June Lake, Sierra Nevada Range/Credit: Don Graham |
However, our intuition was probably right. A new study in the prestigious journal Science surveys multiple studies from around the world and finds that 82 percent of the vital biological functions they examined showed clear changes in response to the 1 degree C the Earth has warmed since the beginning of the industrial revolution.
"Genes are changing, species' physiology and physical features such as body size are changing, species are shifting their ranges and we see clear signs of entire ecosystems under stress, all in response to changes in climate on land and in the ocean," says wildlife ecologist Brett Scheffers, at the University of Florida.
Climate change impacts on ecological processes in marine, freshwater, and terrestrial ecosystems/Credit: Scheffers et al., Science, 11 November, 2016
"Some people didn't expect this level of change for decades," said environmental researcher James Watson, at the University of Queensland, Australia. "The impacts of climate change are being felt with no ecosystem on Earth being spared."
It's important to recognize that these changes are not just abstractions of interest to scientists and nature lovers. They impact us all directly. The authors write:
Disruptions scale from the gene to the ecosystem and have documented consequences for people, including unpredictable fisheries and crop yields, loss of genetic diversity in wild crop varieties, and increasing impacts of pests and diseases.
Since we're seeing these across-the-board changes sooner than expected, and with only one degree C of human-caused warming, it becomes all the more urgent to do everything we can to reduce CO2 and other greenhouse gases, and to move as quickly as possible to alternative energy sources such as solar, wind and hydro.
With the coming Trump administration threatening to do everything it can to reverse the progress towards climate-change mitigation that the US has made in recent years, we will have to look to the rest of the world to recognize the need to sustain a healthy and habitable planet, and act to preserve it.
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