Scientist: Warming Will End Many Species
Pastor Dale Morgan
Mar 31, 11:05 AM EDT
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Scientist: Warming Will End Many Species*
From the micro to the macro, from plankton in the oceans to polar bears
in the far north and seals in the far south, global warming has begun
changing life on Earth, international scientists will report next Friday.
"Changes in climate are now affecting physical and biological systems on
every continent," says a draft obtained by The Associated Press of a
report on warming's impacts, to be issued by the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC), the authoritative U.N. network of 2,000
scientists and more than 100 governments.
In February the panel declared it "very likely" most global warming has
been caused by manmade emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse
gases.
Animal and plant life in the Arctic and Antarctic is undergoing
substantial change, scientists say. Rising sea levels elsewhere are
damaging coastal wetlands. Warmer waters are bleaching and killing coral
reefs, pushing marine species toward the poles, reducing fish
populations in African lakes, research finds.
"Hundreds of species have already changed their ranges, and ecosystems
are being disrupted," said University of Michigan ecologist Rosina
Bierbaum, former head of the U.S. IPCC delegation. "It is clear that a
number of species are going to be lost."
The IPCC draft estimates that if temperatures rise approximately 2 to 4
degrees Fahrenheit more, one-third of species will be lost from their
current range, either moved elsewhere or vanished.
From Associated Press bureaus around the world, here are snapshots of
animals and plants the IPCC will identify as already affected by climate
change:
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The frogs went silent in the night
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) - Back in the Puerto Rican rain forest for
the first time in five years, biologist Rafael Joglar sensed something
was wrong. He wasn't hearing the frogs whose nocturnal calls he had long
recorded in the misty highlands.
It was as if a small orchestra had lost key players, he recalled.
After that discovery in 1981, Joglar and wife Patricia Burrowes, a
fellow University of Puerto Rico amphibian specialist, found that other
populations of frogs in the genus Eleutherodactylus - known locally as
coquis for the distinctive co-kee sound made by two species - were also
mysteriously absent. Similar reports trickled in from frog specialists
worldwide, particularly in Central and South America.
Working their way through such suspected culprits as pollution and
habitat loss, researchers here eventually zeroed in on climate change.
The average minimum temperature had risen from 1970 to 2000 by 2 degrees
Fahrenheit, a significant rise for climate-sensitive amphibians.
Scientists believe higher temperatures lead to more dry periods and a
chain reaction, at higher elevations, that leaves the frogs vulnerable
to a devastating fungus, Burrowes said.
In Puerto Rico and nearby islands, experts believe three of 17 known
Eleutherodactylus species are extinct and seven or eight are declining.
Loss of the frogs, scientists warn, could have disastrous consequences,
depriving birds and other predators of a food source, eliminating a
consumer of insects and disrupting the ecosystem in ways impossible to
guess.
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Fragile, sensitive coral sounds the alarm
SYDNEY, Australia (AP) - The rainbow world of the Great Barrier Reef may
fade away.
Scientists say rising sea temperatures worldwide are causing more coral
bleaching - the draining of color when the fragile animals that form
reefs become stressed and spew out the algae that give coral its color
and energy to build massive reef structures.
Oceans are also absorbing more carbon dioxide, increasing their acidity
and eroding coral's ability to build reef skeletons.
Because just a 2-degree-Fahrenheit shift can trigger a major bleaching
event, the behavior of corals is an early sign that global warming is
already changing our world, experts say.
"We've got about 20 years to turn (greenhouse gas emissions) around or
it's going to cost the world a lot environmentally but also
economically," said Terry Hughes, a leading Australian coral specialist.
The 1,250-mile-long Great Barrier Reef, off Australia's northeast coast,
produces $4 billion a year in tourism revenues. Forecasts vary, but many
experts say ocean temperature rises projected for the next 50 years
could strip this natural wonder of most of its color. The changes will
affect countless millions of fish and other marine organisms that depend
on the reef.
Many reefs worldwide will fare worse, since they don't have the
protection against pollution and overfishing provided by the Great
Barrier Reef World Heritage Area.
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Ticks move north, carrying diseases with them
STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) - A bloodthirsty parasite is popping up in parts
of Sweden where deep winter chills used to make survival difficult, if
not impossible.
Ticks are spreading north along the Scandinavian country's shorelines,
pestering pets and spreading infectious diseases to humans.
"It probably has to do with the greenhouse effect," said Thomas Jaenson,
professor in medical entomology at Uppsala University. "The fact that
we've seen ticks in January indicates that there has been a major change."
