In reading the postings on CONCH-L, I learn a great deal from you all, but
this time I just can't let several comments go unchallenged.

While I had a little difficulty in understanding the comparisons intended in
Bob Dayle's display of shell parameters for Cypraea isabella, the idea of
using large collections for establishing time lines relative to the present
should not be disparaged. Timeline data on distribution of species --or
distribution of key attributes within a species-- are desperately needed,
when clearly identified as to location and date interval. Such data can
often be aggregated with other data to provide very valuable information on
biological consequences of long-term climate change. Other perturbing
influences, like estuarine and stream modifications (pesticides, urban
effluents, etc.) that affect the shelf may indeed have confounded the
picture, and if known should be identified. Nevertheless,  I am not expert
in malaco-zoology, but I would not discourage acquisition of any such
long-term biological baseline data. With present oceanic disturbances, I
believe some of these baseline data will become increasingly useful.

With respect to global "warming," I think the key point has been missed. It
IS true that aerosols over urbanized and industrialized areas offset warming
with a regional cooling effect. Nevertheless satellite data do establish an
average net warming of both the ocean, polar, and Central African regions,
and these effects have profound consequences on cloud dynamics and ocean
circulation. The real issue is the frequency and severity of overall
climatic disturbances, not narrowly surface "warming."

Baselines on geophysical data have been central to establishing the fact of
an extraordinarily rapid global climate change that tightly correlates with
anthropogenic emissions of CO2. The point is that CO2 and proxy temperatures
have changed more over a human lifetime, than they did over several thousand
years in earlier epochs. Most features of this phenomenon are events that,
taken in isolation, could be considered "normal"; e.g., storms and
hurricanes, in-land drought, polar warming, glacial retreat, severe El
Ninos, ocean surface warming, Antarctic snow-pack melt, block of the
thermohaline circulation, and shifts in speciation. Again, the point is that
most of these changes are now taking place at a rate that appears to be far
faster than the natural response capabilities of many individual species and
ecological systems. Moreover: 1) CO2 levels continue to rise, and rise
faster than volcanic input RATES (not amounts); 2) Ocean and forest sinks
(for excess CO2) are rate-limited and seem unable to absorb the excess, a
fact that now rests on half-way decent experimental evidence.

Bottom line: If you think the impact of global climate change is hyperbole,
you ain't seen nothing yet. There will be many winners & losers over the
next couple of decades, and Allen Aigen has it about right as to what we can
do.

Burton Vaughan