posted January 08, 2004 03:04 PM           

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By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 8, 2004; Page A01

In the first study of its kind, researchers in a range of habitats including northern Britain, the wet tropics of northeastern Australia and the Mexican desert said yesterday that global warming at currently predicted rates will drive 15 to 37 percent of living species toward extinction by mid-century.
Dismayed by their results, the researchers called for "rapid implementation of technologies" to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and warned that the scale of extinctions could climb much higher because of mutually reinforcing interactions between climate change and habitat destruction caused by agriculture, invasive species and other factors.
"The midrange estimate is that 24 percent of plants and animals will be committed to extinction by 2050," said ecologist Chris Thomas of Britain's University of Leeds. "We're not talking about the occasional extinction -- we're talking about 1.25 million species. It's a massive number."
The study marks the first time scientists have produced a global analysis with concrete estimates of the effect of climate change on habitat. Previous work -- much of it by the same researchers -- focused on smaller regions or limited numbers of species.
Thomas led a 19-member international team that surveyed habitat decline for 1,103 plant and animal species in five regions: Europe; Queensland, Australia; Mexico's Chihuahuan Desert; the Brazilian Amazon; and the Cape Floristic Region at South Africa's southern tip. The study is being published today in the journal Nature.
The five regions encompass 20 percent of Earth's surface and "include a fair range of terrestrial environments," Thomas said in a telephone interview from Leeds. "Obviously, it would be valuable to expand the scope, but there's no reason to think that doing so would change our results tremendously."
Researchers said the wide geographical scope also overcame outside factors that might affect a single region only. "A prolonged drought might cause one instance of a dieback" but be offset by changes elsewhere, acknowledged climate change biologist Lee Hannah, who worked in South Africa. "When you see the broader context, the regional blips drop out."
Although there is little dispute that Earth's temperature is rising, debate over the reasons and speed of change remains contentious. Still, most scientists accept that much of the warming is caused by the cumulative effects of human-produced emissions of carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse gases" -- from power plants and other industries -- that trap and hold heat in the atmosphere.
One skeptic, William O'Keefe, president of the George C. Marshall Institute, a conservative science policy organization, criticized the Nature study, saying that the research "ignored species' ability to adapt to higher temperatures" and assumed that technologies will not arise to reduce emissions.
Climatologists have developed models that describe the temperature changes that specific regions have undergone over periods of as long as 30,000 years. The Nature study used U.N. projections that world average temperatures will rise 2.5 to 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100.
The trick for the study, Thomas said, was to marry the maps of projected climate change in particular regions with maps describing the habitat -- especially the climate needs -- of plants and animals in the same area.
For this, "we needed to get the people together who knew where the species lived," Thomas said. These were the conservationists on the research team -- ecological experts who study extinctions by looking at traditional culprits: destruction of habitat through agriculture, industry or human settlement; invasive species shoving aside native plants and animals; and hunting and extermination of pests.
"Obviously, plants and animals depend on climate for survival, but we figured that if we protect them in place, they would be all right," Hannah said in a telephone interview from his home in California. "But now we realize that we have to take care of them not only where they are now, but where they might have to go."
The team calculated the effects of climate change on extinctions by using what ecologists J. Alan Pounds and Robert Puschendorf, in an article accompanying the study, called "one of ecology's few ironclad laws" -- that shrinking habitat supports fewer species.
The study considered a range of possibilities based on the ability of each species to move to a more congenial habitat to escape warming. If all species were able to move, or "disperse," the study said, only 15 percent would be irrevocably headed for extinction by 2050. If no species were able to disperse, the extinction rate could rise as high as 37 percent.
"Reality, of course, will fall somewhere in between," Thomas said.
As an example, he cited Britain's comma butterfly, a robust flier that hopscotched 160 miles north from 1982 to 1997, feeding all the way -- in its caterpillar phase -- on stinging nettles. By contrast, the silver-studded blue butterfly needs to move north but cannot, because it needs lowland heath to survive, and the gaps between patches of habitat are too large for this weak-winged flier to overcome. As a result, "it has continued to decline," Thomas said.
Pounds, speaking by telephone from his office in Costa Rica's Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve, called the study's results "ironclad" and "if anything, too conservative." The adverse effects of natural roadblocks would be compounded by "interaction with other changes" such as agriculture, human settlement or invasive species, he said.
"There are different ways you can lose area," Pounds said. "One is to have the habitat directly destroyed. Climate change does the same thing."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A63153-2004Jan7.html

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From: The Boundless
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posted January 08, 2004 03:49 PM         

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*sigh*

I saw the same information in USA Today. I couldn't read much of it, it made me too sad.

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From: on the trail of the Old Ones
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posted January 08, 2004 03:57 PM         

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Hi Proxieme. I read that article, too. Coincidentally, I've recently been doing research for a documentary on the forest fires in BC during 2003. One of the topics for the show is about climate change and if we can expect to see more years coming up that have extreme fire danger. My research turned up basically the same info that was in that Washington Post article, but was not focused on specific species or numbers thereof that might go extinct because of the changes. I looked at tons of scientific calculations put out by both independent researchers and a compendium of scientists working for several governments, including the US, Canada, Russia, etc. I'm going next week to interview one of BC's foremost experts on the subject. He has already told me the crux of his information...we are going to see a temperature increase in the next 90 - 100 years that is greater than anything the earth has experienced since the glaciers melted about 10,000 years ago. Higher latitudes, such as Canada and Russia, will be most effected. We can expect droughts and fires followed by floods and storms on a regular basis. Furthermore, he figures this change is unavoidable. Kyoto might help to some extent, but it won't have much effect on what will happen during the next century. The dye is already cast on that one, partly due to human activity, but mostly due to the cyclical nature of natural climatic shifts on earth. It all ties in with Milankovitch Cycles and other long-term changes. Very interesting stuff. Kind of makes you want to put in some really big water storage tanks, eh? What do you think about Global Warming?

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posted January 11, 2004 09:20 PM           

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3384067.stm
^---An interesting follow-up
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3380387.stm
^---The World-Watch study referred to

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posted January 12, 2004 12:12 PM           

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Orang-utans 'may die out by 2025' http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3383425.stm

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From: on the trail of the Old Ones
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posted January 12, 2004 01:16 PM         

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Poor orangutans. I studied primate behaviour from Birute Galdikas. She has a similar relationship to orangutans that Jane Goodall has to Chimps and Dianne Fossey had to gorillas. She runs an Orang refuge on Borneo. Birute did a siminar a couple of years ago called "The Coming Extinction" (or something like that) about the dangers orangutans are facing. It is just so sad. I don't think I will ever understand the human capacity to drive species to extinction.

Thanks for the updates, Prox.

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