In this first of the thirteen articles that are acknowledged by Root et al. to not provide statistically significant evidence for any aspect of climate-modulated plant or animal behavior, the authors excavated six abandoned and three modern Adelie penguin colonies in the Palmer Station area of the Antarctic Peninsula.  By careful analyses of these materials, they developed a 644-year history of penguin occupation of the region, which stretched back to just before the Little Ice Age.

Throughout the Little Ice Age, Emslie et al. noted there were both cool and warm periods, and that many penguin colonies periodically came and went, presumably because "the area may [periodically] have become too snow- or ice-covered for occupation by breeding birds."  In addition, they found that "only recently [since 1957] have gentoo and chinstrap penguins expanded their breeding distribution to this region," noting that "it is possible that the relatively rapid regional warming now occurring in the Antarctic Peninsula has favored the expansion of these species southward."

These latter data demonstrate that, just as in the Northern Hemisphere, opportunistic species' range extensions occur in response to warming in the Southern Hemisphere.  Below the equator, however, the cold-limited boundaries of species' ranges move southward, as is demonstrated by the recent arrival of gentoo and chinstrap penguins in the Palmer Station area of the Antarctic Peninsula.  These extensions of the penguin species' southern range boundaries, however, tell us nothing about their critical heat-limited northern boundaries.  Hence, the observations of this paper - like many of those comprising Root et al.'s Tier 1 set of papers -- are totally irrelevant to the CO2-induced global warming extinction hypothesis.

T2.2 -- Pollard et al. (1995)

The authors studied temporal changes in the distributions of 18 butterfly species that "are widespread and, more or less, common in the British countryside," finding that "nearly all of the common species have increased in abundance more in the east of Britain than in the west."  They then note that "the reasons for recent range expansion and increases in abundance of common butterflies are not known," stating in their concluding paragraph that "we are thus a long way from understanding the cause or causes of the expansions of butterfly ranges and the increases in abundance described in this paper."

In light of these observations, and the authors' admission that they do not know the cause of them, it is difficult to understand how Root et al. could possibly have cited this research as evidence for a warming-induced shifting of ranges.  We also note that these range expansions and increases in abundance would appear to be welcome phenomena, not at all to be feared and far from implying imminent extinction.  In addition, they appear to be part of a recurring cycle in which the authors suggest the participating species have merely been "regaining lost ground."

T2.3 -- Ott (2001)

With respect to the warming-induced range expansions of dragonflies that have been observed since about 1980 in Europe, the author developed "an updated summary of a compilation of probably all relevant publications on this topic, including the so called 'grey literature'."  The story told by this wealth of information is that of a "clear trend of expansion towards the north, the increase of population sizes and the colonization of biotopes in higher altitudes," which, again, is exactly what one would expect in response to regional warming.

Are these changes good or bad?  The author notes that "mass invasion of one or more species along with a long term change of abiotic conditions, e.g. temperature and precipitation, may cause considerable alterations in the floral and faunal composition of whole coenoses."  However, he rightly concludes that "a more diversified fauna in a particular area is not at all to be regarded as negative from the standpoint of nature conservancy," which is another way of saying that this phenomenon likely helps species to avoid extinction.

T2.4 -- Thomas et al. (2001)

The authors begin their paper by stating the long-held belief that many animals are "relatively sedentary and specialized in marginal parts of their geographical distributions," citing Thomas (1993) and Thomas et al. (1999) as examples of that concept and noting that such animals are thus "expected to be slow at colonizing new habitats."  This idea provides some of the basis for the chief contention of the CO2-induced global warming extinction hypothesis, i.e., that plants and animals of many types will not be able to migrate either poleward in latitude or upward in elevation fast enough to avoid extinction as the earth warms in response to the rising CO2 content of the atmosphere.  "Despite this," the authors report, "the cool margins of many species' distributions have expanded rapidly in association with recent climate warming," citing a host of other studies as evidence of this phenomenon.

