
The biodiversity loss caused by the climate crisis will be sudden and swift, and could begin before 2030.
That's the warning from a new study published in Nature Wednesday, which set out to determine how a variety of species and ecosystems would respond to rising temperatures over the course of the 21st century.
"We found that climate change risks to biodiversity don't increase gradually. Instead, as the climate warms, within a certain area most species will be able to cope for a while, before crossing a temperature threshold, when a large proportion of the species will suddenly face conditions they've never experienced before," lead author Dr. Alex Pigot of University College London's Centre for Biodiversity & Environment Research said in a press release. "It's not a slippery slope, but a series of cliff edges, hitting different areas at different times."
The researchers divided the globe into 100 by 100 kilometer (approximately 62 mile) grids and looked at the ranges of 30,652 species along with climate models from 1850 to 2005. They then used models to determine when the species in each grid would experience temperatures beyond their historic ranges for five years or more. The results showed that many species in an ecosystem would cross that temperature threshold at the same time, and 73 percent of species around the world facing temperature shocks would do so in the same decade.
Key finding is that in any location, species may occur within their niche limits for a while, but then a threshold… https://t.co/Q39HJGp9qT— Alex Pigot (@Alex Pigot)1586358090.0
Jennifer Sunday, a McGill University biologist who was not involved with the study, told InsideClimate News that its novel approach allowed for new insight into the timeline for climate-driven biodiversity loss.
"We did not know about the time-course of events. We have lots of models that compare species ranges today to those at a future date, but we did not know when most of the changes were going to happen," she said. "The research also makes it clear that global warming's impacts on ecosystems could arrive very suddenly."
Just how sudden and how devastating those impacts will be depends entirely on how swiftly greenhouse gas emissions are lowered to reduce global warming.
The study found that, in a high-emissions scenario that allows more than four degrees Celsius of warming by 2100, at least 15 percent of ecosystems would suffer an event in which more than 20 percent of their key species hit their temperature limits in the same decade. This could happen before 2030 for tropical oceans and by 2050 for the far North and tropical forests.
If emissions are kept below two degrees Celsius, however, as per the goals of the Paris agreement, fewer than two percent of ecosystems will face such an event.
This early projected onset of exposure is consistent with the recurrent mass bleaching of coral reefs which are hap… https://t.co/HN2UrsmHBp— Alex Pigot (@Alex Pigot)1586358092.0
Dr. Pigot said the experience of the coronavirus provided a model for how swift action now could avert catastrophe later.
"Our findings highlight the urgent need for climate change mitigation, by immediately and drastically reducing emissions, which could help save thousands of species from extinction. Keeping global warming below 2°C effectively 'flattens the curve' of how this risk to biodiversity will accumulate over the century, providing more time for species and ecosystems to adapt to the changing climate – whether that's by finding new habitats, changing their behaviour, or with the help of human-led conservation efforts," he said in the press release.
Conservation groups also endorsed Pigot's message.
"There is already more than enough evidence that climate change is impacting the natural world and that we risk losing up to a million species. We know what the solutions are to halt climate change and biodiversity loss," Mark Wright, director of science at WWF-UK, told The Guardian. "The world is currently rightly focused on tackling the global health emergency. However, this new research reinforces that, after we are through this extremely difficult time, we will need renewed ambitious action to address the climate and nature crisis."
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By Peter Giger
The speed and scale of the response to COVID-19 by governments, businesses and individuals seems to provide hope that we can react to the climate change crisis in a similarly decisive manner - but history tells us that humans do not react to slow-moving and distant threats.
