OFFERING ENDANGERED SPECIES A FREE RIDE
A vast number of species are shifting their ranges in response to climate change, but some are finding there’s nowhere to go in their search for new habitats.
Salamanders, for example, travel along watery pathways that are becoming increasingly blocked by human-built structures or farmland.
Hardest hit are animals who dwell in the mountains. The warmer it gets, the higher they go, and the more restricted their habitat becomes.
In southern Europe, brown bears are stuck on mountain tops in the Pyrenees that are becoming too hot for them to survive.
And in the Rockies, a small, furry creature called the pika is proving to be particularly sensitive to climate change. Though populations could survive in cooler alpine regions further north, there is considerable risk involved if they attempt to migrate across low-elevation valleys.
In a paper in Science last week, conservation scientists from Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. posed the idea of assisted migration – transporting endangered brown bears to mountains in northern Europe, for example, or extending habitats such as coral reefs by placing concrete blocks on the sea bottom to seed the growth of new reefs.
Some biologists object to these measures as extreme, saying there are unknown risks on any number of levels.
Another solution that has been proposed to assist species migration is to build corridors between habitats – salamanders, for example, could travel more easily if they were provided with a strip of wet land between habitats.
CENSORED SCIENTISTS
After years of being accused of gagging scientists and allegedly suppressing negative reports about climate change, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is finally acknowledging what most of the world already knows: The effects of climate change are already upon us.
According to the recently released EPA report, “Analyses of the Effects of Global Change on Human Health and Welfare and Human Systems,” the likely impacts of climate change will include heat waves, poorer air quality, higher rates of lung disease, more flooding and water-borne diseases – all of which will disproportionately affect the old and poor.
The resistance of the Bush administration to deal with climate change has drawn considerable criticism – including from within government ranks. Earlier this month, former EPA official Jason Burnett said that Vice President Dick Cheney deterred the head of the Centres for Disease Control (CDC) from speaking to Congress on “the human health consequences of climate change” in October 2007.
Mr. Burnett further alleged that the White House rejected a document from the EPA on the risk greenhouse gases posed to health in December, 2007, and that it was heavily influenced by Exxon Mobil, the American Petroleum Institute and other oil lobbyists.
This is not the first time the American government has been accused of gagging government scientists on climate change – NASA scientist James Hansen complained of efforts to censor his work in 2006. In April a survey from the Union of Concerned Scientists found that 60 per cent of EPA scientists report “political interference in their scientific work.”
Last year the U.S. Supreme Court decreed that greenhouse gases qualify as “pollutants” under the Clean Air Act and mandated that the EPA determine if they pose a danger and regulate emissions. This new report is expected to be key in the EPA’s future actions.
KILLER ICEBERGS
An increasing numbers of icebergs being calved off of the glaciers of Antarctica are pounding the sea floor to a greater extent than ever before – which is bad news for the creatures who live there. Sea urchins, worms, spiders and other animals off the southern continent’s peninsula are being directly affected, according to new research published in the journal Science last week. Scientists with the British Antarctic Survey placed markers all over the sea floor and found that more were scraped away by icebergs in warmer years. And as 80 per cent of all life at the South Pole (underwater and on land) is found on the sea floor, the ramifications for the antipodean food chain could be huge.
“We don’t predict that particular species will go extinct – but they may change their ranges, such as by moving to deeper waters, and this is likely to have consequences through the food chain, up to fish and seals,” says Dan Smale of the British Antarctic Survey, a lead author of the study.
He cautions that icebergs have always calved off the continent’s glaciers – they are just doing so more often now. And the seafloor scouring may actually increase Antarctic biodiversity by creating a greater diversity of habitats – future research missions will look at this question.