Why has this opportunistic response been so dramatic?  One reason is revealed in what the scientists learned from the two butterfly species they studied: the butterflies "increased the variety of habitat types that they can colonize," which is something climate alarmists are loath to admit is possible, for it deals a strong blow to their contention that current plant-animal associations cannot be changed without debilitating consequences, as suggested by Root in interviews reported in several of the media reports associated with the publication of Root et al. (2003).  Similarly, in Revkin's article in the 2 January 2003 issue of the New York Times, Richard P. Alley of Pennsylvania State University is quoted as saying that to survive a forced migration of the type described by the CO2-induced global warming extinction hypothesis, species will "have to change what [they] eat," as if that were not possible.  Yet Chavez et al. (2003) report that "recent theoretical work supports the idea that complex food webs can undergo substantial changes in response to subtle physical forcing (Taylor et al., 2002)."  The results of this study clearly demonstrate that not only is such a change possible, it's already occurring!

Another reason why the many opportunistic responses noted by Thomas et al. have been so rapid is revealed in what the scientists learned from the two species of bush cricket they studied.  The crickets showed "increased fractions of longer-winged (dispersive) individuals in recently founded populations," which is something else climate alarmists are loath to admit is possible [see, for example, the quote from Root and Schneider (1993) in the Introduction of this report], for it deals a strong blow to their contention that animal physical characteristics cannot change fast enough to enable them to migrate as rapidly as they claim will be needed to escape the killing heat of a rapidly warming world.  Here, too, Revkin quotes Alley as saying species will have to "travel farther to eat," as if that were also not possible. Yet the results of this study clearly demonstrate that species not only will do it, they are doing it.

As a consequence of these totally unanticipated but real-world observations, the authors report that "increased habitat breadth and dispersal tendencies have resulted in about 3- to 15-fold increases in [range] expansion rates, allowing these insects to cross habitat disjunctions that would have represented major or complete barriers to dispersal before the expansions started."

It is amazing that Root et al. ever included this paper in their list of Tier 2 studies, as almost everything its authors discovered contradicts one or more of the negative tenets of the CO2-induced global warming extinction hypothesis.

T2.5 -- Southward et al. (1995)

Is there anything new or earth-shaking here?  No.  Cyclical warmings and coolings with their associated "restructuring of planktonic, pelagic and benthic communities" have been a normal part of nature since the dawn of life itself.  More recently, for example, Chavez et al. (2003) documented a whole host of such cycles throughout the Pacific Ocean in response to basin-wide "regime shifts" with a periodicity of about fifty years.  As ocean waters warm and cool, different marine communities not only relocate themselves, they often restructure themselves, as Southward et al. report; and they do it very successfully, protestations of climate alarmists to the contrary notwithstanding [see also the discussion of publication T2.4].

T2.6 -- Meshinev et al. (2000)

The authors documented a post-1970 "impressive invasion" of the higher slopes of the Central Balkan Mountain of Bulgaria by Pinus peuce Griseb., as it advanced "from the established timberline at 1760 m up to 2100 m," which advance was correlated with a concomitant increase in minimum winter temperatures.  Again, this observation provides no pertinent data for evaluating the CO2-induced global warming extinction hypothesis, as it deals with but one species' opportunistic movement up a mountain.

T2.7 -- Walther (2000)

Rather than describing a latitudinal or elevational shifting of species, the author of this paper describes the proliferation of more than a dozen non-indigenous evergreen broad-leaved shrubs and trees throughout deciduous lowland forests of southern Switzerland.  The invading species were imported from relatively warmer places such as Africa, the Far East and Australia.  For more than 200 years these ornamental woody plants were grown in Swiss gardens and parks.  Within the latter half of the 20th century, however, many of them began to spring up in adjacent natural habitat, becoming especially competitive over the last thirty years.  The author attributes this phenomenon to concurrent warming.  It is clear, however, that were the alien species not introduced to the region by human transplantation in the first place, this particular type of opportunistic ecosystem reorganization would not be occurring, with or without the help of global or regional warming.  Hence, this study, too, has essentially nothing to say about the CO2-induced global warming extinction hypothesis.