A Game of Jenga
<p>Think of it as a game of Jenga and the planet's climate system as the tower. For generations, we have been slowly removing blocks. But at some point, we will remove a pivotal block, such as the collapse of one of the major global ocean circulation systems, for example the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), that will cause all or part of the global climate system to fall into a planetary emergency.</p><p>But worse still, it could cause runaway damage: Where the tipping points form a domino-like cascade, where breaching one triggers breaches of others, creating an unstoppable shift to a radically and swiftly changing climate.</p><p>One of the most concerning tipping points is mass methane release. Methane can be found in deep freeze storage within permafrost and at the bottom of the deepest oceans in the form of methane hydrates. But rising sea and air temperatures are beginning to thaw these stores of methane.</p><p>This would release a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, 30-times more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming agent. This would drastically increase temperatures and rush us towards the breach of other tipping points.</p><p>This could include the acceleration of ice thaw on all three of the globe's large, land-based ice sheets – Greenland, West Antarctica and the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica. The potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is seen as a key tipping point, as its loss could eventually <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5929/901" target="_blank">raise global sea levels by 3.3 meters</a> with important regional variations.</p><p>More than that, we would be on the irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters, roughly at the rate of two meters per century, or maybe faster. Just look at the raised beaches around the world, at the last high stand of global sea level, at the end of the Pleistocene period around 120,0000 years ago, to see the evidence of such a warm world, which was just 2°C warmer than the present day.</p>Cutting Off Circulation
<p>As well as devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world, melting polar ice could set off another tipping point: a disablement to the AMOC.</p><p>This circulation system drives a northward flow of warm, salty water on the upper layers of the ocean from the tropics to the northeast Atlantic region, and a southward flow of cold water deep in the ocean.</p><p>The ocean conveyor belt has a major effect on the climate, seasonal cycles and temperature in western and northern Europe. It means the region is warmer than other areas of similar latitude.</p><p>But melting ice from the Greenland ice sheet could threaten the AMOC system. It would dilute the salty sea water in the north Atlantic, making the water lighter and less able or unable to sink. This would slow the engine that drives this ocean circulation.</p><p><a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/atlantic-conveyor-belt-has-slowed-15-per-cent-since-mid-twentieth-century" target="_blank">Recent research</a> suggests the AMOC has already weakened by around 15% since the middle of the 20th century. If this continues, it could have a major impact on the climate of the northern hemisphere, but particularly Europe. It may even lead to the <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/39731?show=full" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cessation of arable farming</a> in the UK, for instance.</p><p>It may also reduce rainfall over the Amazon basin, impact the monsoon systems in Asia and, by bringing warm waters into the Southern Ocean, further destabilize ice in Antarctica and accelerate global sea level rise.</p>The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation has a major effect on the climate. Praetorius (2018)
Is it Time to Declare a Climate Emergency?
<p>At what stage, and at what rise in global temperatures, will these tipping points be reached? No one is entirely sure. It may take centuries, millennia or it could be imminent.</p><p>But as COVID-19 taught us, we need to prepare for the expected. We were aware of the risk of a pandemic. We also knew that we were not sufficiently prepared. But we didn't act in a meaningful manner. Thankfully, we have been able to fast-track the production of vaccines to combat COVID-19. But there is no vaccine for climate change once we have passed these tipping points.</p><p><a href="https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2021" target="_blank">We need to act now on our climate</a>. Act like these tipping points are imminent. And stop thinking of climate change as a slow-moving, long-term threat that enables us to kick the problem down the road and let future generations deal with it. We must take immediate action to reduce global warming and fulfill our commitments to the <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Paris Agreement</a>, and build resilience with these tipping points in mind.</p><p>We need to plan now to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, but we also need to plan for the impacts, such as the ability to feed everyone on the planet, develop plans to manage flood risk, as well as manage the social and geopolitical impacts of human migrations that will be a consequence of fight or flight decisions.</p><p>Breaching these tipping points would be cataclysmic and potentially far more devastating than COVID-19. Some may not enjoy hearing these messages, or consider them to be in the realm of science fiction. But if it injects a sense of urgency to make us respond to climate change like we have done to the pandemic, then we must talk more about what has happened before and will happen again.</p><p>Otherwise we will continue playing Jenga with our planet. And ultimately, there will only be one loser – us.</p>By John R. Platt
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