Plants, animals feel the heat of global warming, already
7 Dec, 2007, 0020 hrs IST, AGENCIES
BALI: More than 3,000 flying foxes dropped dead, falling from trees in Australia. Giant squid migrated north to commercial fishing grounds off California, gobbling anchovy and hake. Butterflies have gone extinct in the Alps. 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.
“A hell of a lot of species are in big trouble,” said Stephen E Williams, the director of the Centre 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% of the earth’s species could disappear if temperatures rise 2.5 degrees Celsius and up to 70%, if they rise 3.5 degrees Celsius, a UN network of scientists reported last month.
There have been five major extinctions in the past 520 million years, and four of them have been linked to warmer tropical seas, according to a study published last month in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a British scientific journal.
The hardest hit 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 Conserva-tion Union, which catalogs threatened species.
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