"ALL CAPS IN DEFENSE OF LIBERTY IS NO VICE."

Thursday, May 11, 2006

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC: TREES CAUSED MAMMOTH EXTINCTIONS

Dale Guthrie, a researcher at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, has spent some 20 years examining more than 600 bones of large mammals from Alaska and the Yukon Territory. ... Guthrie's data, published in tomorrow's issue of the journal Nature, shows that increases in moisture and warmer temperatures 13,500 to 11,500 years ago allowed for edible plants to migrate north. This plant exodus provided more food sources for horses, mammoths, bison, and elks living in the far north, he suggests. ...

But then the milder climate backfired on the big mammals. It paved the way for trees, which eventually outshaded and outcompeted the low-lying plants the animals depended on, Guthrie says. The upstart forests transferred the landscape's nutrients to the treetops, out of the reach of large mammals. Elks and bison, it seems, adapted better to the new landscape than mammoths and horses. ...

Guthrie notes that there is thousand-year gap between when people showed up and when mammoths died off.

IOW: People didn't kill them off; the extinction of the mammoths was entirely NATURAL.

Today's eco-nazis seem to feel that the current state of natural affairs is perfect and immutable and should not be changed, nor would it be changed if it weren't for evil humans. No species would become extinct, no climates would change. Which is pure bunk. The geo-eco-bio world is constantly changing, and some species survive and others do not. No law and no treaty and no technology will ever change that fact.

(OH, BY THE WAY: THERE WERE NO STINKING SUV'S AROUND BACK THEN - ABOUT 13,500-11,500 YEARS AGO - EITHER. SO I GUESS THE WARMING UP OF THE CLIMATE WAS NATURAL, TOO.)

1 comment:

Pastorius said...

Reliapundit,

I think you got it wrong. The Mammoths heard we were coming, and they died of fright at the very thought of our SUV's.