No mays, coulds, or mights here in this press release headline from UEA. They say “will“. As usual, they assume nature so poorly equipped her creations that they can’t adapt. That’s some ballsy certainty.
Climate change will cause widespread global-scale loss of common plants and animals
More than half of common plants and one third of the animals could see a dramatic decline this century due to climate change – according to research from the University of East Anglia.
Research published today in the journal Nature Climate Change looked at 50,000 globally widespread and common species and found that more than one half of the plants and one third of the animals will lose more than half of their climatic range by 2080 if nothing is done to reduce the amount of global warming and slow it down.
This means that geographic ranges of common plants and animals will shrink globally and biodiversity will decline almost everywhere.
Plants, reptiles and particularly amphibians are expected to be at highest risk. Sub-Saharan Africa, Central America, Amazonia and Australia would lose the most species of plants and animals. And a major loss of plant species is projected for North Africa, Central Asia and South-eastern Europe.
But acting quickly to mitigate climate change could reduce losses by 60 per cent and buy an additional 40 years for species to adapt. This is because this mitigation would slow and then stop global temperatures from rising by more than two degrees Celsius relative to pre-industrial times (1765). Without this mitigation, global temperatures could rise by 4 degrees Celsius by 2100.
The study was led by Dr Rachel Warren from theTyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at UEA. Collaborators include Dr Jeremy VanDerWal at James Cook University in Australia and Dr Jeff Price, from UEA’s school of Environmental Sciences and the Tyndall Centre. The research was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).
Dr Warren said: “While there has been much research on the effect of climate change on rare and endangered species, little has been known about how an increase in global temperature will affect more common species.
“This broader issue of potential range loss in widespread species is a serious concern as even small declines in these species can significantly disrupt ecosystems.
“Our research predicts that climate change will greatly reduce the diversity of even very common species found in most parts of the world. This loss of global-scale biodiversity would significantly impoverish the biosphere and the ecosystem services it provides.
“We looked at the effect of rising global temperatures, but other symptoms of climate change such as extreme weather events, pests, and diseases mean that our estimates are probably conservative. Animals in particular may decline more as our predictions will be compounded by a loss of food from plants.
“There will also be a knock-on effect for humans because these species are important for things like water and air purification, flood control, nutrient cycling, and eco-tourism.
“The good news is that our research provides crucial new evidence of how swift action to reduce CO2 and other greenhouse gases can prevent the biodiversity loss by reducing the amount of global warming to 2 degrees Celsius rather than 4 degrees. This would also buy time – up to four decades – for plants and animals to adapt to the remaining 2 degrees of climate change.”
The research team quantified the benefits of acting now to mitigate climate change and found that up to 60 per cent of the projected climatic range loss for biodiversity can be avoided.
Dr Warren said: “Prompt and stringent action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally would reduce these biodiversity losses by 60 per cent if global emissions peak in 2016, or by 40 per cent if emissions peak in 2030, showing that early action is very beneficial. This will both reduce the amount of climate change and also slow climate change down, making it easier for species and humans to adapt.”
Information on the current distributions of the species used in this research came from the datasets shared online by hundreds of volunteers, scientists and natural history collections through the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).
Co-author Dr Jeff Price, also from UEA’s school of Environmental Studies, said: “Without free and open access to massive amounts of data such as those made available online through GBIF, no individual researcher is able to contact every country, every museum, every scientist holding the data and pull it all together. So this research would not be possible without GBIF and its global community of researchers and volunteers who make their data freely available.”
‘Quantifying the benefit of early climate change mitigation in avoiding biodiversity loss’ is published by the journal Nature Climate Change on Sunday May 12, 2013.
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Getting a lot of traction in today’s Independent, where the comments display complete ignorance of the issues and esp of the problems with this paper. It’s a sad fact that this ‘newspaper’ is read by so many opinion-formers, inc teachers and lecturers.
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/life-on-earth-under-threat-from-co2-levels-say-scientists-8612900.html
It.
Stopped.
Warming.
We are very happy to use everyone’s freely donated data. Thank you.
You cannot have our data because you just want to find fault with it. Bugger off.
“… 50,000 globally widespread and common species…”
If they are widespread they already cope with the ‘projected’ 2C to 6C catastrophe.
Name the reviewers. I will bring the tar and the feathers.
That statement is true. The Climate will (and does) change. That change will (and does, and always has) cause plants and animals to die. We learned at least that much in high school.
The causes are not yet known, however. Next.
Unbelievable. I mean, really, unbelievable, as in “not to be believed.”
How many plants and animal species would be lost in the absence of “climate change,” a dubious term if there ever was one? How much species range would be lost regardless of “climate change” due mostly to loss of habitat through changes in land use? McIntyre would have a field day with this study.
They really are revving up for AR5, aren’t they?
CO2 helps plants grow, therefore possibility more diversity not less?
They are right, of course, but because the sign on the change is towards the minus: A coming ice age could indeed cause that effect. Heating Earth will not.
IF the change is unprecedented, then the rate of adaptation is also unknown.