Swedish studies have shown that ticks have multiplied countrywide in
recent decades, spreading north from traditional breeding grounds in the
Stockholm archipelago. The pinhead-sized arachnids have even turned up
near the Arctic Circle.
"There are more of them now. And they show up earlier in the year," said
Marja Lodin, 69, who has a summer house near the northern city of Umea.
Two years ago she was infected with Lyme disease, which causes fever,
headache, fatigue and skin rash, from a tick lodged in her navel.
Sweden's disease control agency doesn't keep records on Lyme disease,
but said the potentially deadly tick-borne encephalitis virus, known as
TBE, is on the rise. Reported annual cases more than doubled from 60 in
the late 1990s to 131 in the 2001-2005 period. In 2006, there were 155
cases, two of which turned fatal.
"It is possible that these people would be alive if we had had a more
stable climate," Jaenson said.
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White giants face future of too much water, too little ice
TORONTO (AP) - Inuit hunters in Canada's Arctic say they have seen polar
bears moving farther north as the polar ice cap recedes, or farther
south in search of new sources of food.
The northern people who have hunted these majestic marine mammals for
thousands of years say they haven't seen a dramatic decline yet in their
numbers. But scientists worry that the polar bear will be pushed
steadily toward extinction by 2050, to be found only in zoos, as Arctic
waters grow warmer.
The bears depend on sea ice for survival. They have their pups and they
hunt seal and walrus on ice floes. But the summer ice cap is about 20
percent smaller today than in 1978, the U.N. climate panel reported in
February. And as sea ice shrinks, bears are forced to hunt and to fast
for longer periods.
Biologists believe 20,000 to 25,000 polar bears roam the frozen Arctic,
about 60 percent in Canada. The research group Polar Bears International
says one polar bear population, in Canada's western Hudson Bay, has
dropped 22 percent since the 1980s, about the time Inuit hunters started
noticing dramatic changes in wind and weather patterns.
The trends are so troubling that the U.S. government has proposed
listing polar bears as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
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Changing climate, vanishing plankton threaten cod
LONDON (AP) - Overfishing has cut deeply into the North Sea's cod
population in recent decades, and scientists now say this important food
fish faces a second challenge - climate change.
North Sea water temperatures have climbed 1 degree Fahrenheit over the
past 100 years, and that has shifted currents, carrying a major food
source, plankton, away from the cod, said scientist Chris Reid of the
Partnership for Observation of the Global Oceans in Plymouth, England.
"The only way that these increases can be explained is by greenhouse gas
emissions," Reid said. In their larval stage, the cod feed on the minute
plants and animals known as plankton. Chances of survival without them
are slim. North Sea cod that do survive today are smaller and less
successful at mating and reproducing, Reid explained. In addition,
warmer temperatures increase cod metabolism and the larvae's need for
nutrition, he and other marine scientists noted in a 2003 research paper.
Because the European Union's 2003 cod recovery plan isn't working,
scientists and fishing industry representatives met March 9-10 to
discuss new ways to counter the threats and help the cod.
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The dimb's demise tells of African climate change
DAKAR, Senegal (AP) - It's getting harder for villagers in the north of
this dry West African country to find a favored ingredient for a
traditional couscous dish - the fruit of the dimb tree.
The once-prevalent tree with its meaty fruit has disappeared from all
but one village in an area the size of Connecticut, as shifting rainfall
patterns have made northern Senegal drier and hotter, research has found.
Many tree species like the dimb are retreating from the Sahel, the arid
region south of the Sahara Desert, losing ground to more arid species.
In the zone that climate change scientist Patrick Gonzalez studied, the
dimb's range decreased 96 percent between 1945 and 1994 - from 27
villages to one.
Gonzalez said he looked at many factors, including population shifts and
tree cutting, but "precipitation and temperature explained most of the
variance in the data."
The greenhouse effect has warmed the southern Atlantic Ocean, source of
the African monsoon, causing more rain to fall over the sea and less
over the Sahel, said the Nature Conservancy's Gonzalez, who did the
research while with the U.S. Geological Survey.
Fig and firewood species also are dying, forcing women gatherers to
range farther and spend more time hunting firewood. "Once you don't have
that, people start burning cow dung. And that's when environmentally the
area is in great trouble," Gonzalez said.
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This report was written by AP correspondents Charles J. Hanley, New
York; Ben Fox, San Juan; Rohan Sullivan, Sydney; Karl Ritter, Stockholm;
Beth Duff-Brown, Toronto; Courtney French, London; and Heidi Vogt, Dakar.