As the earth gets warmer, there's one species that supposedly will really benefit."Climate Change is amazing," reported National Geographic. "If you're a rat."
The horrific prospect of these pizza-dragging, toilet-bathing, plague-spreading, baby-eating, cannibalistic beasts swarming the sweltering streets of our major cities helps to explain why a recent study allegedly demonstrating a global warming-induced increase in the urban rat population received such widespread media coverage. As is often the case, journalists were not sufficiently skeptical, nor did they take the time to read the study closely.
Published in Science Advances with 19 co-authors, this paper contains nothing meaningful about either climate change or rats. It relies on weak data and inaccurate statistics, and uses misleading references to support its claims. There is no evidence to suggest that global warming is contributing to an increase in urban rat populations.
