Image courtesy of animaldanger.com (not the same source as the article)

I always thought that Al Gore’s global warming was a scam and I still do, but the earth is getting warmer, so maybe even if it’s not caused by his fictional ‘carbon footprint’ it’s caused by something else, whatever the case is, it’s definitely happening. This constant war on global warming is not working, just like the war on terrorism. But it’s clear we must do something before most of our animals go extinct.

Because lizards are cold-blooded animals, it might seem at first blush that higher temperatures would be beneficial. But that’s not the case, said evolutionary biologist Barry Sinervo of UC Santa Cruz, the lead author of the report. “These lizards need to bask in the sun to warm up, but if it gets too hot they have to retreat into the shade and then they can’t hunt for food,” he said at a news conference.

The team found that, at the sites where extinctions were occurring, the number of hours per day the animals could spend in the sun had dropped sharply. “They would barely have been able to emerge to bask before having to retreat,” Sinervo said.

The effects were most pronounced during the spring breeding season, when it is most important for the animals to eat lots of food to be able to produce offspring. If they can’t produce the normal number of young, the population collapses.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m totally not a lizard person, I actually hate lizards as much as the next guy but it would REALLY suck to see them disappear. It’s like when you are used to a really lousy TV channel and you give it for granted and every day when you are channel surfing, the lousy channel is there and you are like “Man, I hate MTV that channel!” and one day you turn the TV on and the channel is gone! and the other channels kinda start to suck… Get what I’m saying? yeah, me neither, I shouldn’t have used that analogy. Anyhow, visit articles.latimes.com to read the entire article:

Lizards face extinction because of global warming, study finds

In the meanwhile I will buy a giant shipment of sun block, just in case this whole global warming business goes out of control and threatens humans as well…