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Environment Exts - Warming Impacts - Biodiversity Loss
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- Global Warming tied to extreme biodiversity loss---anthropogenic warming kills genetic variations
- Warming leads to a mass species extinction—we’re on the brink now
Environment Exts - Warming Impacts - Biodiversity LossUN affirms link between biodiversity loss and extinction---decline of wildlife species means human extinctionBuczynski 10, Freelance writer, editor, and green brand supporter—Writer at Revmodo.com, EarthTechling.com, CrispGreen.com, EV Update, 1800Recycling.com, EcoSphericBlog.com, 10/18/10[Beth, “UN: Loss Of Biodiversity Could Mean End Of Human Race, care2.com, http://www.care2.com/causes/un-humans-are-rapidly-destroying-the-biodiversity-ne.html#ixzz20nZKAzW1]ADravid UN officials gathered at the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Japan have issued a global warning that the rapid loss of animal and plant species that has characterized the past century must end if humans are to survive. Delegates in Nagoya plan to set a new target for 2020 for curbing species loss, and will discuss boosting medium-term financial help for poor countries to help them protect their wildlife and habitats (Yahoo Green). “Business as usual is no more an option for mankind,” CBD executive secretary Ahmed Djoghlaf said in his opening statements. “We need a new approach, we need to reconnect with nature and live in harmony with nature into the future.” The CBD is an international legally-binding treaty with three main goals: conservation of biodiversity; sustainable use of biodiversity; fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising from the use of genetic resources. Its overall objective is to encourage actions which will lead to a sustainable future. As Djoghlaf acknolwedged in his opening statements, facing the fact that many countries have ignored their obligation to these goals is imperitive if progress is to be made in the future. “Let us have the courage to look in the eyes of our children and admit that we have failed, individually and collectively, to fulfil the Johannesburg promise made to them by the 110 Heads of State and Government to substantially reduce the loss of biodiversity by 2010,” Djoghlaf stated. “Let us look in the eyes of our children and admit that we continue to lose biodiversity at an unprecedented rate, thus mortgaging their future.” Earlier this year, the U.N. warned several eco-systems including the Amazon rainforest, freshwater lakes and rivers and coral reefs are approaching a “tipping point” which, if reached, may see them never recover. According to a study by UC Berkeley and Penn State University researchers, between 15 and 42 percent of the mammals in North America disappeared after humans arrived. Compared to extinction rates demonstrated in other periods of Earth’s history, this means that North American species are already half way to to a sixth mass extinction, similar to the one that eliminated the dinosaurs. The same is true in many other parts of the world. The third edition of the Global Biodiversity Outlook demonstrates that, today, the rate of loss of biodiversity is up to one thousand times higher than the background and historical rate of extinction. The Earth’s 6.8 billion humans are effectively living 50 percent beyond the planet’s biocapacity in 2007, according to a new assessment by the World Wildlife Fund that said by 2030 humans will effectively need the capacity of two Earths in order to survive. Unchecked global warming will lead to massive biodiversity loss - it has a multiplier effect that leads to more species lossNational Geographic News 4 (“By 2050 Warming to Doom Million Species, Study Says” National Geographic News. July 12, 2004 http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/01/0107_040107_extinction.html) Foster Study Results¶ According to the researchers' collective results, the predicted range of climate change by 2050 will place 15 to 35 percent of the 1,103 species studied at risk of extinction. The numbers are expected to hold up when extrapolated globally, potentially dooming more than a million species.¶ "These are first-pass estimates, but they put the problem in the right ballpark … I expect more detailed studies to refine these numbers and to add data for additional regions, but not to change the general import of these findings," said Hannah.¶ Writing in an accompanying commentary to the study in Nature, J. Alan Pounds of the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve in Costa Rica, and Robert Puschendorf, a biologist at the University of Costa Rica, say these estimates "might be optimistic."¶ As global warming interacts with other factors such as habitat-destruction, invasive species, and the build up of carbon dioxide in the landscape, the risk of extinction increases even further, they say. "The threat to life on Earth is not just a problem for the future. It is part of the here and now," they write. Climate Scenarios¶ The researchers based their study on minimum, mid-range, and maximum future climate scenarios based on information released by the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2001.¶ According to the IPCC, temperatures are expected to rise from somewhere between 1.5 and more than 4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 and more than 2 degrees Celsius) by the year 2050.¶ "Few climate scientists around the world think that 2050 temperatures will fall outside those bounds," said Thomas. "In some respects, we have been conservative because almost all future climate projections expect more warming and hence more extinction between 2050 and 2100."¶ In addition, the researchers accounted for the ability of species to disperse or successfully move to a new area, thus preventing climate change-induced extinction. They used two alternatives: one where species couldn't move at all, the other assuming unlimited abilities for movement.¶ "We are trying to bracket the truth," said Peterson. "If you bracket the truth and look at the two endpoints and they give the same general message, then you can start to believe it."