While humans debate at UN climate change talks in Bali, global warming is already wreaking havoc with nature. Most plants and animals are affected, and the change is occurring too quickly for them to evolve.
“A hell of a lot of species are in big trouble,” said Stephen E. Williams, the director of the Center for Tropical Biodiversity & Climate Change at James Cook University in Australia.
“I don’t think there is any doubt we will see a lot of (extinctions),” he said.
Globally, 30 per cent of the earth’s species could disappear if temperatures rise 2.5 degrees Celsius — and up to 70 per cent if they rise 3.5 degrees Celsius, a UN network of scientists reported last month.
But warming isn’t the only concern of conservationists. In Bali, experts warned that measures aimed at reducing greenhouses gases — such as building hydroelectric dams as a substitute for coal plants or switching over to biofuels — might have the unintended consequence of reducing biodiversity.
Brazil and Indonesia, for example, are investing heavily in biofuels which environmentalists have warned could replace rich rain forests with plantations which have far fewer species.
“If that happens, the Amazon is gone,” said Antonio Nobre of the Amazon Research Institute, referring to suggestions that Brazil wants to be the “Saudi Arabia” of biofuel. “If that happens, we are shooting ourselves in the foot.”
As climate change takes hold, the hardest hit species will include plants and animals in colder climates or at higher elevations and those with limited ranges or little tolerance for temperature change, said Wendy Foden, a conservation biologist with the World Conservation Union, which catalogues threatened species.
Butterflies that lived at high altitudes in North America and southern France have vanished, and polar bears and penguins are watching their habitat melt away.
The carbon dioxide emissions that are a leading cause of global warming also turn oceans more acidic, killing coral reefs and the microscopic plankton that blue whales and other marine mammals depend on for food.
“In the long run, every species will be affected,” Foden said.
A few will benefit, chiefly those that breed quickly, already exist in varied climates and are able to adapt swiftly to changing conditions, scientists said. Think cockroaches, pigeons and weeds.
The spread of a deadly fungus that thrives in warmer conditions has decimated some frog populations in South America, Africa and Europe.
Then there are Australia’s flying foxes. More than 3,500 gray-headed and black flying foxes — huge bats — died in 2002 after temperatures rose above 42 degrees Celsius in New South Wales, according to a report published last week in the Royal Society B journal.
The rising temperatures are related to global warming, said the author, Justin Welbergen of the University of Cambridge.
“It got really hot and suddenly started raining foxes from the trees,” said Welbergen, who witnessed the die-off. “It was quite gruesome. This colony had between 20,000 and 30,000 animals and about 10 per cent of those died.”
In Australia’s Queensland state, temperatures are projected to rise 3 degrees Celsius, an outcome that could drive half the species to extinction in a mountainous stretch of tropical rain forest, said Williams, the director of the climate change institute at Australia’s James Cook University.
As temperatures rise, animals are seeking cooler climates. In a study of more than 1,500 species, University of Texas biologist Camille Parmesan concluded that 40 per cent had shifted their ranges, mostly toward the poles.
Millions of Mediterranean Sea jellyfish have turned up off Northern Ireland and Scotland. The Humboldt squid, which can grow up to 2.1 meters long, has moved up the California coast as ocean waters warmed.
“It’s the latest in a long series of bad news for fishermen,” said Stanford University’s Lou Zeidberg, adding that squid have been found as far north as Alaska in the past five years.
With warmer weather, 60 per cent of plant and animal species are migrating, breeding and blooming earlier in the spring, Parmesan said. But not all are, and that could upset relationships between birds and the insects they feed on as well as insects and the flowers they pollinate.—AP