Gila Monsters Are Threatened by Development Not Warming, Science News
By
Linnea Lueken
April 10, 2025
A recent Science News article, “Gila monsters may struggle to survive climate change,” claims that Gila monsters living in the Mojave Desert may be displaced and lose habitat due to climate change. The story is purely speculative with no proof given that Gila monsters have suffered from the past hundred-plus years of warming, and the study referenced relies solely on unreliable climate models.
The Science News article cites a study published in Ecology and Evolution which used “climate change forecasts” (climate modelling) to predict how the native environment and preferred habitat of the Gila monster may change under future warming scenarios.
Science News reports that in “lower emissions scenarios, the team found, not much changes for the Gila monsters,” however under the high emissions scenario, “large swaths of the desert ideal for the lizards could vanish by 2082, resulting in a loss of over a third of today’s suitable territory.“ This may sound reasonable at first glance, but if the study authors meant for people to take the results seriously, they should have started by using reasonable climate model scenarios. The researchers chose only two scenarios, represented by RCP 2.6 as the low emissions scenario, and RCP 8.5 as the high-end emissions scenario. The problem is that RCP 8.5 has been abandoned by even mainstream alarmist scientists and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) because it is an implausible, possibly impossible, projection. It would require a colossal uptick in the amount of fossil fuel use, possibly more than the planet actually contains. It is certainly not a “business as usual” or even a “slightly more business” type of scenario.
https://climaterealism.com/2025/04/gila-monsters-are-more-threatened-by-development-than-warming-science-news/