T2.8 -- Wardle and Coleman (1992)

The authors looked for evidence of a rise in the upper limits of four native New Zealand forest trees at several South Island locations in response to the warming of the past century or more, obtaining results that were "consistent with the proposition that altitudinal limits of native trees have risen in response to climatic warming during recent decades."  Again, this finding is irrelevant to the CO2-induced global warming extinction hypothesis, being concerned with the cold-limited boundaries of the trees' ranges, which advance opportunistically and not because they are threatened by heat.

T2.9 -- Catling (1996)

The author notes that sometime between 1959 and 1996 the northern boundary of the range of the damselfly Enallagma civile (Hagen) moved northward in southern Ontario, Canada by at least 200 km, concluding that "the northward spread of E. civile is probably related to climatic warming."  He may well be right.  But whether he is or he isn't sheds no light whatsoever on the robustness of the CO2-induced global warming extinction hypothesis, for reasons we have now repeated over and over and over.

T2.10 -- Ford (1996)

The author notes that from its discovery in 1949 until 1990, the oyster parasite Perkinsus marinus was found along the Atlantic coast of the United States from the Gulf of Mexico to Chesapeake Bay.  In 1990 and 1991, however, it suddenly appeared in locations from Delaware Bay, New Jersey to Cape Cod, Maine.  Ford describes "several hypotheses for the sudden appearance of the parasite in the northeastern United States," concluding that the pathogen probably "was repeatedly introduced, by many means over many years, into various northeast locations where it remained undetected and was stimulated to proliferate into an epizootic by a recent extreme warming trend."

Be that as it may -- and who knows, for Ford describes even this idea as but an hypothesis -- we again are dealing with a northward extension of a northern range boundary in the Northern Hemisphere, which does not allow for a critical evaluation of the CO2-induced global warming extinction hypothesis.

T2.11 -- Frey (2002)

The author recounts the life and work of George Divoky, who at enormous personal sacrifice and with great attention to detail, studied a colony of Arctic seabirds (black guillemots) on a remote barrier island off the northern coast of Alaska every year since 1972 to the time of the writing of this report.  In addition to documenting the birds' behavior throughout this 30-year period, Divoky reconstructed their movements over the past 120 years from analyses of the ð¹³C content of the feathers of specimens that had been "shot, stuffed and housed in museum collections."  So what did he find?

According to Frey's report, the ð¹³C content of 19th-century bird feathers indicated the birds "had to fly as far south as the Bering Sea in winter to find ice cracks in order to fish," but that the ð¹³C content of more recent feathers indicated "the birds had been able to winter some 500 miles to the north," indicating that "guillemots [had been] tracking more than a century of warming."  Once again, therefore, this study only confirms the obvious.  As the earth recovered from the global chill of the Little Ice Age, this Arctic seabird successfully shifted its range hundreds of miles northward in response to the opportunity to do so.

T2.12 -- Frey (1992)

The author documents a cooling trend from the 1930s to the 1960s and thermal stability from that point in time to the 1980s in Kansas and Nebraska, USA, together with a trend towards greater precipitation from the 1950s to the 1980s.  She then documents expansions of the ranges of a certain group of Boreal mammals into the region that became progressively cooler and wetter.  This opportunistic response is just the reverse of those described in most of the other studies we have discussed.  It documents range expansions where cooling has made it possible for species to live where it was previously too warm for them; and, hence, it has nothing to do with the CO2-induced global warming extinction hypothesis.

T2.13 -- Nehring (1998)

The author conducted a review of phytoplankton species that have appeared in the North Sea over the last few decades, finding that 16 non-indigenous species have become permanently established immigrants.  Of these, he reports that "13 have colonized the German Bight, corresponding to an increase of about 1% in the number of phytoplankton species found in this area."  Nehring suggests the influx of species, at least ten of which are normally found in more southerly and warmer waters, may be due to regional warming; but he notes that natural variability of temperature in this region is of such a magnitude that "a warming trend cannot be ascertained."

Once again, it is clear that these data have nothing to say about the CO2-induced global warming extinction hypothesis.  They merely describe another example of opportunistic range expansions in response to warming, but only, of course, if there really was a concurrent warming of the water body where the species introductions were detected, of which Nehring admits he is not confident.