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This is the name of the article:

"Study: Climate Change May Be Causing Smaller American Birds."

What means: Climate change could reduce the size of American birds. I can not understand why comparative adjective Smaller means - reduce the size of. Is it question of grammar or style or collocation "Causing Smaller"

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    Climate Change May Be Causing greater anxiety among the general public. As with your example, the comparative adjective implies smaller than American birds were before, more anxious than the general public were before. It would be quite reasonable to just use the "plain" adjective for my example, but with your exact example that wouldn't make much sense (some American birds were always relatively small before the boffins thought up this latest scare story, so the actual meaning is birds smaller than they used to be, not more instances of preexisting "small" bird types). Commented Dec 7, 2019 at 17:43

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In this context "smaller" implies "smaller than before". It is not that climate change is favouring small birds (like sparrows). Instead it is benefitting birds that are smaller than others in the same species and so there is evolutionary pressure which is causing the average size of birds to reduce over time.

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