Back in March 2012, Popular Science posted “Hot Weather Makes Mammals Smaller, So Will Global Warming Make Us Shrink?” The article discusses how 56 million years ago, during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) phase, horses shrank in size when global temperatures increased by 5 to 10 degrees due to an increase of CO₂ in the atmosphere.

Going further, Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Michigan, Philip Gingerich, joked in the article about our future climate change and stated that “we’re going to be walking around 3 feet tall if we keep going the way we’re going.” Basically, next-humans will have to become smaller and subsist on fewer resources in order to adapt to our warming climate.

Now here’s the part where Laverne, meets Shirley.

Just in time to feed the petite-humans of the warmer future, Gizmag posted, “Dwarf plants could reduce demands for water, fertilizer, nutrients and pesticides.” The article is about the work of Assistant Professor of Horticulture & Landscape Architecture, Burkhard Schulz, and how he discovered a way to treat plants with a cheap and widely available fungicide, propiconazole, that will keep them small in size without affecting their output. Not only would the treated, smaller plants need less fertilizer, water and space but they could also be sturdier due to their small size and ability to resist the weather.

So thank you wee-plants. Wee-humans of the future owe you a solid. [PopSci and Gizmag]