You know that the latest UN IPCC working vacation is coming soon when the number of bat guano hysteria fables increase above normal. Here’s another
Scientists have a new worry about a special group of organisms that protects soil on the Colorado Plateau. They’re called “biocrusts,†and they’re easily destroyed when trampled—but new research shows there’s another menace: climate change.
Biocrust is created by mosses and lichens glued together with photosynthetic bacteria. It forms a kind of bumpy shield on the soil surface.
Scott Ferrenberg is a research ecologist with the Flagstaff-based Southwest Biological Science Center of the U.S Geological Survey. He collected a decade’s worth of data in Utah on how biocrusts respond to warming temperatures and changes in rainfall.
“My personal expectation was that physical disturbance would be much more dramatic – much more negative – than the climate change effects,†Ferrenberg said. “Sadly and shockingly, we found that they were very much equivalent.â€
Of course they did. Sadly, this kind of idiocy takes focus off the real issue of people destroying the Biocrust by trampling on it. A real environmental concern, versus the Biocrust having to survive a tiny increase in heat, which it has multiple times during the Holocene, much less millions of years of history, if not more.
I may be wrong but I think these ‘scientists’ made up a new word for dirt.