So says the journal Science. The theory, however, relies on readings from “electronic lizards”:
Sinervo and his colleagues recently went to the Yucatán to test this theory. With thermal sensors, PVC pipe, plastic caps, and automobile primer paint, they created “electronic lizards” — temperature sensors painted to have light reflectivity similar to that of a lizard — and placed them at two sites where lizards could still be found and two where they’d gone extinct. After recording temperatures for 4 months, the researchers found that, in line with Sinervo’s theory, daytime temperatures at the sites where lizards had gone extinct would have severely reduced the amount of time lizards could forage, whereas temperatures at the sites where lizards still lived were milder enough to allow them plenty of time to seek food.
So is it valid? The piece ends with this alternative hypothesis:
Eric Pianka, a zoologist at the University of Texas, Austin, is skeptical of the model itself, questioning its applicability to nocturnal lizards. Habitat destruction and other kinds of human involvement play at least as great a role in lizard extinctions as global warming, he adds. “I certainly hope their dire predictions do not come true,” Pianka says. “A world without lizards would be a sorely impoverished placed.”
I expect this is some of that “grey literature” that will end up in the next IPCC report.