Daily News 26 Jan 2025

Study: Climate Change Did Not Drive Giant Kangaroos to Extinction

Essay by Eric Worrall

Another mystery case of megafauna disappearing shortly after the arrival of humans with sharp sticks.

Demise of Australia’s large kangaroos likely not caused by climate change, study suggests

…

By Andrew Wulfeck
Published January 22, 2025 11:49pm EST

ADELAIDE, Australia – A new study has shed light on the extinction of many of Australia’s prehistoric kangaroos, challenging beliefs that their demise was closely linked to climate change.

In university research published in the journal Science, researchers said they used dental analysis to determine feeding habits, which turned out to differ from previous assumptions.

Wildlife biologists had assumed that climate change transformed ecosystems in ways the giant mammals couldn’t adapt to, but dental analysis now suggests these animals were actually able to adjust to the changing environment.

…

“Our study shows that most prehistoric kangaroos at Naracoorte had broad diets. This dietary flexibility likely played a key role in their resilience during past changes in climate,” Dr. Samuel Arman, one of the lead researchers on the project, told staff at Flinders University in Australia.

So, what caused many of the continent’s large kangaroos to go extinct?

Researchers suggested the arrival of humans played a more significant role than previously thought more than 40,000 years ago.

Hunters primarily used the animals for their meat, with their skins turned into leather and other materials.

…

Read more: https://www.foxweather.com/earth-space/australia-kangaroos-climate

The abstract of the study;

Dietary breadth in kangaroos facilitated resilience to Quaternary climatic variations

SAMUEL D. ARMAN, GRANT A. GULLY, AND GAVIN J. PRIDEAUX
SCIENCE
9 Jan 2025
Vol 387, Issue 6730
pp. 167-171

Editor’s summary

Much can be said about what a species ate based on the form of their teeth. In Australia, it has been hypothesized that the extinction of many large marsupial species by about 40,000 years ago may have been due to a narrow diet in the face of a changing climate. Arman et al. looked at extant and extinct kangaroo species using a tooth microwear approach and concluded that most species were generalists, not specialist grazers or browsers, and thus were adapted to deal with climate-driven vegetation changes. Thus, their demise was likely not driven by climate change, leaving humans as the probable cause. —Sacha Vignieri

Abstract

Identifying what drove the late Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions on the continents remains one of the most contested topics in historical science. This is especially so in Australia, which lost 90% of its large species by 40,000 years ago, more than half of them kangaroos. Determining causation has been obstructed by a poor understanding of their ecology. Using dental microwear texture analysis, we show that most members of Australia’s richest Pleistocene kangaroo assemblage had diets that were much more generalized than their craniodental anatomy implies. Mixed feeding across most kangaroos pinpoints dietary breadth as a key behavioral adaptation to climate-driven fluctuations in vegetation structure, dispelling the likelihood that late Pleistocene climatic variation was a primary driver of their disappearance.

Read more: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq4340

The varied diet argument seems pretty conclusive – an animal which could adapt its diet to changed conditions would be resilient to changes in conditions.

Reading the Wikipedia description, Procoptodon was likely slow moving compared to modern kangaroos, more of a lumberer than a hopper. Easy prey for early humans with sharp sticks.

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January 26, 2025 at 12:10PM

Daily News 26 Jan 2025

The Media’s Goes Full Hysterical Over Eowyn

By Paul Homewood

To the shame of the MSM, the reporting of Strom Eowyn has been disgracefully hysterical, untruthful and misleading.

There have been widespread claims that it was record breaking, once-in-a-generation storm. The Evening Standard even described “hurricane force winds battering the UK”.

The Met Office at least brought a hint of reality, when they said it was the strongest in ten years. But even that does no stand up to scrutiny, as Eunice brought stronger winds three years ago. This was when 122 mph winds were recorded on the Needles. On Friday, the highest gusts were 100 mph. Of course, as we know, the Needles is not a representative site, but the Met Office still think it appropriate to list it as a record for England!

If they really believe Eowyn was more powerful, they should drop the pretence that measurements on the Needles are meaningful. They cannot have it both ways.

But more to the point, Eunice itself was not unusually powerful, as the Met Office State of the Climate Report last year revealed:

https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/joc.8553

Indeed it is this relative absence of really strong storms lately which makes Eowyn seem “exceptional”.

We all know that those 1980s and 90s storms were at another level – not only the Great Storm of 1987, but also Burns Day in 1991 and the Boxing Day storm in 1998. To call Eowyn “once in a generation” is an insult to all those who suffered back then.

In fact you don’t even have to search to find storms every bit as strong as Eowyn. Eighty years ago to the month, for instance, an “exceptionally severe gale” brought winds of 113 mph to St Ann’s Head in Pembrokeshire, much stronger than anything Eowyn brought to the British Isles.

Winds elsewhere also exceeded Eowyn away from the new breed of cliff and hill top sites, which are now employed by the Met Office to give a false impression.

For example, winds of 88 mph at South Shields in 1945 were above anything in comparable locations this week.

The 1945 storm was the same one which brought record 113 mph winds to Limerick before the instrument pen went off the chart, as related by the Irish Times.

As for that “hurricane” nonsense, there was even one report, in the Mail I believe, which compared the 100 mph winds at Drumalbin with the Saffir Simpson scale, which lists 74 mph winds as Cat 1. The dopey reporter obviously had not understood that the Saffir Simpson scale works on average, sustained wind speeds, not gusts.

I have not found anywhere in the British Isles where sustained winds exceeded 74 mph.

At Armagh in N Ireland, for instance, sustained winds were only 42 mph:

And at Eskdalemuir, as another example, winds averaged 39 mph during the peak of the storm.

These are both places which were in the thick of the storm. Even coastal sites, such as Prestwick, barely got above 80 mph gusts – certainly not “hurricane strength”.

It is hardly surprising that the younger generation, who have no memory of the really devastating storms of the past, genuinely believe that stroms like Eowyn really are unprecedented and the consequence of climate change. The media has done a good job of brainwashing them!

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January 26, 2025 at 10:17AM