will cause mass lizard extinction. From the story:

Scientists warn in a research paper published on Thursday that if the planet continues to heat up at current rates, 20 percent of all lizard species could go extinct by 2080. “The numbers are actually pretty scary,” said lead researcher Barry Sinervo from the University of California Santa Cruz. “We’ve got to try to limit climate change impacts right now or we are sending a whole bunch of species into oblivion.” A mass extinction of lizards, which eat insects and are eaten by birds, could have devastating effects up and down the food chain, but the extent is difficult to predict.

Wait a minute: The “current rate” of warming is negligible—even Professor Jones acknowledged that there has been “no statistically significant warming for the last 15 years.”

Why study lizards?  The scientists were alarmed that populations appear to have dropped in some areas—and that got them to worrying about mass extinction.  So, they decided to do some surveys and drop models of lizards in the searing Mexican desert to study the impact:

Sinervo made models of lizards with thermal monitors and left them in the searing sun of southern Mexico to measure how the reptiles would react to temperatures at different altitudes.

The world is not going to turn into the searing Mexican desert!  Moreover, the earth has been far warmer in its history than is projected in even Al Gore’s fervid imagination—and somehow life thrived—most particularly reptiles.

The earth is incredibly dynamic. Species rise and fall, populations move to new locales, and others move in to fill the vacant niche. Habitats are in a state of constant change.  Whatever warming we cause will have burdens and benefits—and life will adjust.

But they will keep it up—issuing dire study after dire study after dire study based on computer models, and lizard models—heck, why not models based on repeats of Death Valley Days?—all in a (hopefully) vain effort to scare us into destroying our economies and ceding power to an unelected international scientocracy intent on controlling how we live.

This is what they don’t seem to get: Panic mongering is a classic example of the law of diminishing returns.  The more they beat the panic drum, the less the people will believe them. Indeed, by now, the only people who care about these stories are the MSM, which can’t get enough of them, and the already hysterical.  The rest of us have already tuned out.