¶ Outside of the small group of researchers working directly on the impacts of climate change to species diversity, "the numbers will come as a huge shock," said Thomas. Global Warming tied to extreme biodiversity loss---anthropogenic warming kills genetic variationsScience Daily 11, A news website dealing with science research and current events—Provides information on a variety of scientific topics (I.E. anthropology, biology, climate)—Articles are selected from news releases by Universities and research programs—over two million people visit the site each month, 8/24/11[Science Daily, “Global Warming May Cause Higher Loss of Biodiversity Than Previously Thought” Science Daily, http://www.sciencedaily .com/releases/2011/08/110824091146.ht m]ADravid ScienceDaily (Aug. 24, 2011) — If global warming continues as expected, it is estimated that almost a third of all flora and fauna species worldwide could become extinct. Scientists from the Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre (Biodiversität und Klima Forschungszentrum, BiK-F) and the SENCKENBERG Gesellschaft für Naturkunde discovered that the proportion of actual biodiversity loss should quite clearly be revised upwards: by 2080, more than 80 % of genetic diversity within species may disappear in certain groups of organisms, according to researchers in the title story of the journal Nature Climate Change. The study is the first world-wide to quantify the loss of biological diversity on the basis of genetic diversity. Most common models on the effects of climate change on flora and fauna concentrate on "classically" described species, in other words groups of organisms that are clearly separate from each other morphologically. Until now, however, so-called cryptic diversity has not been taken into account. It encompasses the diversity of genetic variations and deviations within described species, and can only be researched fully since the development of molecular-genetic methods. As well as the diversity of ecosystems and species, these genetic variations are a central part of global biodiversity. In a pioneering study, scientists from the Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre (BiK-F) and the Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturkunde have now examined the influence of global warming on genetic diversity within species. Over 80 percent of genetic variations may become extinct The distribution of nine European aquatic insect species, which still exist in the headwaters of streams in many high mountain areas in Central and Northern Europe, was modelled. They have already been widely researched, which means that the regional distribution of the inner-species diversity and the existence of morphologically cryptic, evolutionary lines are already known. If global warming does take place in the range that is predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), these creatures will be pushed back to only a few small refugia, e.g. in Scandinavia and the Alps, by 2080, according to model calculations. If Europe's climate warms up by up to two degrees only, eight of the species examined will survive, at least in some areas; with an increase in temperature of 4 degrees, six species will probably survive in some areas by 2080. However, due to the extinction of local populations, genetic diversity will decline to a much more dramatic extent. According to the most pessimistic projections, 84 percent of all genetic variations would die out by 2080; in the "best case," two-thirds of all genetic variations would disappear. The aquatic insects that were examined are representative for many species of mountainous regions of Central Europe. Slim chances in the long term for the emergence of new species and species survival Carsten Nowak of the Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre (BiK-F) and the Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturkunde, explains: "Our models of future distribution show that the "species" as such will usually survive. However, the majority of the genetic variations, which in each case exist only in certain places, will not survive. This means that self-contained evolutionary lineages in other regions such as the Carpathians, Pyrenees or the German Central Uplands will be lost. Many of these lines are currently in the process of developing into separate species, but will become extinct before this is achieved, if our model calculations are accurate." Genetic variation within a species is also important for adaptability to changing habitats and climatic conditions. Their loss therefore also reduces the chances for species survival in the long term. New approach for conservation So the extinction of species hides an ever greater loss, in the form of the massive disappearance of genetic diversity. "The loss of biodiversity that can be expected in the course of global warming has probably been greatly underestimated in previous studies, which have only referred to species numbers," says Steffen Pauls, Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre (BiK-F), of the findings. However, there is also an opportunity to use genetic diversity in order to make conservation and environmental protection more efficient. A topic that is subject to much discussion at present is how to deal with conservation areas under the conditions of climate change. The authors of the study urge that conservation areas should also be oriented to places where both a suitable habitat for the species and a high degree of inner-species genetic diversity can be preserved in the future. "It is high time," says Nowak, "that we see biodiversity not only as a static accumulation of species, but rather as a variety of evolutionary lines that are in a constant state of change. The loss of one such line, irrespective of whether it is defined today as a "species" in itself, could potentially mean a massive loss in biodiversity in the future." Warming leads to a mass species extinction—we’re on the brink nowReuters 11 (“Is Earth due for a mass extinction?” Reuters is an international news agency. March 3, 2011 http://blogs.reuters.com/environment/2011/03/03/is-earth-due-for-a-mass-extinction/) Foster It has all the signs of a sick good-news/bad-news tale. The bad news is that Earth may be ripe for a mass extinction, where 75 percent or more of the life on the planet vanishes forever.¶ The good news is it’s unlikely to happen for at least three more centuries.¶ Scientists writing in the journal Nature warn that we could be on the brink of a mass extinction, the kind of species loss that has happened just five times in the last 540 million years.¶ “If you look only at the critically endangered mammals–those where the risk of extinction is at least 50 percent within three of their generations–and assume that their time will run out and they will be extinct in 1,000 years, that puts us clearly outside any range of normal and tells us that we are moving into the mass extinction realm,” Anthony Barnosky, an integrative biologist at the University of California at Berkeley said in a statement about the study he co-wrote.¶ Are humans to blame? Possibly.¶ “A modern global mass extinction is a largely unaddressed hazard of climate change and human activities,” said H. Richard Lane of the National Science Foundation, which funded the research.¶ If the species that are now considered critically endangered, endangered and vulnerable actually went extinct, and that rate of extinction continued, the sixth mass extinction could arrive in three to 22 centuries, Barnosky said.¶ This is by no means a sure thing, and the scientists said there is still time to save endangered species short of a tipping point. That would require dealing with a perfect storm of threats, including habitat fragmentation, invasive species, disease and global warming.¶ The last mass extinction was 65 million years ago when a space rock slammed into what is now the Yucatan peninsula, one of several factors that caused the big die-off. Previous events occurred 200 million years ago, 251 million years ago, 359 million years ago and 443 million years ago. 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