First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
A general rule of biology states that small animals like rodents and deer require high-quality food like seeds, buds, and shoots while nutritionally poor fodder favours large species like mammoths. This is the probable driver behind the size of the dinosaurs as well as the size difference between gorillas and bonobos. So what Craine is obviously doing here is confusing a short term direct effect with the expected long term results under homoeostasis and selection – an astonishingly common mistake also often seen in medicine.
There can be no doubt whatever about a lot of current climate events being anthropogenic in origin, deforestation, soil sealing, river regulation, albedo, and urban heat islands are just a few of the relevant terms here. What is not true is the simplistic and monocausal explanation of everything by an elusive global warming alone. As Dunstone et al. show, the recent rise in hurricane activity – or more precisely the reverting to normal from a recent depression – is anthropogenic too with pollution by aerosols being the dominant driver.