Everything about Extinction Risk From Climate Change totally explained
The
extinction risk of climate change is the risk
species have of becoming
extinct due to the
effects of global warming.
The scientific consensus in the
IPCC Fourth Assessment Report is that "Anthropogenic warming could lead to some impacts that are abrupt or irreversible, depending upon the rate and magnitude of the climate change."
"There is medium confidence that approximately 20-30% of species assessed so far are likely to be at increased risk of extinction if increases in global average warming exceed 1.5-2.5°C (relative to 1980-1999). As global average temperature increase exceeds about 3.5°C, model projections suggest significant extinctions (40-70% of species assessed) around the globe."
In one study published in
Nature in 2004, between 15 and 37% of known plant and animal species will be extinct or heading for eventual extinction by 2050. More properly, changes in habitat by 2050 will put them outside the survival range for the inhabitants, thus committing the species to extinction.
The abstract states:
Climate change over the past 30 years has produced numerous shifts in the distributions and abundances of species and has been implicated in one species-level extinction. Using projections of species' distributions for future climate scenarios, we assess extinction risks for sample regions that cover some 20% of the Earth's terrestrial surface. Exploring three approaches in which the estimated probability of extinction shows a power-law relationship with geographical range size, we predict, on the basis of mid-range climate-warming scenarios for 2050, that 15−37% of species in our sample of regions and taxa will be 'committed to extinction'. When the average of the three methods and two dispersal scenarios is taken, minimal climate-warming scenarios produce lower projections of species committed to extinction (18%) than mid-range (24%) and maximum-change (35%) scenarios. These estimates show the importance of rapid implementation of technologies to decrease greenhouse gas emissions and strategies for carbon sequestration.
Other researchers, such as Thuiller
et al., Araújo
et al.
, Person
et al., Buckley and Roughgarden, and Harte et al. have raised concern regarding uncertainty in Thomas et al.'s projections. Daniel Botkin and other authors in one study believe that projected rates of extinction are overestimated.
Mechanistic studies have documented extinctions due to recent climate change: McLaughlin
et al. documented two populations of
Bay checkerspot butterfly being threatened by precipitation change. Parmesan states, "Few studies have been conducted at a scale that encompasses an entire species" and McLaughlin
et al. agreed "few mechanistic studies have linked extinctions to recent climate change."
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