Gee, Can We Be Rational for a Minute?

 The headline, splashed across Fox News this morning was that the first species has gone extinct purely due to (duh duh duhhhhhhh).... Global Warming!

Now, this is a cute little critter, and it would certainly be a shame if it went extinct, but there are so many holes in this story, that Fox should have been ashamed to carry it (especially in the truncated form), and the Courier-Mail could have done a better job highlighting the issues in order to make this fair and balanced.

The first thing, of course, is that we don't actually know if the possum is gone.  Yes, it hasn't been sighted in the last 3 years, but that only accounts for 20 hours of looking.  Normally they would have expected to have seen about 27 given the reported sighting rate.  This certainly warrants some concern, but its not like people have been living up in the mountains for three years and haven't seen any, its just a handful of expeditions.

Next we learn that this species, for whatever reason, is unable to maintain its body temperature above 30 degrees.  That probably explains its limited range, and argues that the animal may have inadvertently evolved toward a dead end.  Species do that.  Since global temperatures have not always been static (a fact which seems to elude most of the media), then inability to adapt to the rising and falling global temperatures  would be an evolutionary disadvantage.  If this species has been killed off from the purported warming of the last few years then why didn't it get killed off during the medieval warm period (before you Google the term, be aware of the infamous hockey stick problems)?  I suspect that there are two possible reasons.  One is that this extreme sensitivity to temperature is a recent development, likely due to inbreeding of a small population.  The other is that they moved further up into the mountains where it was cooler - which may be what happened today.

Finally, of course, there is the unstated backdrop that all of this is caused by mankind.  If, perhaps, that is not the case, then this story while sad, wouldn't really have hit the news.  After all, what could we possibly do about this?

Why didn't any of these questions get posed in the article?