Climate change won’t just affect humans
by David Atkins
One of the popular misconceptions about climate change is that it will mostly affect human beings, primarily those in dry areas and on the coasts. There is a small school of thought that a reduction in the human biosphere might be acceptable, and that other fauna and flora will adapt. That’s a morally outrageous view, of course, but it’s also wrong:
Nature doesn’t like to be rushed. But to keep up with climate change, many animals will need to evolve 10,000 times faster than they have in the past, a new study suggests.
Manmade climate change — fueled by excess greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, namely carbon dioxide — is expected to raise global temperatures by up to 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit (6 Celsius) within the next 100 years. That will transform many ecosystems in just a few generations, forcing wildlife to either evolve quickly or risk extinction.
Published online in the journal Ecology Letters, the study concludes that most land-based vertebrate species evolve too slowly to adjust to the dramatically warmer climate expected by 2100. If they can’t make high-speed adaptations or move to a new ecosystem, many terrestrial animal species will cease to exist, the researchers report.
“Every species has a climatic niche which is the set of temperature and precipitation conditions in the area where it lives and where it can survive,” co-author and University of Arizona ecologist John Wiens says in a press release. “We found that on average, species usually adapt to different climatic conditions at a rate of only about 1 degree Celsius per million years. But if global temperatures are going to rise by about 4 degrees over the next hundred years, as predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, that is where you get a huge difference in rates. What that suggests overall is that simply evolving to match these conditions may not be an option for many species.”
Climate change doesn’t just mean severe impacts for humans. It also means mass extinctions.
I realize that the percentage of Americans that cares whether entire species of plants or animals live or die largely intersects with that empathetic portion of the public that also cares about climate change and most other liberal causes. But for those on the extremes of both conservative and liberal politics who think that doing away with the human riffraff is fine and dandy, they might want to think twice if they care at all about the other species we live with.
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