Apparently the historical size of horses is inversely proportional to the temperature — in other words, when temperatures were hotter, the ancestors of modern horses were smaller, and vice versa. It makes sense, since smaller bodies are easier to cool.
Unfortunately it’s also well-known that reptiles have just the opposite response, getting larger as temperatures go up. That might make this sort of “solution” to global warming rather less appealing. 😉
People are a lot more dependent on clothes and shelter than body size for determining heating and cooling, I suspect enough to negate any reasonable environmental pressures.
Yes, that part was meant as a joke, riffing on the joke theme of the article.
Jokes are supposed to be smiley-captioned for the humor impaired. 😉
Practically everything on The Register should be smiley-captioned, then. 😉 The blog entry was though. :-p