Climate Change NOT Endangering Pika!

Guest essay by Jim Steele

In February 2015, I posted an essay on WUWT about why the pika, a high elevation relative of rabbits, are not endangered by climate change. I highlighted some bad science that has been deceptively used to fear monger about catastrophic global warming, falsely suggesting pika are fleeing upslope to avoid warming, and are being driven off the mountain tops into extinction by rising CO2 concentrations. Based on bad science lawyers from the Center for Biological Diversity have sued California twice and the United States once to list pika as endangered due to climate change.

After that blog post I did receive a few emails from pika experts applauding my analyses. Although they requested to remain anonymous, they advised me that one of the world’s leading pika experts, Dr. Andrew Smith whose work I referenced, would soon be publishing a…