After all, Polar Bears, Artic Foxes, Emperor Penguins, and Seals aren’t that fragile, I’ve seen them at the Denver Zoo frolic in the sun at 95 F.
If any creatures were too fragile to endure a temperature at nearly 60 degrees (F) than what is normally encountered in their normal habit, these would be the first ones I’d expect to be hunkering down or not active.
It is the Tynfoil Centre…
Nature Climate Change – This new journal does seem to have spectacular papers published quite regularly. Spectacular but implausible papers. As though the year on year variations in the timoings of the seasons is of less impact than a gradual change (for whatever cause) over a century.
OK, some turtles have a long period generations but “More than half of common plants and one third of the animals”?
Would this pass peer review in a respectable journal?
But Nature Climate Change is a new journal. Perhaps, there needs to be a formal rating system for the quality of such journals. Maybe, the percentage of published papers that are overturned per year since publication could gve a simple, two-parameter metric. Too few overturned quicky and the journal haslittle new to say. Too many overturned quickly and the editorial standrds are clearly rubbish.
Oh, and a third metric especially for Nature Climate Change – % of papers that can never be falsiifed.
Like every pro-AGW organization, they are doubling down on their claims while “fixing” global temperature numbers as data mocks computer model “projections.”
The 13th word in paragraph #1 is “could”.
Technically, I “could” be president. Or an astronaut…
Pure Climate Bollocks.
The complete Greenland ice core shows the Eemian temperature was ~8 C warmer than today about 130,000 years ago.
Nature is robust:
– both in constraining total changes between ~ 10C and 25C,
and in adapting to such changes!
Focus on adapting as 50x cheaper than “mitigating”.
It’s the CO2, you see. Plants don’t like it.
Oh look, another squadron of flying pigs………..
A great business opportunity! A zoo & botanical garden should be set aside to study un-extinct
animals and plants which became un-extinct at least twice before.
“We looked at the effect of rising global temperatures”
========
apparently they didn’t get the memo that there has been no significant increase this century.
Maybe if we give them another $100K they might be able to learn that plants grow better in higher CO2 environments.
Reality Check needed!
See:
Study: Climate 460 MYA was like today, but thought to have CO2 levels 5-20 times as high
Vandenbroucke, T.R.A., Armstrong, H.A., Williams, M., Paris, F., Zalasiewicz, J.A., Sabbe, K., Nolvak, J., Challands, T.J., Verniers, J. & Servais, T. 2010. Polar front shift and atmospheric CO2 during the glacial maximum of the Early Paleozoic Icehouse. PNAS doi/10.1073/pnas.1003220107.
The paper is correct!
Bird choppers (Wind turbines) will kill more endangered species because “environmentalist” believe in CAGW. Beliefs do kill.
No surprise that the BBC (Biased Broadcasting Corpration) picked up on this and is featuring it on their website. What a wonderful illustration of how scientifically illiterate a society we’ve become.
“… reduce the amount of global warming and slow it down.”
Rejoice, then, ye worriers, for global warming has slowed down to nil:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/global-land-ocean-mntp-anom/201101-201112.png
RHS says:
May 13, 2013 at 7:14 am
” I’ve seen them at the Denver Zoo frolic in the sun at 95 F.” That’s a first to me, whenever I’ve seen penguins, they’ve been frolicking in the water.
I call these people global warming rapture-ists comparing them to the religious fundamentalists from the Bible Belt. They are all seeing that the Great Apocalypse is coming, something we common sense people can’t see.
The CAGW crowds are becoming more and more desperate as nature refuses to cooperate.
The migration of Ecotones is not new. Carole Crumley, for example, did some good work on this in the 1990’s. To quote from Gill’s “The Great Maya Droughts: Water, Life and Death.”
“Over the past two millennia, in fact, the ecotone dividing the Mediterranean and continental climatic regions has migrated north and south from 36 degN along the North African Coast to 48 degN along the North Sea and Baltic coast of Northwest Europe – a distance of 8 deg of latitude, approximately 880 km (500 miles). (Crumley 1994))
……… During the first millennium BC, Celtic peoples occupied the northern half of the range of the Mediterranean-continental ecotone. South of the Celts, along the north Mediterranean littoral, lived the sea traders, among them Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans. Around the fifth century BC, during a period when the ecotone when the ecotone was located far to the south, the Celts advanced on settlements in Italy and Geece. By the end of the second century BC, as the ecotone moved sharply north, the tables were turned dramatically. Rome came to dominate the Greek-controlled shipping lanes and made a province of the southern fringe of Celtic polities in France. By the end of the first century BC, Rome had conquered the entire Mediterranean region and Western Europe as far as the Rhine, roughly the northern location of the ecotone.
As Crumley points out, “The extent and duration of the Pax Romana in Europe was greatly facilitated by climatic conditions that favored Roman-as opposed to Celtic-economic, social and political organization.”
I suppose, back then, us Celts were the “endangered species.”
We had frost this morning. The forecast for tomorrow is 90 degrees. If a couple degrees in 70 years is going to cause that much harm, surely >60 degrees in 24 hours is going to kill everything here, eh?